Mark Steyn recalls an important 10-year milestone in the fight for freedom of speech.

Exactly a decade ago – January 7th 2015 – two Muslim fanatics burst into the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed a dozen people, including the bulk of the senior editorial staff and some of France’s best known cartoonists. … Throughout the very bad ten years for free speech that followed, I have thought often of Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo and a great cartoonist in the French style. Two years before his death, he said:

“It may seem pompous, but I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.”

He did. He was an heroic figure, and he paid for it with his life. One reason for that is because, when everyone else is on their knees, the guy standing up kinda stands out. And Charb & Co had been standing out for almost a decade. As I said to Megyn Kelly at Fox News lster that night:

“Yes, they were very brave. This was the only publication that was willing to publish the Muhammad — the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2006 because they decided to stand by those Danish cartoonists. I’m proud to have written for the only Canadian magazine to publish those Muhammad cartoons [The Western Standard]. And it’s because The New York Times didn’t and because Le Monde in Paris didn’t, and the London Times didn’t and all the other great newspapers of the world didn’t – only Charlie Hebdo and my magazine in Canada and a few others did. But they were forced to bear a burden that should have been more widely dispersed.” …

… [T]he cowardly media pixelate Mohammed as a way of fast-tracking themselves into the witness protection program – or so they hope. On TV, one of the few surviving Charlie Hebdo staffers attempted to hold one of the offending covers on screen, only to have the camera lurch away. Around the world, the dead cartoonists’ professional colleagues, almost to a man, agreed that the preferred response was some or other limpid, evasive, self-flattering variant of “the pen is mightier than the sword.”

But that line doesn’t work if your pen’s filled with White-Out.