"Maybe it’s the fact that the victims were artists that made the Charlie Hebdo massacre more appalling. OK then, what about the hundreds of artists and would-be artists that suffer daily the brunt of America’s wars and interventions in our region? What about Iraqi scientists, talented engineers and university professors, plucked one after another and assassinated CIA-style on the heels of Bush’s disastrous “liberation of Iraq”? What about Palestinian cartoonist (imagine that?) Mohammad Saabaneh, who was summarily jailed by the Zionist regime for his drawings? Didn’t he account for freedom of speech? Or Palestinian football players Jawhar Nasser Jawhar and Adam Abd al-Raouf Halabiya (yes, we should remember their names), who were shot in their legs by Israeli soldiers after coming home from a training session, rendering them disabled and ending their sports career even before it had begun? Another Palestinian footballer, Mahmoud Sarsak, a member of the Palestine national football team, had to starve himself out of one of Israel’s notorious “administration detention” dungeons; his teammate footballer Zakaria Issa, however, was not so lucky, as he died after undertaking a similar hunger strike. What about Syrian actor Mohamad Rafea, who was kidnapped and violently killed and maimed by Western-backed Islamic radicals on Wahhabi steroids who were unleashed on the Syrian people to bring about regime change?" (thanks Ahmad)