On January 7, 2015, the world was alerted of another tragic act of terrorism that had taken place, only, this time, time, it happened in France. Two Islamist terrorists who were armed with assault rifles and several other weapons forced their way into the building and offices of the world known satirical (weekly) newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Approximately fifty shots were fired, resulting in the death of eleven people, and non-fatal injuries caused to another twelve. During the midst of all of this, they (the terrorists) shouted, "Allahu Akbar" or "God is [the] greatest." Each gunman identified himself as belonging to Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen, which unhesitantly took full responsibility for the attack (CNN 2015). .
Terrorists have one goal. To communicate terror among millions, and in this case, that's what they did. Going into a place and killing people is one effective way to do so. David Lake has suggested that "terrorism is an effective method mainly because it forces a target to decide between making a trade-off between responding strongly to the terrorist threat, in contrast to avoiding the radicalization of the public through its heavy-handed response" (Lake 2002, 22). According to Krause, the ongoing survival of any terrorist organization helps pursue resources and provides support for itself to keep moving forward, and to becoming stronger (Krause 2013). .
Back in February of 2006, Charlie Hebdo, the French [satirical] magazine published a series of twelve cartoons that had to depict the Prophet Muhammad that had been featured in the Nordic daily a year prior. This created a domino effect that would make Charlie Hebdo a prime terrorist target (Jamison 2011). In 2011, Charlie Hebdo got firebombed (with no fatalities) shortly after publishing a caricature of the Islam Prophet Muhammad (Brooks 2015). Not too long after that (two years), Charlie Hebdo tactically published a comic book biography of Islam's founder (Brooks 2015).