In January 2015, a massive demonstration occurred in Paris to mark the murder of seventeen people a few days earlier. The demonstration reportedly consisted of two million people in Paris, close to two million more in other French cities, and hundreds of thousands more around the world. More than forty heads of state and dozens more prominent representatives of nations globally led the procession in honor of the victims and in support of freedom of the press and of religious pluralism and toleration.

Everyone was on edge and security measures were strict. The shock of the event came not only from the loss of human life but also because the murderers attacked freedom of the press in one location, a police woman in another, and innocent shoppers in a kosher supermarket in yet another. The assassins professed to be murdering their victims in the name of Islam, although imams in many countries adamantly protested that murdering innocent people had nothing to do with Islamic law or values. For the murderers, the dead—newspaper cartoonists and editors, representatives of the secular French state, and Jews—were enemies who deserved to die.

Among the politicians in the front line of the demonstration were Antonis Samaras (prime minister of Greece), Mariano Rajoy (prime minister of Spain), David Cameron (prime minister of Great Britain), Helle Thorning Schmidt (prime minister of Denmark), Ewa Kopacz (prime minister of Poland), Anne Hidalgo (mayor of Paris), Benjamin Netanyahu (prime minister of Israel), Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (president of Mali), François Hollande (president of France), Angela Merkel (chancellor of Germany), Donald Tusk (president of the European Council), Mahmoud Abbas (president of the Palestinian Authority), and the king and queen of Jordan.

Question to Consider

How do you make sense of this coming together of diverse world leaders, some of them current or historic enemies of each other? Given that so many average citizens were murdered in the attacks, why did political leaders have such a prominent place in the march?