Yesterday Paris, along with many other cities around Europe, fell victim to a nauseating display of mandated sentimentality.
It was as if Diana, or rather her mangled body, had come back to whip up a frenzy of public sorrow.
Candles, flowers and other paraphernalia of grief were everywhere. I didn’t see any teddy bears, but some of the 1.5 million mourners must have brought a few. Anguish just isn’t complete without fluffy toys.
One almost expected to see an expertly saddened Tony Blair declare to the Paris mob that the victims of the Muslim atrocity were ‘people’s cartoonists’. One almost expected the London mob to harass the Queen with shrieks of ‘Show us you care, ma’am!’
In reality, the French tricolore was projected on the building of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, as if the battle after which the square is named had gone the other way. ‘Je suis Charlie’, screamed the crowd of people few of whom are Francophones and many of whom can’t even speak English properly.
But of course Paris claimed pride of place for the unprecedented scale of mawkish mourning. You ought to remember, mes amis, that grief is at its most poignant when it’s private and dignified. A single tear sliding down an otherwise stony face betokens sorrow. A crowd screaming Je suis Charlie! betokens a human herd.
Still, the spectacle would have been almost bearable if my old friends hadn’t acted in the capacity of shepherds. There they were: Angie and Dave, François and Junk (as Jean-Claude Juncker likes to be called by his mates), marching at the head of the herd and indulging in public foreplay for the cameras.
I was especially moved by the picture of Angie, her head on François’s shoulder, his arm embracing her warmly.
Isn’t Angie aware of the chap’s track record? A girl puts her head on François’s shoulder and before long his motorcycle helmet will turn up at her doorstep. Perhaps Angie feels she’s past the age of consent and therefore on safe grounds. A false sense of security, that, if you ask me – François abhors discrimination.
I really think yesterday’s grief was a misplaced and largely faked emotion for everyone other than the victims’ friends and families. A much more appropriate sentiment, as discrete from sentimentality, would have been rage.
Instead of ‘Je suis Charlie’, the demonstrators should have been shouting ‘J’accuse’.
And the objects of appropriate rage were all there, at the head of the rally, putting their heads on one another’s shoulders and looking oh so statesmanlike.
They should have been pinned to the wall and asked, fists at their noses, how they allowed this tragedy to happen and what they are going to do to make sure such tragedies don’t happen again.
Those 17 people didn’t die in an Alpine avalanche or a car accident. They were monstrously murdered by the enemies in our midst, those born within our civilisation but committed to destroying it.
The monsters didn’t operate in a vacuum. They operated in a poisoned atmosphere largely exhaled by our political establishment. You know, Dave, Angie, François, Junk et al, with their jolly friends and illustrious predecessors.
It’s they, our governing spivs, who in pursuit of their nefarious political ends have allowed unlimited Muslim immigration to our countries.
They, who have encouraged the immigrants and their offspring to live, if they so choose, lives of isolation from, and hatred of, the civilisation that took them in.
They, who have excreted or at least fostered the cocoon of political correctness protecting the enemies in our neighbourhoods.
They, who have hamstrung our security services and emasculated our police.
They, who do nothing, and will do nothing, to rid our societies of those who have declared war on us and now regard themselves as combatants behind enemy lines.
They, who out of cowardice and fear for their own political future refuse to acknowledge that there is a war on.
They, who lead the lemmings of our inert, ill-educated, anomic masses to the edge of an abyss and tell them to march on.
Yet, if they devoted themselves less to public relations and more to public safety, there would be much they could do.
Some understanding of the scale of the looming disaster would be a useful start. One hears BBC types claim that merely 10 per cent of the Muslims sympathise with jihadists. If true, that sounds almost innocent – unless we translate percentages into absolute numbers.
There are 38 million Muslims in Europe. Ten percent of that is 3.8 million who feel that the Charlie murderers did the right thing. Among them are thousands of activists like Mizanur Rahman of Palmers Green.
Those who ‘insult Islam’, declared this London-born preacher, ‘can’t expect a different result’. ‘Britain,’ he added, ‘is the enemy of Islam’. If only. Unfortunately, it’s the other way around.
As shown by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the 1933 Nazi equivalent, it doesn’t take millions of supporters and thousands of activists to destroy a country. Thousands of the former and dozens of the latter can do the job nicely.
Once we’ve understood what is really happening, all kinds of measures could be introduced to prevent the likes of Rahman and millions of those who heed sermons of hate from inflicting upon us a repeat of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, or something worse.
Norway provides an example to follow. There anyone expressing jihadist sentiments is quickly deported without much fuss. Over 10,000 Muslims have been deported in the last few years, and the violent crime rate in the country has fallen by almost a third.
Among the deportees were hundreds of Norwegian citizens, which destroys the myth of citizenship offering an ironclad right to stay. Rather than being an unconditional lifelong licence, citizenship involves a reciprocal arrangement.
Protectio trahit subjectionem, subjectio projectionem (protection draws allegiance; allegiance, protection) is an old legal principle. Applied to the situation at hand, it’s clear that, as Rahman and the 150,000 British Muslims who regularly log onto jihadist websites feel no allegiance to Britain, Britain would be justified in taking their passports away and kicking them out.
Jihadist websites should have the same (preferably even greater) stigma attached to them as paedophile websites. Anyone following them religiously, as it were, must be punished by large fines and get a criminal record, with repeat offenders imprisoned and then deported.
Any mosque in which one jihadist word has ever been preached, must be shut down and ideally razed, with the preachers themselves treated as accessories to murder and their congregations as lists of suspects.
Anyone convicted of terrorist offences, be it perpetration or planning, must go to prison for a long time and then be deported. Had the French authorities applied such measures to the Kouachi brothers, the tragedy of Charlie Hebdo wouldn’t have happened – having already served prison terms, they were on every conceivable international list of villains.
All Muslim immigration must be stopped forthwith, and every Muslim visitor treated as a terror suspect until the situation improves and Britain (or Europe, if you’d rather) has been cleansed of dangerous elements.
Should any country finance, arm and train terrorists, this must be regarded as an act of war and dealt with accordingly.
Specifically, France and therefore Nato must summarily declare war on Yemen, where one of the murderers received such competent infantry training. Some hideous punitive damage, military or otherwise, must be inflicted on the country for its rulers to realise that hostilities towards the West don’t pay.
The list of things our spivocrats should do and won’t do could go on and on. But that would be an exercise in futility, for what they actually will do is more of the same: meaningless talk, empty gestures and well-rehearsed shows of solidarity aimed at winning the next election.
Je ne suis du tout Charlie.