He Was Murdered Over a Lie: What the Killing of Samuel Paty Means for Free Expression

Samuel Paty was decapitated on Oct. 16, 2020, outside the middle school in a north Paris suburb where he had taught history and civics for five years. The murderer, a radical Islamist terrorist, acted because Paty had supposedly shown his class images of the Prophet Mohammed from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in a lesson on free expression in France.

The magazine was the target of a high-profile Islamist terrorist attack back in January 2015 that spurred a month’s long wave of jihadi violence across the country.

In a...