After the Charlie Hebdo shootings, I was pretty incensed at any attempt to contextualize the murder of the cartoonists by focusing attention on how “offensive” the cartoons were. Whether they were offensive or not was beside the point. The point was that they had a right to say it and not be killed over it. In the immediate aftermath of such an event, attention devoted to the sins of the dead is at best misguided. Often worse.

Adding to this was the fact that Charlie was mostly just being Charlie, and did not have a habit of pulling punches with anybody. That’s context mattered to me a lot more. To argue that what they did was – while not as bad as murder – the important thing, is not to argue that we shouldn’t target a beleaguered minority, but that all humor should conform to the idea that certain religious, and certain peoples, should be entirely free of ridicule. It’s one thing to say “Don’t talk about Muslims the way you don’t want people talk about Christians” but another thing to say “We must hold Christianity accountable for its many sins, but we have to pull our punches against Islam because that’s punching down.” Even if we’re not talking about passing a law or killing people, that’s not a good position to take if you support “free speech.”

My reaction to the shooting in Garland is not as intolerant. While I don’t think the focus should be on the offensiveness of the speech, which unlike Charlie Hebdo was pretty specific in targeting Muslims.

While I get the sense that Charlie Hebdo would love nothing more than to live in peace with Muslims, Pamela Geller is a different story. Geert Wilder made a career out of trying to keep them out of Denmark. Maybe in the particular the latter is the right position, and if it’s the wrong position it certainly doesn’t warrant violence. But it’s not the same. They have the right to say here what they will, but what they are saying, and the context in which they are saying it, is more worthy of criticism, even after an event like this.

Not the least of which because they’re still alive. What had me so incensed about Charlie Hebdo was that whatever their sins, they were dead. While even those who criticized them past the buzzer said they didn’t deserve that, a lot of them spent more time talking about the sins of the dead than the sins of their killers. Geller and Wilders are thankfully alive. Everybody but the two would-be terrorists are dead. Praise be. More than being dead, they were made stronger by this and, to a degree, vindicated by it. The result, though, is that condemning the dead comes doesn’t seem the same level of preenery at the expense of the conveniently dead than was the case with Hebdo.

If we don’t Geller and Wilders and people like them doing what they’re doing, it doesn’t pay to make them martyrs. And since they paid little price for what they did, there is less need to hold back. Since the damage done was so light, there is more room to talk about what is and isn’t appropriate speech.

My own view is that we have to share this planet with too many Muslims to go about conscientiously antagonizing them all. I may not view Islam favorably, but that’s as irrelevant as whether you think Charlie Hebdo is funny. There are too many to really consider them a single entity, and if they were as bad as Geller suggests, events like this would be a far more frequent occurrence. Instead, Geller and Wilders had to go out of their way to bring the crazies out of the wordwork. Which, in turn, alienates those who can be and are productive and peaceful members of society. While I do not for a moment lament the death of these shooters, maybe we should choose not to do that?