Have you ever watched someone provoke a dog? Was it one that was already agitated, or not? In the end, aren’t they always agitated? Scared or angry, a provoked animal responds predictably and dangerously. What about a person? Have you ever seen a person provoked, especially over time?

The reaction of the provoked is not always, or even usually, defensible because it often ratchets in excess of the insult to be even more egregious. Yet, it is often an avoidable consequence. There tend to be multiple bad actors in a bad situation from whom and from which we should learn. It is never inappropriate (or too early) to criticize the dead if such honesty could save more lives, and in the short term.

Today’s news about the murders in France has not yet fully developed, but should remind us that clearly certain behaviors can be provoked, and others mitigated. Why go into a bad area, late at night flashing money? Why talk crap to someone you know could beat you up or will at least try? Why keep doing something that your boss already told you a bunch of times not to do? Participative blame lies at the feet of the institution and those running it when they so plainly dared Pro-Islamist radicals to attack them in France. They have also been hypocritical and uneven in their ridicule.

If your office has already been shot at, firebombed, publicly threatened and you continue to thumb your nose at the threat even taunting those who threaten for not following through, what do you expect? Freedom is considerably more than doing and saying whatever we want. Death begets sympathy, but arrogance begets death. In stating back in 2012 that he would “prefer to die than be silenced” someone would have done the Charlie Hebdo Editor a favor in reminding him of the basic characteristics of death..