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Paris Update or, “Who Should I Believe? You or My Lying Eyes?”
This post begins and ends with an apology for being guilty of what’s driving me nuts. The other day I wrote what turned out to be a very widely-circulated post in response to a headline I saw on the Drudge Report: “Every Jew I Know Has Left Paris,” which linked to a Daily Mail article attributing the quote to Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Now, who should have known better than to trust a sensational headline? Who should have thought, “Drudge and The Daily Mail may not have quoted Mr. Pollard properly? Perhaps I should check to be sure?”
Yep, that would be me.
Stephen Pollard contacted me to let me know that this was not precisely what he said. You may read his own words in the Telegraph. They were “Anecdotally, every French Jew I know has either already left or is working out how to leave.” I agree that the words on Drudge are a sensationalized version of this, and not an accurate quote.
But I’m not sure that the words were so so far from his point as to suggest I missed it, so my response still stands. However, I apologize to Mr. Pollard for failing to treat with proper suspicion the things I see in the news, and ensure to my own satisfaction that the quote was entirely accurate. I’ve asked him to join us here on Ricochet to discuss his column — if ever he’d like to join a very civil conversation among friends — and hope that he’ll agree; I believe he’d find this a welcoming place.
Which brings me to my next point:
What the Hell? Why is every journalist in the world getting everything wrong? Where are all these idiot ideas about what’s going on in Paris coming from?
Which I believe I just answered.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of journalists are spreading ideas about France that are simply not true. They’re now in wide circulation in America, widely believed, and so wildly wrong that I don’t understand how anyone could believe them. Unless the world were, say, full of sensationalist and irresponsible journalists who can’t get their facts straight or properly confirm a quote. Which I guess is a possibility.
But some of these things are really untrue, and also important to understand. And I’m sure that they’re true because I’ve seen them. I do get a bit exercised when people keep insisting to me that my own eyes are lying because they know for a fact what they do because they read it on The Drudge Report.
Untruth 1: Muslim Silence
If another person tells me that “No Muslims are speaking out against this,” I will personally insert the entire Grand Mosquée de Paris in his orifices. How many more Jews do French Muslims have to save from terrorists — as one did at that Kosher deli (and fifteen of them, at that) — before people stop slandering them this way? Was the death of a cop who happened to be a Muslim and died trying to protect the victims of these animals not enough of a statement?
Is this enough? Or this? How about this:
In case you don’t understand, he is describing them as Satans. He is denouncing them as barbarians, criminals; he is saying we cannot stop weeping; he is saying they attacked liberty and the people who protect us; he is saying there can be no excuse, no qualification; that it is a disaster; they have outraged everything we treasure … and then he had to stop speaking, because he couldn’t keep from crying in public.
What more do you want? Have the people who keep saying Muslims refuse to denounce terrorism no decency? And why — in the first place — should every Muslim in the world be repeatedly insulted by the demand that they say they oppose murder? As far as I’m concerned, unless someone is either a murderer or someone who has clearly stated that he approves of murder, he or she is entitled to the presumption that he or she is opposed to it. Particularly if he or she is a member of a community that has recently been the object of it, not merely its subject.
Does France have a lot of home-grown, Islamist filth who murder or, at least, approve of murder? Indeed it does. I saw that with my own eyes folks, and in a particularly unpleasant way, so don’t don’t tell me it’s not true.
Does it also have many more Muslims who are appalled by this, outraged, and speaking up as loudly as they know how, to the point of screaming and wailing? To the point that it breaks my heart for them? It does: I saw thousands of them yesterday, too, perhaps tens of thousands. Do not tell my my eyes are lying. They are French citizens! They were born here. They have nowhere else to go.
And do not tell me they do. Not until you have personally spoken to one of them. One who has told you why she was born here. And I assure you, once you have, you will understand why he or she cannot go back. Does “Every one of my classmates was massacred by the Muslim Brotherhood in Algeria and I was the only one who survived, and only because my father had a shotgun” sound like a good enough reason? Do you want to look that woman in the face and say, “You have somewhere else to go to?” Well do it, if you want, but not in front of me.
Untruth 2: French Police Are Unarmed
Where did this idea come from? I’ve just seen this too many times and I can’t figure out why people believe it. What do people think those things on their hips are? Some kind of weird Gallic cellphone?
And I keep hearing this from people who laugh at journalists who confuse earplugs with bullets, too! If you can’t figure out that what the French police are carrying are weapons — and some very heavy firepower at that — I don’t think you’re in a position to laugh.
Now, at some point — because I know Ricochet is one of the few places where people will be interested in this — I will provide very full details of the kinds of weapons with which the French security forces are armed, and I know that many people here will appreciate that a SigPro 2022 is a perfectly reasonable choice for a standard service weapon. It’s not a cellphone and its magazine doesn’t hold earplugs. And it’s not the only kind of weapon they carry.
(Sidebar for those many who will be interested: Chamber: 9x19mm Para, .357SIG, .40 S&W; Weight with empty magazine: 760 g (9mm); 790 g (.40 & .357); Length: 187 mm; Barrel length: 99 mm; Capacity: 15 (9mm) or 12 (.40) rounds. Fitted with typical SIG frame-mounted decocker lever; slightly different from earlier SIGs in that there’s no separate disassembly lever on the frame and the slide release lever looks weird. Comes equipped, if you like, with a detachable silencer. Fixed sights dovetailed into the slide.)
So believe me, next person who tells me that French police are unarmed is… well, let’s just say I’m in no mood to defend to the death your right to say it, even with my own firearm.
Untruth 3: The French Themselves Are Unarmed
Which brings me to the next “I can’t believe people believe this” point. Why do people keep telling me that French citizens aren’t allowed to arm themselves? Of course they can. Limit of 1,000 rounds per weapon, but frankly, if you need more than that, you’ve got an aim problem, not a gun-control law problem. You can have up to 12 weapons. I don’t know how many you can handle at once — some of you may be unusually talented — but I suspect even the best of us wouldn’t use that many at once, and the best of sure wouldn’t have to.
Now, it is true that to acquire the amount of firepower I would ideally have in my apartment would put me at greater risk of dying of frustration with the amount of paperwork I’d have to fill out than of dying at the hands of a terrorist. But I suppose I don’t really need my own personal force de frappe, and probably wouldn’t even be able to acquire that all that easily even in the US. Though I suspect that if I filled out all the correct forms at my local préfecture, documented by several years’ worth of gas and electric bills, and submitted in triplicate, I could get even that.
Or I could do it the easy way: Believe me, if those bozos could get that many AKs in their hands despite being — and looking like — exactly the people who shouldn’t have them, I could get ten times as many in my apartment by tonight. It wouldn’t be my weapon of choice, for reasons those who can tell a bullet from an earplug will understand, so I’d probably go for something a bit more to my taste. But believe me, getting them wouldn’t be a problem. I mean: technically, it’s illegal to smoke weed in Paris. It sure doesn’t mean no one gets stoned.
Beyond that, for obvious reasons, I won’t further advertise all the details of my home protection strategy. But let’s put it this way: if I say, “I’m going to kill the next person who tells me I’m unable to arm myself in Paris,” you might consider taking my ability to do that literally.
Untruth 4: Neither The French Government Nor The French Has Shown Support for Jews
Where did you hear that one? When yesterday the President of the Republic said he’d call in the military to protect every synagogue, school, and kosher hot dog stand in France, even this Jew thought he was going overboard, martial law not being to my taste. Been there, done that. An enhanced police presence will be fine. As will better police training. As will listening to what your intelligence services are saying to you.
“But where are the signs saying Je suis Juif?” I hear. I throw up my hands at this point. See these? They’re not some elaborate photoshop conspiracy (and who would be behind that? I mean, the usual objects of conspiracy-theories are busy with more important things these days, I promise you.) I saw all of them yesterday with my own eyes.
Not my eyes lying. It’s your media, I’m afraid. So whoever is telling you that, ditch them.
And that’s all I’ve got to say for now.
Once again, my apologies to Stephen Pollard. Very careless of me, and I hope you’ll accept my apology as sincere. I hate it when jounalists do these things. It makes the world a vastly worse place. No one needs more arrant nonsense and sensationalism at a time like this. I’m sorry I contributed to the problem.
However, if you’d like to come to France and meet some Jews who aren’t leaving, I’d be happy to introduce you to them. I saw a lot of them yesterday. A lot of them feel just the way I do. Over our dead bodies. Literally.
But more likely: over yours, you terrorist scum. And yes, we do know how.
Image Credit: Tutti Frutti / Shutterstock.com
Published in General
I will not challenge Claire’s personal observations. But I am more concerned by the big picture.
If I have to choose between Claire Berlinski and Mark Steyn as my predictor, I’ll go with Steyn every time.
Freedom of expression is incompatible with Islam.
I would not. I don’t give a damn for the complexities of Islam. What I care about are the Muslims who kill in the name in Islam.
I imagine that Zoroastrianism is somewhat complex. And I don’t give a damn for any of it. Who cares? Do you care? I don’t. There is no world-wide Zoroastrian-terrorism threat. So I don’t care about them. If Muslims would stop murdering people then I would care at all.
On the same day of the Paris murders there were two attacks in Egypt. In one, a police officer was blown away attempting to detonate a bomb. (Graphic images available.) This had nothing to do with cartoons. The earlier killing of Pakistani school children had nothing to do with cartoons. Most of these killings have nothing to do with cartoons.
One does not attempt to suppress speech for its own sake. One suppresses speech to advance some other goal. Usually dominance.
There are several players in the middle east who wouldn’t mind dominating. Is religion intertwined in all this? Yes. Is suppression of speech? Yes. But these things are just dry wood. They aren’t the spark.
Exactly. Nobody is. Especially not our President. And this is why we’re doomed.
Casey, you seem to want to complexity things that really seem very simple to me.
ALL of the Radical Islamic violence can be described as destructive, even in favor of death.
There is nothing all that complex here: killers must be opposed at every step, in every possible way, in order to save civilization.
Free speech is like the famous “hug a Jew” sketch: a quick and easy way to tell the difference.
I’ll grant you that if you’re talking about hypothetical murder in general. But things change when it gets specific.
If a group of collared, robed men wearing huge gold crosses went around the Holy Land wantonly killing Muslims, blabbing on about a New Crusade, and claiming to do these things on the orders of the Holy Father Pope Urban II, Vicar of Christ, in fulfillment of Christ’s commandments in the Bible, and yelling “Jesus saves!” every time they pulled the trigger, wouldn’t you want to hear some bishops and other Catholics speak out against it, disown and repudiate it? And if they didn’t, shouldn’t we criticize them for their silence?
And so, I’m glad to see the multiple examples you have posted of Muslims condemning the attacks. It doesn’t get enough play in the Western media.
Your litmus test is the perfect test to test what you’re testing.
This is so much bigger. I’m sure in 1754 the British thought the world looked pretty simple, too. And then…
The British were right. They did not understand India or Africa – but they made the former functional, and, had they been in Africa longer, they might have saved it as well.
If we start to hedge on Western Civilization being better than a death cult, then we are truly lost. They want us dead. There is no room for nuance here.
Freedom to offend and criticize is one thing. Freedom to explicitly encourage malicious violence and undisguised hatred is another.
In a civilized nation, nobody can cheer for mass murder and genocide without getting shouted down, at least.
FYI: The full essay does not appear to be on the current michael crichton website, but I found it at archive.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070611005442/http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote03.html
This still doesn’t address the question necessarily of why there are no-go zones for police… in PARIS. Not some bass-ackwards dung-hill in Waziristan. Paris.
The tolerance of the French authorities for this is simply killing them.
Ignorance is preferable to the lazy (and inaccurate) characterizations so widely and easily spread and so ably knocked down by Ms. Berlinski here.
I wish (perhaps foolishly) that people could stop trying to see everything through the lens of our American political debates and resist the desire to constantly editorialize over something one knows so little about. But is has been framed thus: the progressives think of social democratic Europe as some sort of postmodern paradise; conservatives, I guess, see it rather the same way but rather hate that fact. Details, or facts as some might call them, get in the way.
There are key–rather large–differences between the United States and the continent (and within it; yes, I’m talking to you EU Commission) that are of great importance. But stepping back through the vastness of the world and human history, we share so much more than we do not. It is still Western Civilization, and those of us who wish to preserve it should take better care to avoid tarring and feathering other cultures with carelessness. This isn’t “freedom fries;” it’s the real deal.
Indeed, even I believe there is a point when speech stops being mere expression and becomes an explicit order or incitement, and that it can be difficult to pinpoint where speech crosses a line, except in hindsight.
The most common example is the way radio was used to direct violence during the Rwandan genocide.
As far as I know, they never broadcast any single “you are ordered to go out and kill Tutsis” statement, but the accumulative statements dehumanizing Tutsis (referring to them as “cockroaches” and such) and endorsing their elimination surely amounted to the same thing.
I can imagine a theoretical debate at the time, before the genocide began, asking “should it be illegal to call people “cockroaches” on the radio, or is that simply free speech?
Now, of course, Rwanda was a very extreme case, and it’s not like there was a diversity of private radio ownership in Rwanda. In a truly free radio market, there would have been other radio stations able to denounce the inciters.
They were?
They tangled with the French (again) causing a chain of events that essentially led to a world war. 15 years later the empire cracked.
If I told you in 1754 that the British empire was on the ropes you would’ve told me I was nuts. Like you are now.
Now I’m not predicting that America is on the ropes. Only that this could get uglier than it should.
It was not on the ropes, of course, in 1754. The empire did not really give up until the national will was broken in the World Wars.
Maj,
This is a very fundamental issue. There can be no such zones in a sovereign country or it is not sovereign. Islamists have managed to obtain this absurd status in many countries.
Absolutely Unacceptable.
Regards,
Jim
Claire,
Strawmen.
You still haven’t addressed the fact that the nihilistic mentality exemplified by the Charlie Hebdo editors is not a fighting faith -it cannot stand up to militant Islam- but it is the ideology of the French elites. The attitude of Charlie Hebdo is not the sign of a healthy society, but of a decadent one. And Islam does not even need the militants to eventually turn Notre Dame and the Louvre into mosques by popular acclaim; it needs only time. One of the Leftist groups’ more prominent banners attacked “all forms of fascism” because they know that the blood-and-soil types are rapidly growing. The 1962 coup failed, but they weren’t fighting for the very existence of France. And if every Muslim you and I know hate the jihadis and have horror-stories to tell, so what? All that means is that they were unable to fight them. If they cannot leave, that doesn’t say where they will stand. Muslims are already dictating terms (the banlieues). How large a minority would it take to dictate larger terms?
And if you won’t leave, then get ready to duck. Because if things don’t change radically you will find yourself in the middle of a three-sided civil war, and none of the parties particularly fond of the Jews.
Casey,
This is my very point. If we accept that we are at war with literal Jihadist Islam because they have declared war on us, then it is easy enough to see that neither your wife nor her friends and acquaintances are Jihadists. If this is so not only are they not a threat but they are part of the threatened. The Jihadists will surely kill them too. We must make this distinction boldly and offer all aid and assistance that we can. They are our natural allies and we are theirs.
If we recognize the situation for what it is, we will rise to the occasion. The least we can do is say a prayer for them. I’ll try to do that much.
Regards,
Jim
There is something I don’t understand regarding Untruth # 2. It has been reported that the police officer seen begging for his life on the sidewalk before being executed did not have a firearm. Do all French Police have guns, or just some?
If the ever-escalating proxy war for regional dominance was areligious and cartoonist friendly, would everyone feel better about it?
The No-Go zones are the single most important part of this story. Quite simply, they allow bad people free reign to continue doing bad things. Like the mafia, the people first and most continually hurt and exploited by the mob are the locals- be they poor Italian or Irish immigrants on the lower east side, or what happens in Paris today. Imagine if the government’s response back in the day was to say “well, the mafia is part of Italian culture, so we’re not going to enforce US law.” Yet this seems precisely the position the French government has taken, (and the US seems willing to flirt with). Religious tolerance works because it exists within the context of a civil society. Allowing communities to wall themselves off is unacceptable.
If you want moderate Muslims the ability to gain stature in the community, to push back against the crazies, don’t enable their captors by “respecting” the wishes of said crazies and refuse to send police into their neighborhood. Do the opposite. Flood the zone.
I can’t definitively answer this question, but I recommend flipping through this Flickr search I ran for the piece. At the very least, it is not difficult to find pictures of ordinary police nationale officers, apparently going about their everyday business, while armed with sidearms. Heck, I’d say it’s easier to find pictures of armed police nationale officers carrying handguns than not.
The top image in this search was, I believe, the second hit I came across on my Shutterstock search.
I don’t recall the street, but it was not a main road.
My favorite kosher restaurant closed. So did the next. Did you know there used to be a website “100 best kosher restaurants in Paris”? I reckon there are no longer so many.
I’ll be in town for the Paris Air Show; if you are there then, it’d be fun to have dinner, and it is on me. PM me!
Jean Reno, supporting French actor of Ronin, would probably be embarrassed to be seen on screen without his firearm. But then, he didn’t play a typical gendarme. He is a reassuring presence whenever he appears on screen. He’s the last character anyone would want to see killed in a thriller.
Most Muslims are not terrorists,
But most terrorists are Muslims.
OK. Most women are not prostitutes. But most prostitutes are women. Most men aren’t car thieves, but most car thieves are men.
Has any information about the four victims in the Paris kosher grocery story been published in the media; like sex, age, etc? I’ve looked in a number of places and all I see are references to the terrorist or the stock boy who helped people in the store to hide.
Great post! It is such a delight to hear someone else say what I think about the media. The majority of reporters and journalists seem to be so ill-educated and ignorant of everything that I would think they need to know to do their job. The reports are so shallow, lacking in factual background, ignorant, and, as you say so well, totally WRONG! Sickening!
Looking up the curriculum of universities teaching future journalists is no help. What seems to be wrong is in the ideological framework in which the subjects are taught.
I’ve stopped reading newspapers, except for the National Post, Canada. I get the rest of my news from the internet, and that I filter, looking at from whence it comes.
http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Four-Jewish-victims-of-kosher-deli-siege-named-387299