"Being Afraid of Islam Is No Doubt Moronic, Absurd and Plenty of Other Things..."

That's the callout line in an excerpt from OPEN LETTER, the posthumously-published thoughts of Stephane Charbonier, a.k.a. "Charb," who, until he was gunned down last year by jihadis, was the editor of Charlie Hebdo. The except appears in today's National Post.

Charb was no moron, and was, in fact, a full-throated champion of the Western concept of free expression. But given the circumstances of his death and the fact that his assassins were motivated to kill because of the jihad imperative, a core Islamic teaching embedded in Islam's most sacred texts, his above-quoted statement is no doubt moronic, absurd and plenty of other things, including tragic and grimly ironic.

Update: Here's a non-moronic statement with which I heartily concur:

“If the devout do awful things in the name of their prophets, they shouldn’t be surprised to see their prophets in cartoons, and we shouldn’t be afraid to put them there.”