"When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it."

These are words that, in the aftermath of the horrific execution of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and editorial staff yesterday, we risk forgetting.

They are words uttered by editor Stephane Charbonnier, one of the 12 men who paid the ultimate price for freedom.

"Love is stronger than hate" - the cartoon published by Charlie Hebdo right after the magazine's offices were bombed in 2011.

Even as an anti-Muslim backlash spreads globally and Europe risks succumbing to extreme rightist politics, it becomes even more of a priority to never forget what Charbonnier's words stand for.

Even as the cries for the curbing and censoring of the practice of Islam take over social media, and the angered cries denouncing multi-culturalism grow louder, we are only tainting the memory of everything the Charlie Hebdo victims fought for.

Yesterday's victims valued pacifism above everything else. Their pens only ever spread satire targeting  politically-influential personalities. Charlie Hebdo was never about inciting hatred against a whole culture. To use these people's murder as a pretext for furthering a misguided hatred against a whole race is both insensitive and hypocritical.

Yesterday's bloodbath was not carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah, but by evil men for whom any excuse to unleash violence would have worked.

Yesterday's killings were not caused by religion. They were caused by barbarians who needed an excuse to let their inner cruelties rip, and who found this excuse in their interpretation of a particular religion.

Some people are born with the desire to kill, to cause suffering. Any reason will do - in today's politically sensitive climate, the invoking of pseudo-religion is probably the easiest way to secure the global stage.

But make no mistake, with these people if it is not religion, it will be something else. Because violence lives inside them and not on the pages of the Koran or in the words of Muhammad. They, and only they, are to blame for yesterday's carnage. To blame religion is to exonerate them from responsibility, to accept the vague defense "Allah made me do it".

No. Allah did not make you do it. The responsibility is yours, through and through. And those of us who are intent on placing the blame on Islam are only facilitating these barbarians' defense.

Punishing a whole race of people for the acts of a few sadists goes against all the principles of freedom and civilisation that we are supposedly fighting for. In the words of one of Charlie Hebdo's most famous cartoons, published right after their offices were attacked back in 2011,  "love is stronger than hate".

Let us not make the mistake of forgetting that, and let us honour the memory of the fallen in the only way they would have understood.

Freedom above all else.