My immediate hot take:
In general, it’s wise to say “We don’t know who did this or why and we shouldn’t speculate until we get all the facts.” In this case we know exactly who did it, and why. The French won’t be talking nonsense about “violent extremism.”
The (obviously) racist French have closed the borders. They are going to (GASP!) profile, to determine who can leave the country. For example, white (and probably many black) Americans will be allowed to leave. Adult male Algerians and Moroccans (and Syrians, to the degree that they’ve been invading recently) not so much.
This was an act of war, and I expect France to treat it as such. Unfortunately, with the apparent collapse of Westphalia, it won’t be obvious who to punish for it, but if ISIS takes “credit” for it, expect them to get a pounding in Syria and Iraq, Russians or no. And unlike us or Israel, the French know they will be immune from charges of “war crimes.”[Update a few minutes later]
#ProTip The French declaration of a state of emergency effectively suspends civil liberties.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Call me nuts, but I’m guessing that France, and Europe in general, is going to be tightening its Syrian-refugee policy as a result of this.
[Saturday-morning update]
Great timing, Barack: “We have contained [ISIS].” An asshat extraordinaire.
Also, oopsie, more bad timing: Al Gore in Paris this weekend for a summit on the “greatest challenge facing us,” too much plant food in the atmosphere.
Roger Simon: Why Paris happened. Yes, there don’t appear to be any world leaders today, least of all Barack Obama.
Mark Steyn: “The barbarians are inside, and there are no gates.”
And from Richard Fernandez: A Europe with no borders has taken a body blow:
It’s significant that the attacks occurred during a period of heightened alert associated with big soccer matches. French president Hollande himself was watching a game when he had to be unceremoniously shuttled to the safety of a government building. That suggests that French security forces and intelligence were genuinely surprised by the attack and therefore there exist terror networks they don’t know about capable of large-scale operations. Scotland Yard and MI5 must realize this and will inevitably be burning the midnight oil tonight.
DHS should be doing the same thing.
[Afternoon update]
Claire Berlinski checks in from Paris.
I always take early reports of anything with a huge grain of salt.
However, in this case, there are some interesting clues. The French President indicated in a statement that the boarder closing was to keep people out, not in.
My guess; even if the terrorists turn out to be from the “refugees” currently invading Europe, I doubt EU policy will change much (I hope I’m wrong). French policy sure might, though.
I do think that this massacre will wake up a lot of people to the threat posed by the invaders.
I also suspect that the Obama admin plan to bring tens of thousands of Syrians here will still be backed by his usual defenders, given their long-standing aversion to reality.
My sincere condolences to France, and may the victims rest in peace.
I’m sure that the border closing was to keep the terrorists in.
What’s the purpose of saying the opposite?
I’m sure it was just a few guns going off accidentally.
Probably be those damn ‘youths’ again. Whenever anything bad happens in France, it always seems to be the ‘youths’.
Rand, those are assumptions that would apply to a sensible and reasonable person. Persons corrupted by years of multi-cultural PC bullshit and EUism do not fall under that heading. If anything more than token actions are taken against a few bad apples, I’d be surprised.
Despite the “close the borders” pronouncement, flights are entering and leaving France “normally” albeit with “heightened security.”
I would agree. You’re using Earth logic. To the Euro Left, this kind of coordinated terrorist attack is exactly what they want more of, and the people who planned it and carried it out are exactly the ones they want to bring more of into France.
It’s all about virtue-signaling, you see. They will fall all over themselves and trip over their own feet to demand wide-open borders and even more “refugees” in order to demonstrate the purity of their revolutionary zeal. Only the troglodytic “beaufs” would disagree, you see. Only “right-wing hatemongers” could possibly suggest that making it harder for terrorists to get into France, or anything else pertaining to archaic and outmoded concepts like a “social contract,” is more important than France’s “humanitarian duty” to keep the borders wide-open, and the more backward and violent the “refugees” are, the better.
In various left-leaning corners of the Internet we are already seeing the terrorist attacks being politicized and used as a justification to demand a crackdown on “right-wing extremist” groups and individuals, lest anyone hear them saying that the Emperor is not only naked again but waggling his penis drunkenly from a balcony and blowing kisses to the crowd–that’s “hatespeech,” you know.
My prediction is that they will double down. They will refuse to use the word “terrorism,” they will refuse to speak the obvious facts–that the Saudis even WARNED them months ago that the “refugees,” who are, suspiciously, military-age males only, contain within their ranks many thousands of terrorists who planned to enter Europe as “refugees” to avoid the usual scrutiny–they will speak indirectly about “youths” and “crime” and “gun violence” and “xenophobia” and “sensitive urban zones” and perhaps even try to stick the blame on the NRA in America. They won’t call the Islamist terrorists what they are. And if a crackdown is coming, it’s going to be on everyone who “provoked” this “terrible human tragedy” by failure to show sufficient enthusiasm for the Caliphate which is being established right before our eyes.
“My prediction is that they will double down.”
Possibly.
But I also think that the demonstrators in Germany will have increased anger and energy. This will cause Merkel a lot of trouble. She may have to stop the inflow.
I have to agree. The politicians will do as little as possible to get reelected, and hope voters have forgotten about this before the next election. They don’t want to do anything that might provoke widespread violence.
The left will demand more restrictions on nationalists because they’re ‘afraid of what the nationalists might do to Muslims in retaliation’. The multicultural death cult isn’t going to just say ‘sorry, my bad’. They have to double down, because they can’t stop.
However, it’s also clear that nationalism is rising across Europe, and refusing to do anything about these kind of events will only make it rise faster.
Frankly, looks to me like Europe is heading into civil war, because the politicians won’t do what’s required to prevent it.
Besides, the French have more important things to worry about, like the Global Climate Warming Change convention that’s about to start. Talk about waffling while Paris burns…
As the attacks unfolded last night I happened to be in a forum with a Swedish communist whose sister was in Paris.
He repeated complained that the Swedish media was literally censoring any mention of terrorism:
He’d said that he’d supported the open-border refugee problem, but now he’s had enough. Then he told us how he, and presumably some of the far, far Scandi left really feels:
and
So he was asked about the Muslim immigrants already in Sweden:
Perhaps there’s hope after all.
Not sure if true but people were reporting the their FB posts were disappearing last night.
that their* ugh
Probably a beta version. Merkel asked Zuckerberg to do something and he said he was on it. Content specific filters are pretty trivial to implement.
As I said to the Swede, even if they’re limiting information to keep immigrants from going nuts or planning copycat attacks, if you have to watch what you say because you let a crazy person move in with you, you’re no longer free.
No Mizzou scholarship for this guy!
I don’t know this individual, but my prediction is that his outrage will fade long before the next Swedish elections, and by then he will have painstakingly constructed for himself an impenetrable fortress of Doublethink, from which he will sally forth boldly to enter the voting booth to vote either for Kommunistiska Partiet, the Reds, or Miljöpartiet, the Greens.
He will convince himself that a few hundred dead Frenchmen dead at the hands of Arab savages, a few hundred thousand Swedish girls beaten and raped by African “refugees,” is a small and just price to pay for tearing down the “false consciousness” of the Christians he hates so much.
You wait and see. How long will it take before he’s giving you the multi-culti talking points about the poor misunderstood refugees, who just need a bit of Lebensraum which they are rightfully seizing from Europeans who oppressed and exploited their ancestors?
The politics of the Left cannot exist in a mind free of cognitive dissonance and Stockholm Syndrome.
“Call me nuts, but I’m guessing that France, and Europe in general, is going to be tightening its Syrian-refugee policy as a result of this.”
They might…for a while.
However these “refugees” don’t bring papers with them. Syrians can say they are from somewhere other than Syria and how are the Security people able to check that?
Hollande’s tough statements are good but they were made immediately. It’s politically important to sound tough when your constituency is suffering like this.
Actions will speak louder than words as always.
There’s plenty of time for the old Left wing excuse making to slip in (“They must have been troubled children.”) before he actually does anything.
And even if he does get tough what really matters is if he can keep it up for prolonged periods of time:
Thanks to Obama…
I’ll say it again:
thanks to Obama……….
the JV team is pretty strong, well entrenched, and well funded these days.
As he usually does, Mark Steyn says it best:
“Twenty-four hours ago, I said on the radio apropos the latest campus “safe space” nonsense:
This is what we’re going to be talking about when the mullahs nuke us.
Almost. When the Allahu Akbar boys opened fire, Paris was talking about the climate-change conference due to start later this month, when the world’s leaders will fly in to “solve” a “problem” that doesn’t exist rather than to address the one that does. But don’t worry: we already have a hashtag (#PrayForParis) and doubtless there’ll be another candlelight vigil of weepy tilty-headed wankers. Because as long as we all advertise how sad and sorrowful we are, who needs to do anything?
With his usual killer comedy timing, the “leader of the free world” told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning, America” this very morning that he’d “contained” ISIS and that they’re not “gaining strength”. A few hours later, a cell whose members claim to have been recruited by ISIS slaughtered over 150 people in the heart of Paris and succeeded in getting two suicide bombers and a third bomb to within a few yards of the French president.
Visiting the Bataclan, M Hollande declared that “nous allons mener le combat, il sera impitoyable”: We are going to wage a war that will be pitiless.
Does he mean it? Or is he just killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away.”
And I asked the same questions earlier in this thread that Steyn does:
Does he mean it?
He continues:
“As I wrote after the Copenhagen attacks in February:
I would like to ask Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt what’s their happy ending here? What’s their roadmap for fewer “acts of violence” in the years ahead? Or are they riding on a wing and a prayer that they can manage the situation and hold it down to what cynical British civil servants used to call during the Irish “Troubles” “an acceptable level of violence”? In Pakistan and Nigeria, the citizenry are expected to live with the reality that every so often Boko Haram will kick open the door of the schoolhouse and kidnap your daughters for sex-slavery or the Taliban will gun down your kids and behead their teacher in front of the class. And it’s all entirely “random”, as President Obama would say, so you just have to put up with it once in a while, and it’s tough if it’s your kid, but that’s just the way it is. If we’re being honest here, isn’t that all Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt are offering their citizens? Spasms of violence as a routine feature of life, but don’t worry, we’ll do our best to contain it – and you can help mitigate it by not going to “controversial” art events, or synagogues, or gay bars, or…
…or soccer matches, or concerts, or restaurants…”
Yes he asks the key question: what is the real endgame of the Obamas, Merkels, Hollande’s of the world?
Huh?
Just what is it are they looking for?
“So I say again: What’s the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn’t prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his “pitiless war” isn’t serious. And, if they’re still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel’s mad plan to reverse Germany’s demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization, then Europeans aren’t serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.
So screw the candlelight vigil.”
Yes. Screw the candle light vigil. If the French citizenry picked up a gun instead of a candle – that says something. If they stand there for a while with a lit candle, uttering platitudes and then going back to their “well we asked for it” position……..
that’s quite another.
Good link, Gregg. Thanks.
Steyn is often at his best when challenged by events.
Have they found a filmaker to throw in jail yet?
Meanwhile, I hear the first of our ‘refugees’ are entering America.
Maybe the guy behind the Starbucks red cup rant.
http://www.barstoolsports.com/chicago/so-it-turns-out-the-entire-starbucks-red-cup-controversy-was-all-started-by-a-single-youtube-troll-shocker/
The same guy who said Ft Hood was workplace violence and who reflexively blames the USA for problems in the Muslim community that go back 1500 years, wont label what is happening to Christians at the Hands of ISIS as victims of genocide in Iraq and Syria. We won’t know for sure until the State Department makes its pronouncement but this doesn’t look good,
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427044/christians-isis-genocide-obama-administration
The Democrat base would lose their sh** if we had to do something to prevent Christians from being exterminated. And I am always surprised by how close Democrat party positions are to anti-USA Muslim countries that believe in all kinds of crazy marxist conspiracy theories about our country.
no one important wrote:
“And if a crackdown is coming, it’s going to be on everyone who “provoked” this “terrible human tragedy” by failure to show sufficient enthusiasm for the Caliphate which is being established right before our eyes.”
Took less than 24 hours:
Our terrorism double standard: After
Paris, let’s stop blaming Muslims
and take a hard look at ourselves
Salon, by Ben Norton
“Any time there is an attack on civilians in the post-9/11 West, demagogues immediately blame it on Muslims. They frequently lack evidence, but depend on the blunt force of anti-Muslim bigotry to bolster their accusations.”
Screaming “Allahu Akbar” while gunning down defenseless people laying on the floor is all the evidence I require.
He continues:
“The far-right will continue to grow. Neo-fascism, the most dangerous development in the world today, will gain traction. People will radicalize.”
Ah that old right wing/Nazi lie again.
Ah well, if someone is coming after me with an AK-47 I can assure you I’m going to get extremely radical with that person.
Well, it looks as if at least two of the terrorists are the so-called refugees.
ISIS boasted, just a few weeks ago, that they were sending terrorists into Europe with the “refugee” flow. That they (and other terror groups) would do so was also predicted by darn near everyone who pays any attention whatsoever. Thus, this development will be called “unexpected”.
I don’t think the EU will take any meaningful actions due to this terror attack. They can’t; they’ve hung their hat on allowing welcoming the invaders with open arms. France may well keep its borders closed, but I foresee little chance that common sense will break out in Brussels or Berlin. I hope I’m wrong. The one bit of good news, though, is that the countries already resisting the invasion will have their positions strengthened. It’ll also boost the anti-invader movement in other places, such as Sweden (which has closed its borders), where citizens are already voicing their opinions via burning down the “refugee” settlement buildings the government is trying to build throughout the country.
I’ll also make a prediction about tonight’s CBS Dem debate; the candidates will not be asked how they stand on Obama’s policy of bringing these “refugees” to the USA in vast numbers. Nor will the issue of sanctuary cities (which give shelter to all illegals, islamists included) be raised.
Various let-wing numbskulls suggest we are exploiting the Paris attack for political reasons……
Glenn at Instapundit makes a very astute observation:
“Incidentally, doesn’t “exploiting” Paris have the presidential seal of the approval? After all, a month and a half ago, as a headline at Democrat house organ The Hill noted, Obama trumpeted that “Mass shootings are ‘something we should politicize.’” “
The left will exploit anything for political ends: as they say, ‘never let a crisis go to waste.. They just hate to see anyone else do the same.
They’re probably already using these attacks as justification for more ‘gun control’ in France.
Clearly, refugees from the Middle East should only be allowed into areas where the right to keep and bear arms is recognized.
I propose that they only be allowed into the steerage decks of leaky Liberty ships and sent right back to the docks of Latakia and Tartus.
Bet the Croatians aren’t regretting their votes.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/09/anti-mass-migration-conservatives-win-croatia-election/
Any chance this map explains voter sentiments?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Territorial_changes_of_the_Ottoman_Empire_1829.jpg
In an alternate universe ISIS has made a huge strategic blunder. In this universe, revealing themselves has no consequences.
ISIS is not the problem. Unwillingness to face the problem is.
Support gun control. The police should use both hands.
This is what I mean when I say that they can’t tell a Syrian from anyone else if they have no papers: people with NO papers get through:
A suicide bomber at the Stade de France on Friday was carrying a Syrian passport issued in Greece. (CNN)
He was among a group posing as refugees that arrived in Leros on October 3 with no papers. Under new emergency provisions, he was given an emergency passport.The fingerprints on this new passport match the fingerprints of the first terrorist who blew himself up.
Don’t worry. I’m sure it will turn out that he was a lovely refugee who was radicalized by European racism after he arrived.
What happened in Paris underscores the need for the French to stop pretending France is the Wild West and to tighten up their loose gun-control laws.
Oh, wait a minute. Never mind.