The Stench of Appeasement

Last Saturday morning, the citizens of Paris awoke, amidst the smells of croissants and coffee, to the stench of death wafting through the air. The night before seven deluded young men, armed with the insane reasoning commonly held by murderous psychopaths and no doubt harboring visions of virgins eagerly awaiting their arrival in paradise, attacked six sites across the city, killing themselves and 129 people, and injuring hundreds more.

The men, now known to be Islamists associated with the death cult called Islamic State or ISIS, chose a football stadium, a café and bar, a restaurant, the Boulevard Voltaire, and the Bataclan Theater to proclaim their righteous message. Which one can only presume is about being opposed to Friday night limes.

According to witnesses, at the Bataclan Theater where concertgoers had gathered to hear an American heavy metal band, three men with Ak47’s shouting, “God is the greatest” opened fire on the crowd. And it was at the Bataclan that the Islamists took particular pleasure in doing God’s work.

Acceding to Sharia Law, music is haram or sinful. And perhaps considering heavy metal music lovers in wheelchairs to be especially haram, the Islamists specifically targeted those in the disabled section; gunning down as many people as possible in cold blood, who couldn’t run away. In the end, 89 people died at the Bataclan Theater, the deadliest site of all the attacks.

There was however, another stench in the air as well; one emanating from the sewers of social media which had begun to spread earlier in the night, even as the lifeless bodies drenched in blood lay warm on the Bataclan’s floor. It was, as former British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher once famously described it - the stench of appeasement.

This stench comprised of a number of repugnant odors. Firstly, there were the morons who felt that the largest attack on French soil since WW2 somehow didn’t warrant the amount of media attention France was getting. For these people the Paris attacks were not a stark demonstration of the brutality of ISIS, rather it was an excuse to give a lecture about the supposed bias of the media.

After all, why was there no coverage of the bombings in Beirut, or the blowing up of a Russian jetliner the weeks before? Of course there was lots of news coverage of these events, but for morons, if it didn’t happen on Facebook, it didn’t happen at all. ‘All Facebook profiles matter’ they appeared to chant.

Then of course there were the racists, who felt that if you displayed empathy for murdered French people (i.e. white people) you were condoning slavery and colonialism. If you changed your profile picture to the French Tricolour, you may as well have donned a white hood and ridden off on a lynching spree. So eager were these people to prove how 'racist' the media were, that a 7 month old story of a terrorist attack in Kenya began trending with people implying it had just happened and was being ignored. Of course, a person would only fall for that if they weren’t following the news from Kenya.

But neither the nauseating smell of the morons nor the racists could match the complete rank odor of the conspiracy theorists. Social media was inundated with nut-jobs promoting the ridiculously idiotic idea that ISIS was a product of the Israelis, or the CIA or aliens or maybe all. The idea that Islamism might have something to do with Islam is of course too far-fetched.

Pointing out idiocy on social media is grasping at low hanging fruit. But the rhetoric of these idiots helps to feed a wider narrative of those who serve as apologists for terrorism.

For apologists, Islamists are never a product of Islam. Sure Islam and Islamism might both share the same holy text that  promote ideas of Jihad, Martyrdom and Sharia law, and sure Islamists might say they are  Muslims motivated by Islam, but that’s just a coincidence. If people would just get off their Islamophobic horse about potentially being gunned down while going to a concert, they might see that it’s all America’s fault. Because it just is, you Islamophobe!  

Intellectuals here have naturally had little to say about the Paris attacks. They made their feelings clear back in January, when they blamed the staff at Charlie Hebdo for their own murder. Forget murderous Jihad, those cartoonists should not have been drawing cartoons. And so the stench of appeasement persists.

Seven years ago a group of hooded men threatened the owners of the Bataclan, because they hosted “pro-Israeli events.” “Next time we won’t be here to talk,” they said. No doubt they will be back somewhere yet again. And so will their apologists.