Here, some 100 miles south of Paris, things are peacefully quiet. In Paris itself there is no peace and there is no quiet. Yet another lot of innocent blood has been spilled by Muslim terrorism; yet another well of typographic paint has been uncapped.
I can’t really add much to the profusion of indignation so eloquently expressed by so many since the rampage of atrocities in Paris.
All I can offer is a few comments on the commentators, of whom some are right, some righteous, some self-righteous, some utterly predictable and some predictably hypocritical.
In that last category one ought to mention the front-page headline in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité: “What they murdered is liberty.”
It isn’t, comrades. The Kouachi brothers merely pinpricked liberty, but it will recover – such as it can ever be in today’s West dedicated to the values of care, share and be aware.
The real murder of liberty would have occurred only if the cause championed by the paper since 1917 had triumphed. For throughout the existence of the Soviet Union this Stalinist rag toed the Soviet line with canine fidelity.
This is understandable, considering that it was wholly funded by the KGB, and its circulation defied the usual understanding of this publishing term.
Using Soviet blood-stained money, L’Humanité would print lorry-loads of copies that few would read and fewer would buy.
Most of the unused circulation would then be circulated to Russia, there to be pulped. The resulting paper would then be shipped back to Paris for L’Humanité to print more copies. Then, in an early foretaste of responsible recycling, the process would be repeated.
The rag’s founders and pundits, most of whom were Soviet agents, not just sympathisers, were desperate to bring to France the Soviet version of liberty, complete with enslaved population, nonexistent free press, concentration camps, torture and mass shootings.
In compliance with Stalin’s directives, L’Humanité hailed the Nazi-Soviet pact and openly agitated against France’s resistance to the Nazi attack, thereby contributing to its success – only to change its tack on 22 June, when the Nazis attacked the rag’s real owners.
To watch this paper shed crocodile tears over the blow suffered by freedom of the press is like reading laments about homosexual marriage in PinkNews.
Not to be outdone, Libération also bemoans this attack on freedom of expression, screaming “We are all Charlie” from its front page. Of course Libération preaches its devotion to the abused liberal virtue only because it has to function in a country where its raison d’être hasn’t yet triumphed.
Rather than being Stalinist, like L’Humanité, Libération is Trotskyist which, in the context of freedom of the press, is a distinction without a difference.
Both papers, along with their marginally more temperate colleagues at Le Monde and indeed Charlie Hebdo, are largely responsible for fostering the climate of anomic ‘liberalism’ in which Muslim terrorism grows in the soil fertilised by millions of Muslim immigrants.
Assorted lefties, in France and elsewhere, are only too happy to import vast and vastly alien populations, to be used as battering rams of the new order. Then they feign distress when the imports act in character.
Charlie Hebdo itself belongs to the extreme left of French journalism. As such it doesn’t discriminate: it attacks with equal venom Christians, Muslims and especially Jews, for which diatribes the paper has been charged with anti-Semitic propaganda in the past.
The Muslims, of course, tend to take the law in their own hands, which they did a few years ago when attacking Charlie Hebdo’s offices with petrol bombs. Since then the paper has been under police protection, and the assigned police officer was killed in yesterday’s assault.
After the first attack Stéphane Charbonnier, the paper’s editor, refused to surrender to terrorist threats. “It’s better to die standing up than to live kneeling,” he said at the time.
The statement is undeniably noble, but its provenance isn’t. Originally uttered by the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, the saying gained wide currency in Europe’s leftwing circles after it was used during the Spanish Civil War by the communist chieftain Dolores Ibárruri, nicknamed La Pasionaria.
La Pasionaria acquired her nom de révolution for biting through a priest’s jugular vein, and there have to be better ways of quenching one’s thirst. This monster’s words clearly resonated through Charbonnier’s mind.
His cause wasn’t heroic, but his death was, and even those who detested his politics are mourning his death at the hands of Islamic murderers.
Then of course one reads, and hears in the broadcast media, a constant flow of predictable assurances that the atrocity had nothing to do with Islam.
Yet since the murderers were manifestly not Lutheran and, while shooting up Charlie Hebdo’s editorial meeting, they screamed “Allahu akbar!” and “We’ve avenged Prophet Mohammed!” rather than singing Stille Nacht, one is tempted to think that the Muslim faith had a teeny something to do with it.
Not so, according to the British Muslim scholar pontificating on this morning’s Sky News that the religious link is tenuous to the point of being nonexistent.
There is, he acknowledged, one sentence in Hadith, the collection of Mohammed’s sayings, to the effect that anyone offending the Prophet must be killed. But the current thinking is that whenever Hadith contradicts humanitarian values the latter must take precedence.
Obviously this point hasn’t been communicated with sufficient clarity to ISIS, Hamas, al-Qaeda or to the murderous Paris-born Muslims who took such exception to a few cartoons in Charlie Hebdo.
The scholar further explained that real Muslims don’t behave in such a barbaric fashion. They dedicate their lives to living peacefully, the way Mohammed lived.
The poor chap doesn’t have much sense of humour. That faculty alone would have prevented him from making such patently ludicrous remarks in the full knowledge that this is exactly what they are.
For the role model of his religion set rather unpeaceful examples to follow.
Thus his first act after moving from Mecca to Medina was to murder hundreds of Jews with his own hand. This is how the earliest Muslim biographer of Mohammed describes this 627 AD event:
“When [the Jewish Qurayza tribe] surrendered, the Prophet confined them in Medina… Then he sent for them and struck off their heads… as they were brought out to him in batches… There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900… This went on until the Prophet made an end of them.”
Note that his victims had surrendered – just as the victims of the Kouachi brothers meekly went to their death. Hence the brothers were doing exactly what the Sky News expert suggested all faithful Muslims ought to do: imitate Mohammed.
The French police will probably catch the fleeing murderers, but it’ll take some doing. For, after shooting another surrendering policeman, the brothers fled in the direction of Saint-Denis, the Muslim ghetto in the north of Paris, which has become a virtual no-go area even for the police.
It’s there and in other such neighbourhoods beyond the Périphérique ring road that thousands of cars are burned every year by rioters screaming “Nique la France!” (F*** France!).
One gets the impression that the programme of multi-culti assimilation hasn’t been an unequivocal success in France. Murderers on the run find a natural home in Saint-Denis, where they are surrounded by thousands of admiring fans.
We aren’t short of such support in Britain, as witnessed by the London preacher of hate Anjem Choudary who blamed the French government for “allowing” the offensive cartoons to be published, “thereby placing the sanctity of citizens at risk.”
What the French government, along with the British and other Western European governments, shouldn’t have allowed is the burgeoning of vast communities of those who are institutionally and religiously conditioned to hate everything the West stands for.
And they should be blamed not for upholding freedom of the press but for refusing to acknowledge that there is a war on – and we are losing.