Via @PhilWillSays comes this report of Islamist* terror in Paris: “Armed men stormed the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday morning, killing 11 people and injuring more, French President François Hollande said. The men opened fire inside the magazine’s offices using automatic AK-47 rifles before fleeing, a police officer said.” The ‘Islamist’ bit is not yet confirmed; but, given that this isn’t the first time that the magazine has been violently attacked (not to mentioned threatened, criticized, and sued), and given that every other time it’s been over Charlie Hebdo’s willingness to ‘draw Mohammad’ – well, it’s a well-traveled road at this point, no?
The French actually do not suffer as many attacks like these as one might expect, given how often their banlieues riot. And I fully expect that the French anti-terror domestic security apparatus will be doing quite a bit to make sure that future attacks of this sort are discouraged. That’s a polite, bloodless way of saying “Roughly several hundred people involved in radical Islamism will be snatched off of French streets in the next few weeks, and then tortured** for information. Many will not survive the process.” I don’t think that this is actually a superior way to handle things – frankly, it reeks of a colonialist mindset that has plagued Europeans for the last six decades – but it is very much a French way of handling things.
In the meantime, our prayers and thoughts for the people attacked and murdered.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Note suffix. That is not a request, by the way.
**No, I don’t mean water-boarding. I mean the stuff that you don’t want to think about too much.
