Like others before him, in France and elsewhere, Samuel Paty was murdered because he offended. Nico Macdonald at medium.com argues we need to be free to offend and that well-intentioned attempts to protect certain ethnic or religious groups from the feeling of being offended, results in an infantilisation that can be profoundly destructive for everyone:
The inability of some, particularly former liberals, to criticise behaviour by people from particular religious or cultural groupings — and to claim offence on their behalf — may seem like a modern expression of anti-racism and an attempt not to ‘fuel the racists’ fire’. But the reality is that their attitude infantilises the people in their groupings. It imagines they are not capable of achieving the moral standards of our society, in the same way that Europeans regarded ‘the native’ during periods of their colonisations. It is ‘othering’. You cannot defeat racism by racialising society.