Many Americans enjoy poking fun at the French. We tend to question how tough they are as a nation and as a people, and laugh at the thought of the Maginot Line stopping the advance of Hitler’s tanks. We choose to eat Freedom Fries instead of french fries, and view French cinema as something akin to attending an opera or a chamber music recital.

As Western nations who share a history of championing the ideals of liberty and personal freedom, yesterday’s terrorist attack on the satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, by two radicalized Muslim brothers had an eerie familiarity with the Boston Marathon Bombing. With Djokar Tsarnaev’s Boston Marathon Bombing trial initiating jury selection a day earlier, the world was once again reminded of how words, thoughts and images, can become bullets in guns to perform a mass execution.

For those who choose to fault the editors, journalists and cartoonists, of Charlie Hebdo for ridiculing Islam, and making themselves easy targets for an ideological attack not waged with words but bullets; the organizers of the Boston Marathon and the runners who keep this great event alive were completely innocent of waging satirical cartoon attacks against The Prophet or Islam.

The Boston Marathon takes place on Patriots’ Day, which is a holiday only celebrated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Children have the day off from school, parents take their kids to view the race and the army of runners who breathe unique life into this special event, and college students use the day to cheer the pack of runners and hoist a dozen beers. Charlie Hebdo and the Boston Marathon have nothing in common with each other, but each has been used by a pair of radicalized, extremist Muslim brothers to punish the infidels of the West; and in a strange set of circumstances, each attack has perhaps done more to forge a bond between the people of France and the United States.

As the world has witnessed, Western journalists and aid workers have been beheaded when ransoms were not paid to secure their release. Performed as righteous acts to resurrect a lost caliphate, these acts of murder performed by Western jihadists have only strengthened the resolve of Western nations to the threat posed by radical Islamic groups, who seek to create a world that bears no resemblance to the ideals of liberty and freedom. When journalists are under attack, transparency and truth are under attack.

Charlie Hebdo has as much right to print its satirical cartoons, as David Duke does to hold a white supremacist rally in the state of Louisiana. Free speech must be protected whether we like the message or the means in which it is conveyed. Without freedom of speech, we are turning our backs on a democratic ideal that was essential to the birth of the republic in both France and the United States.

An attack on Charlie Hebdo or the Boston Marathon is not simply a terrorist attack, but it causes people to pause and consider – a truly existential moment. It makes a person consider what is important in his or her life. The French woke up this morning and went to work. A day after the Boston Marathon Bombing, Bostonians woke up and went to work. Neither people will succumb to fear and become victims of terrorist acts that are intended to violently alter and obliterate Western values and norms. Once again, the terrorists have lost.

Je Suis Charlie.