Journalist Vivienne Walt, writing in TIME, has suggested it is easier to explain the murder of Jewish Parisians than the murder of non-Jewish Parisians:
In January it had been relatively simple to explain to my child, who was then eight, why the cartoonists had been the target, and why a Jewish supermarket was attacked—grim as the details were… Answering questions over dinner on Sunday was more difficult, however. The targets this time were young people having fun on a warm Friday night; people, in fact, who were his age not all that long ago. To children in Paris, Charlie Hebdo had seemed a one-off attack, involving targets that were not part of our ordinary lives.
Walt also suggested that Jewish people in a supermarket were not “the most normal of people,” writing that:
…Friday’s attacks impacted so many regular Parisians because they had been aimed directly at the most normal of people — the drinkers, the concert-goers, the soccer fans.
The Algemeiner news site adds that despite Walt’s suggestion that the youth of the victims was also more shocking in the November attacks than the January attacks, “Yoav Hattab, murdered in the HyperCacher kosher supermarket attack in January, was 21, and Yohan Cohen was 22. They were pretty young. In fact, they were younger than nearly every victim of the more recent Paris attacks. But apparently that didn’t make it more difficult to explain their murders to Vivienne’s 8-year-old son. Shopping for food is probably as familiar an experience to her son as sitting in a café or going to a concert, but clearly that didn’t make the job of explaining those murders any more difficult.”
Source: Time Magazine/Algemeiner
