What good is commemorating the massacre of concert-goers with performative grief and dazzling lights when the ghastly under-current of murder and Islamic supremacism still remain?
Why even bother with this?:
The scheme was ambitious. One group of three gunmen, moving quickly through a neighborhood of restaurants and cafés, mowed down thirteen people on the streets of the tenth arrondissement and inside a Cambodian eatery called La Petit Cambodge, then took five lives on the rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi in the eleventh arrondissement before murdering twenty-one people outside La Belle Équipe, a bar on the rue de Charonne. One of the three gunman, wearing a suicide vest, was then driven to the Comptoir Voltaire café on the boulevard Voltaire, where he sat down, placed an order, and then exploded his vest, injuring fifteen people.
At around the same time, in Saint-Denis, three suicide bombers arrived at the Stade de France, a sports stadium where President Hollande was attending a soccer match between France and Germany. The men intended to gain access to the stadium, but the first of them to try was stopped at security. All three ended up setting off their suicide vests outside the stadium, taking only one life aside from their own.
The third group of three terrorists were more successful. Outside the Bataclan theater on the boulevard Voltaire, they dispatched three people with their Kaloshnikovs before entering the theater, where an American band called Eagles of Death Metal was performing before an audience of approximately 1500. The ISIS members then proceeded to commit a massacre that lasted for two and a half hours. From the Guardian:
…different witnesses described the clear ripple effect of the crowd – “like a gust of wind through wheat” – as people were mown down by gunfire and rows of people dropped to the ground….Witnesses described how their faces were splattered in blood as people beside them were shot in the head and fell. The shooting continued for 10 minutes before the men reloaded and began shooting again, aiming at the head and thorax with professionalism. “It was carnage,” said Marc Coupris, 57, a legal worker. “It looked like a battlefield. There was blood everywhere, there were bodies everywhere.”…
The firing was relentless and indiscriminate….The gunmen fired up into the balconies and dead bodies fell over and down on to the stalls below.….There was lots of screaming, lots of panic, lots of blood. People threw themselves to the ground but then they then just started firing at random at the people on the ground….”
And that was just the beginning. The gunmen laughed as they shot people in the back. They kicked bodies lying on the floor to make sure they were dead. One of the men stood by an emergency exit and picked off victims as they ran towards it. After one gunman exploded his suicide vest, the other two took about a hundred hostages, some of whom they employed as human shields after the police finally arrived; when one of these gunmen, too, detonated his vest, it instantly killed both him and the third gunman. The total number of people murdered at the Bataclan that evening was ninety.
At all of the sites of terrorism that evening, needless to say, there were shouts of “Allahu akbar!”
Fast forward to last Sunday night in Norway. Twenty-two minutes into the evening news at seven o’clock, state-owned NRK-TV – sandwiched between typically mendacious stories about how the Republicans are responsible for the government shutdown in the U.S. and about the incomparable suffering of the innocent inhabitants of Gaza — began a segment commemorating the tenth anniversary of that evening in Paris and environs. I was surprised to see the government channel, which is always at pains to whitewash Islam, even bringing up the memory of Bataclan. But it was soon clear why NRK was doing so.
The segment focused on two survivors of the massacre at Bataclan. One of them, a young man named Thomas, was shot in the hand. Every November 13 he gets together with other survivors of Bataclan. Being a survivor of the atrocity, he says, makes him feel as if he lives in a parallel world. But he doesn’t blame Islam. “Yes, it was carried out by Islamic terrorists,” he says. “But there are extremists who are Catholics and Jesuits. In almost all groups there are some who are more extreme than others.”
Yes, let’s not forget the obscene amount of death and destruction that has been wrought in Europe by Jesuit terrorists.
The other Bataclan survivor was a woman named Gaëlle Messager. Shot in the head and arm, she lost a huge chunk of the left side of her face, including much of her jaw. Surgeons have since reconstructed her face using tissue from her leg. She has undergone no fewer than fifty-six operations and is scheduled to have several more. In fact she will have to keep getting surgery for the rest of her life.
But what does she do when she’s not under the knife? She visits a jihadist in prison.
Yes, that’s right. She talks regularly to a jihadist. She does it partly “as therapy for herself” and partly “to understand how a Muslim extremist thinks.” To be sure, the man whom she visits was not one of the perpetrators of the Bataclan massacre – they’re not available for conversation these days, having blown themselves to bits – but is indeed a believing Muslim and convicted terrorist who is convinced that “a holy war in France is necessary.”
Wow.
That is some serious Kool-aid drinking there.
And it cannot be fixed.
If anything could, it would have been that dreadful massacre.
But no.
Such people offer succor to such terrorists with their complacency and their weakness.
Who are they to do that?
**
A decade on from deadly attacks in Paris, the world’s two most notorious jihadist groups Islamic State (IS) and Al-Qaida have significantly evolved and their branches still pose a global security threat, especially from Africa, analysts say.
Jihadists killed 130 people in shootings and suicide bombings in and around Paris on the night of Nov. 13, 2015, with IS claiming responsibility.
The attackers killed around 90 people at the Bataclan concert hall, where the U.S. band Eagles of Death Metal was playing.
They ended the lives of dozens more at Parisian restaurants and cafes, and one person near the Stade de France football stadium just outside the capital, where crowds were watching France play Germany.
The sole surviving member of the 10-person jihadist cell that staged the attacks, 36-year-old Salah Abdeslam, is serving life in jail, after nine fellow attackers blew themselves up or were killed by police.
With strong central leadership, the terror groups were once able to train and then send commandos into Europe to carry out attacks such as the strikes in Paris. ...
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