Our minds still try to resist the idea that someone is willing to kill another human being because of the words that he or she writes. Yet that is exactly what happened to Avijit Roy, an American citizen hacked to death by men brandishing knives and machetes during a trip to his native Bangladesh.
Roy and his wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, now in critical condition after also being attacked Thursday, were in Bangladesh to attend the national book fair, where Roy was promoting his books advocating tolerance, education and secular humanism.
Why was he killed? At the time of writing, the perpetrators had not been caught, but there seems little doubt he was killed by Islamist radicals, who were likely angered by his devastatingly critical writings. Just last month he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris and the December 16 massacre in Peshawar, Pakistan, in which Pakistani Taliban opened fire inside a school, killing 145 people, including 132 children. “To me,” he wrote, “such religious extremism is like a highly contagious virus.”
Roy strongly disagreed with President Barack Obama’s statements distancing the so-called Islamic State from Islam. “ISIS,” he said, “is what unfolds when the virus of faith launches into action and the outbreak becomes an epidemic.”
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