One of the notable things about the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in Paris was how swiftly it was carried out. “It lasted five minutes,” said one witness. The cops were already there — guarding the newspaper offices. Two of the cops were killed.
The assailants gained admittance by forcing a cartoonist to enter the door security code at gunpoint. A large percentage of people — maybe nearly everyone — would have done the same thing, yielded to that threat, in a moment of fear. A certain smaller percentage, perhaps 2 percent, would for some reason refuse; and refuse unreasonably without quite knowing why. Which of the two groups one belongs to nobody knows until the day.
A young mother and cartoonist who survived the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris today said she had let the suspected Al Qaeda killers into the magazine office.
Corrine Rey said she had returned from picking up her young daughter from a kindergarten when she was confronted by two heavily armed men wearing balaclavas.
‘I had gone to pick up my daughter at day care, arriving in front of the magazine building, where two masked and armed men brutally threatened us,’ said Ms Rey, who draws under the name ‘Coco’.
They said they wanted to go up to the offices, so I tapped in the code,’ said Ms Rey, referring to the digi-code security system on the inter-phone.
Miss Rey and her daughter hid under a desk, from where they saw two other cartoonists being executed.
Years ago there was a story about an Israeli security guard who grappled a suicide bomber outside a supermarket where they both blew up. It is doubtful the guard did it for his salary; nobody dies for a pittance. It is doubtful that he even knew what he was going to do until he did it. It was just one of those things you find out about yourself in a moment.
“Well, whadda ya know?” Boom. It’s nice to know you’re made of stern stuff. But it’s a helluva way to find out.
It’s the talking heads who have got all the answers. Take Howard Dean, who’s assures us the world is up against a nameless cult — a nameless second amendment cult, to be precise.
According to Dean, we should stop attributing the “Muslim” label to them because they fall in line with a cult that is able to overcome France’s strict gun laws to carry out such an attack.
“You know, this is a chronic problem,” Dean said. “I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for whatever anybody else’s life. That’s not what the Koran says. You know, Europe has an enormous radical problem. I think ISIS is a cult, not an Islamist cult. I think it’s a cult. I think you got to deal with these people.”
“You know, the interesting thing here is we talked about guns the last time regarding the United States, regarding how guns get in the hands of the kind of people that kill the two police officers here two weeks ago — France has tremendous gun control laws, yet, these people are able to get Kalashnikovs,” he continued. “So, this is really complicated stuff. I think you have to treat these people basically as mass murders. But I do not think we should accord them any particular religious respects because I think whatever they are claiming, motivation clearly is a twisted cultage mind.”
But honestly, does Howard Dean think al-Qaeda — whoever — is really scared of the police? ISIS just blew up the police academy in Yemen, killing at least 37 people. They’ve killed more cops in the last 36 hours than cartoonists. The assailants, whatever Howard Dean wants to call them, don’t care what he thinks. The Left still thinks terrorism is a function of Western political attitudes: t=f(w). But the probability is that these terrorists think a certain way because they’ve always thought that way. What the cult does is independent of any politically correct mind tricks the Left may seek to implement. They’re marching to a different drummer, to a whole brass band in fact, and none of the musicians take orders from Howard Dean.
In fact, if developments in the West mirror the way things work in the Middle East, not just the media but the police will be the next targets.
Speaking of cults, Dean sounds like a guy trying desperately hard not to lose his religion. Leftist orthodoxy now accepts the innocence of Islamism as an article of faith, on par with say, the enlightenment of the Buddha. It has to be true or else their little world falls apart. The belief in the existence of faceless second amendment cults has now become an existential value for the Left.
They are too completely invested in multiculturalism, social deconstruction and redistribution to doubt the faith now. To misgive their chosen pathway to power, is to fail at the last step. So they’ll grit their teeth and plunge on; they will never give it up on pain of anathema.
And therefore they will cling to their dogma, however improbable it might be, long past the point when any reasonable Leftist would have doubted it. This is the most dangerous aspect of the crisis facing the West. Not only are we in danger of tearing our politics apart, we must. It has now become a case of destroying our civilization in order to save it. We have to stay crazy to avoid the growing suspicion that we’re nuts. The cultural elites of the West are going to hang themselves in the morning according to a schedule that they themselves have devised.
Do you think our elites won’t punch the door buttons to let the killers in to shoot us? They already have. They already have.
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The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
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The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
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