To be sure there were still plenty of people Saturday posing for selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower and finding a lover’s lips along the Seine. I heard the news on the radio, and I had this heartfelt reaction. It wasn’t particularly an illustrator’s response, he said, “more an instinctive, human reaction”. It’s more of a state of shock and sadness and anger and all these very sort of raw feelings.
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“If it deters me from doing it again then they win”, Dunmire said. “It was meant to be used freely, to encourage peace in Paris and peace in general”.
Nearly as soon as the vicious terror attacks on Paris took place, netizens on social media started reposting a poignant image portraying the Eiffel Tower on a peace sign, as a sign of support for France and its people. “I wanted to create a symbol of peace”, Jullien says of the hand-drawn illustration that combines the Eiffel tower and the universal symbol of peace.
“I thought we needed a message for peace”, he told CNN.
French officials told Associated Press they now believe one more person involved in the attacks is still at large. People reused it, retweeted it. You know, it’s putting me in the spotlight that I don’t necessarily want to be because I don’t want to benefit from this exposure in the sense that it’s a tragedy first and foremost. A few of the wounded are in critical condition.
But most importantly for Jean, the post was shared by everyone else, from those directly affected by the attack, which claimed over 130 lives, to people from corners of the earth as far removed as possible from the city.
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The highest number of deaths was at the Bataclan concert venue, where the American band, Eagles of Death Metal, was in the middle of a concert when shots rang out. “The Paris tragedy requires of us all to unite in the fight against extremism”. France is part of a US-led coalition conducting an air war against IS in Syria and Iraq, where IS declared a caliphate previous year after seizing swathes of both countries. “As I look out my window, I see a bunch of flickering lights in the Parisian night”, he wrote in an email Saturday.
