Hard questions for the West after Paris attacks

We all must condemn such unlawful aggression as we saw in Paris last week but we must also try to parse and probe what happened.

Where do all the armaments emanate from in the first place ? Who supplies these? Where are they sourced? Are Western arms manufacturers obliquely complicit? Does filthy lucre override all considerations of social decency and human integrity? Does cartooning have an open carte-blanche right to deride, satirise and demean all and sundry? There are no easy or comfortable answers to these questions but there is surely a case for responsible contextualisation.

Jim Cosgrove