I am horrified by the atrocity in Paris. Freedom is under attack. The best response I have read so far is a blog post in the Spectator by Alex Massie. And the many thousands of people who have congregated in demonstrations in squares around France.

In response to his own question: “What can we do?” Alex Massie answers like this :

Only, perhaps, this. We can hold the line. We can make our stand, a stand for liberalism and reason and liberty and we can hope – however flickeringly – that this will, in time, be enough to prevail.

Je suis Charlie? In truth, I don’t know about that. I hope so. But, really, I don’t know if enough of us are Charlie Hebdo just as I know too few of us were prepared, 25 years ago, to say I am Salman. But there is no longer either the time or room to hide. If you were not Charlie Hebdo yesterday it is time, today, that you were.

That’s our faith. Here we stand. For otherwise what – and who – are we?