A defiant, slightly outlandish hashtag started trending after the French police announced that one of their police dogs was killed during a dawn raid in the Saint-Denis suburb of Paris.
The raid targeted the suspected architect of last week’s attacks on Paris, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Seven people were arrested and two were killed in the standoff—including woman wearing an explosive suicide vest who blew up her vest. Along with five officers who suffered minor injuries in the raid, a seven-year-old police dog named Diesel sadly lost his life. The police later tweeted that canines like Diesel are “indispensable” to their missions.
After the news about Diesel broke, the hashtag #JeSuisChien started trending on Twitter—a take-off of #JeSuisCharlie following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January.
(Update, Nov. 3, 2017: “Jenna Abrams”, of the tweet above, has turned out to be a fake identity created by a Russian troll farm and widely cited by various news media.)
Though some were more tongue-in-cheek than others:
Following the attacks last week, this isn’t the first instance of people expressing themselves through a “Je suis…” hashtag. The new favorite among Parisians is #JeSuisEnTerrasse, which translates as “I am sitting outside.” That may sound silly, but the mere act of dining al fresco has become something of an act of defiance after last week’s terrorist attacks.