THE MASSACRE IN PARIS: A COMMENT

"The apparently well-planned attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, under police protection for years because of its repeated mocking of Islam, is one of the deadliest terrorist assaults on European soil in recent years and left 12 people dead. It followed months of warnings by the French government of the risk of terrorism from Islamist militants. Reuters reported on Wednesday night that the Paris prosecutor said a man linked to the Paris attack voluntarily presented himself to police in northeast France. Two gunmen entered the magazine’s offices on Wednesday morning, opening fire with automatic weapons. Eight journalists, including four of Charlie Hebdo’s best-known cartoonists, and two policemen were reported to be among the dead. The attackers escaped in a car, later found abandoned in the northeast of the capital. Paris prosecutor François Molins quoted a witness as saying at least one of the assailants shouted “God is Great” in Arabic during the attack. French police last night identified the suspects as Said and Cherif Kouachi, aged 32 and 34, and 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad".

Adam Thomson, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Claer Barrett, "Charlie Hebdo: Suspect surrenders to police in France". The Financial Times. 8 January 2015, in www.ft.com.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.... At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after..... As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood." That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

Enoch Powell, Speech to the Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968.

As the late, great British politician, Enoch Powell, noted almost fifty years ago, the 'supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils'. In the case of Wednesday's massacre in Paris, the evil done could have been and should have been prevented. By allowing almost unlimited immigration of a foreign, non-French, non-Christian, non-European horde, the authorities in Paris as unfortunately in much else in Europe, made Wednesday's tragedy something 'waiting to happen'. Given the evil ideology, following from and inheriting much of its content from what is in many ways (but admittedly not entirely) the in it's essence, the ne plus ultra of Islam, no one should be surprised in the least. A religion which in its origins almost uniquely views the employment of the sword, of violence with approval. In any sane and healthy polity, id. est., almost the entire European continent sixty or more years ago, the menace represented by the 'fifth column' which is Islam, would have been dealt with by massive expulsions: tutti quanti. Such measures representing au fond the only sure means of dealing with this cancerous poison in the European body politic. To mouth bien-pensant pleasantries that 'Islam is a peaceful religion', will get us nowhere indeed. With that in mind, one can only look with favour upon the German, anti-Islam, mass movement, 'PEGIDA'. One may only hope that Wednesday's events will be enough of a shock that the European body politic will 'wake up' and listen before, once again in the words of Powell, 'like the roman I seem to see 'the River Tiber with foaming much blood''. Coupled with a very serious re-appraisal of the West's position towards the Syrian conflict. Which without a doubt has become a crucial harbinger of Islamic fanaticism and extremism. Additionally, a severe clampdown is required on the funding by the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia in particular of Muslim charities and other organizations around the world.