Timothy Garton Ash skriver om Charlie Hebdo i senaste New York Review of Books (Volume LXII, Number 3, Feb 19, 2015). Artikelns titel är Defying the Assassin’s Veto, och den är dessvärre än mer aktuell än det var tänkt. Den börjar med kristallklar tydlighet:
The massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris on January 7 was an attempt to impose the assassin’s veto. Where the heckler’s veto says merely “I will shout you down,” the assassin’s version is “dare to express that and we will kill you.” Instead of the academic’s metaphorical “publish or perish” we have the Kouachi brothers’ “publish and perish.” In the quarter-century since the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, this has become one of the largest threats to free speech in the West, and certainly the most extreme.
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