Kouachi was brought to trial in 2008; according to trial testimony, he had become radicalized by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the later images of detainee mistreatment in Abu Ghraib prison...link

Said and Cherif Kouachi are the massacre suspects. They became radicalized because of the US invasion of Iraq. Which France opposed.

Republicans applauded George W. Bush when he said "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people."

You can find that quote at boycottliberalism.com, on a page headlined: "Conservative Words of Wisdom".

For those with memories longer than a news cycle, it was March, 2003, just before President George W. Bush ordered the 'shock and awe' invasion of Iraq, supported by at least 935 'falsehoods' they spread like crop dusters on the US mainstream media, that Republicans in Congress proposed renaming French Fries as Freedom Fries in Congressional food facilities because France did not support the war in Iraq.

The war not only gave Islamic terrorists a cause, recruits, it also gave them a training ground, a 'terror university' in Iraq, US troops as targets, while also supplying them with weapons and explosives looted from Saddam's stockpile which Bush/Rumsfeld failed to secure.

So the fiasco of an unnecessary war, possibly an international war crime, which was justified by a 'use of force' vote in Congress which failed on the Democrat side of the aisle is the gift that keeps on giving....

BTW - for right wingers, a war isn't legal if it passes a vote in Congress.

Any action against a sovereign nation must be approved by the UN Security Council to be 'legal'.

GWB tried and failed to achieve UN approval for his Iraq War when Colin Powell went to the UN to present why war was necessary in February, 2003. He failed to convince the French:

France also suggested that it would veto any resolution allowing military intervention offered by the US or Britain.

...standing on principle in the face of violent opposition can end in tragedy

I would truncate your prefix: Violent opposition can end in tragedy.

The folks who worked in the World Trade Center weren't standing on principle. Nor were the schoolchildren who were murdered in Pakistan. Islamic extremism did not start with a caricature of Mohammed, and it will not stop if there are no more caricatures. If Charlie Hebdo's journalists had not stood on principle, they might have preserved their own lives, but the killers would have found some other target. The lightning rod does not cause the lightning.

Re: where are we? In the face of rising fears in the western world

You want to go really big picture, long term? Leave the freedom of speech issues behind, think about the attackers meme of enforcing their religious rule of no blasphemy of the prophet anywhere in the world.  And look at what is happening to the Mideast, what the real big picture goals of many of the radical Islamist groups of many varieties are: Religious segregation now, religious segregation forever in the region.

What got me thinking on that  is this New York Times article "No Safety for Christians in the Mideast"

....The Middle East’s demography, in other words, is being fundamentally rewritten, particularly in recent months when militants of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have expelled, murdered or persecuted Christians and other minorities in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

For the first time in centuries, scholars of Middle Eastern religion say, Iraq is becoming an exclusively Islamic state after hosting one of the region’s biggest Christian minorities.

“There is a feeling of ‘fin de race’ among Christians all over the Middle East,” the prominent Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi was widely quoted as saying before his death in 2011.

“Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place, and that is a very bad thing for the Arab world.”

Indeed, Pope Francis told Middle Eastern Christians: “Your very presence is precious for the Middle East. You are a small flock, but one with a great responsibility in the land where Christianity was born and first spread. You are like leaven in the dough....

What does that mean for us in the West? If it continues, doesn't look like it's going to reverse for decades at least. With the West.as pluralistic by choice? Maybe not much, as we've been able to get along with countries like Saudi Arabia for decades? As long as we stop supporting Israel so much? What about Southeast Asia, Hindu India vs. Muslim Pakistan/Afghanistan? Does that affect us?

A world with much more religious segregation by country, how does that affect us? It's the trajectory we are on right now and attacks like these are just pushing it faster. Maybe it means a lot more immigration for the next few decades, of people that don't want to live in Islamic states.  Things like that. What about the Sunni/Shia rift and whether Iran gets nukes?

Well, where does that take us? War of civllizations maybe if not physical, metaphorical? Certainly just the opposite of the initial promise of the internet.

I would remind that meantime, elsewhere in the world, China is struggling with assimilating Christmas, the ancient western pagan celebration that was appropriated long ago by the Roman Catholicism...

I'm not asking these questions in a judgmental way, I'm asking them in a "business analyst" kind of way, a "try to predict the future" kind of way. It's obvious radical Islam is not going away anytime soon! And it's forcing a lot of changes on the rest of the world and will continue to do so. We will have to deal with the repercussions of that for the rest of our lives, we should think about what those really might be, big picture.