Custodianship Lost

Why Paris is even more shocking than Peshawar - The Times of India: "The moral equivalence between the West and Islamist jihadis is presented to the reader as an unquestionable truth. There is something deeply corroded and flaccid about the Left now. It is clapped out, morally. It cannot be the custodian of Western civilization any longer.

The assault on Charlie Hebdo — terrorists killing cartoonists — can have left no rational person unscathed. As an assault on the moral senses, it had, arguably, an even greater impact than the mowing down of schoolchildren in Peshawar only days ago. In that last attack the children were pawns who had death dealt to them because of their institutional association with the Pakistani army. Their deaths were blood-curdling, but also random. They were a hapless conduit to another target: the army itself, and, by extension, the Pakistani state.

In Paris, at Charlie Hebdo's offices, the dead were chosen by name—yes, names were called out, and men who answered to them were shot; men who had been staked out and stalked, chosen expressly for slaughter for acts they had committed in the pursuit of their profession."