Wednesday's Paris Attack Is an Assault on American Values

If a bleary-eyed America, still finding its second gear after the holidays, needed a fresh reminder that a global war continues to rage mostly away from its shores, it came early Wednesday morning with news of a daylight assault on a Paris newspaper office that killed at least 12, including two police officers.

At first blush, the shootings, which French officials called a terrorist attack, suggests that the conflict between the United States and its allies against the Islamic State cannot be confined to the battlefields of Iraq and Syria—and that journalists, too, are now in the crossfire, wherever they might be.

When President Obama, last September, redeployed U.S. forces to Iraq to combat the advance of the Sunni radical group and declared, "Our own safety, our own security, depends upon our willingness to do what it takes to defend this nation and uphold the values that we stand for," this was the kind of thing he was talking about.

Wednesday morning, Obama reiterated that invocation in a statement on the attack. "Time and again," the president said, "the French people have stood up for the universal values that generations of our people have defended."

The president didn't explicitly cite the freedom of expression, but he didn't need to. It's embedded in our culture and Constitution, and in France's as well. France's Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen, a 1789 document influenced by the work of Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolution, states, "The free communication of ideas and opinion is one of the most precious of the rights of man."

Obama's September address to the nation came amid reports of a wave of abuses by IS forces, such as the rape and subjugation of women captives, public executions, and mass beheadings, including those of two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff. In that context, it may come as less than a surprise that a sharp-elbowed publication such as Charlie Hebdo, which has angered Muslims with its depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and recently mocked IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, would find itself a target. The Paris newspaper was firebombed in 2011—apparently as a response to a cartoon.

The French military has provided air support for U.S. operations in Iraq, although in the wake of the shootings, terrorism experts downplayed that as a motive in the attack on the newspaper—and they cautioned against immediately attributing the attack to the Islamic State rather than, say, al-Qaida. Still, it was France's worst terrorism incident in two decades, and it comes less than a month after a self-styled jihadist alarmed Australia by taking hostages in a siege at a Sydney café.

Both serve grim notice that while the United States has as yet faced no real repercussions at home for renewing hostilities in the Middle East, there's little reason to expect that to remain true. Indeed, part of Obama's case to the public for bringing to fight to the Islamic State was the specter of a new round of domestic terrorism.

Despite this, in Washington in recent weeks, the battle in Iraq and Syria was largely subsumed by end-of-the-year partisan bickering over budget bills, the Keystone XL pipeline, Obama's executive orders, and the president's new Cuba policy, although the White House was pleased when Congress agreed to include funding to fight the Islamic State its final $1.1 trillion omnibus spending package.

But Republicans, angry over Obama's unilateral action on immigration, agreed to fund the Homeland Security Department only through the end of February. That action is likely to receive new scrutiny in the wake of the Paris attack—and it would be no surprise to see Democrats and the White House seize what they may see as a political opportunity to pressure the new congressional leadership on the issue.

It also may spur efforts on the Hill to pass a resolution granting the administration legislative authority to continue to wage the conflict against the Islamic State.

In the meantime, newly nervous Americans—and anyone across the world who cares about the freedom of expression—will train their eyes on France. And in the hours after the shooting, a hashtag defending that ideal emerged on Twitter--#JeSuisCharlie – "I am Charlie." As the president noted Wednesday, because of values that both countries share, the attack on Paris hits searingly close to home.