(JNi.media) Jewish American journalist Pamela Druckerman, who lives in Paris with her husband and three children, described her Friday night experience in a tense and honest op-ed story titled “In Paris, a Night Disrupted by Terror.” Druckerman was at a dinner party when the attacks began (they had boar) and her journalist husband was at the Stade de France, where the national French and German soccer teams were playing a friendly match of soccer with President Hollande in the stands. Druckerman’s description of the large and small—and petty—anxieties of a group of “bourgeois bohemians” as their world was turning over in front of their faces was powerfully reminiscent of New York City’s 9/11, and of countless, similar terrifying scenes in burning cities in our culture, including three different Sacking of Rome dates, the fall of Constantinople and the end of Krypton. All those terrifying occasions ended with the ushering in of new eras, of the loss of innocence and, often, much more violence.
“The symmetry could not be more jarring,” Liz Alderman and Jim Yardley reported, also in the Times. “A Parisian year that began with the bloodshed and chaos of the terrorist attacks at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and later at a Jewish grocery now had an even deadlier coda.”
TheLocal.fr wrote on Saturday: “Friday’s carnage perhaps gave us all an insight into what it must have been like for the Jewish community in Paris, who lost four of their members in the January terror attacks just because they were in the wrong supermarket at the wrong time of day and – in the eyes of gunman Amedy Coulibaly – they were the wrong people. The victims of the Kosher store attack were like those Parisian victims on Friday night, simply killed for being who they are.”
This is not the time for “I told you so” articles, when one of the most beautiful cities on Earth is groaning in pain. Still, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been going blue in the face, warning the Europeans that the Islamists may target Israel and Jews first, but they’d be coming for everyone else in short order. This should be a sobering realization for the people who just signed a contract with the Islamic Republic which, today, continues to engage in developing long range ballistic missiles, in anticipation of the day when they can attach atomic devices to those things.
All these acts of terror took place on President Francois Hollande’s watch. At this point it’s highly doubtful the French voters see him as the leader who would pull them out of their misery and avenge their losses. He sounded very aggressive Saturday, much like President GW Bush on the day after New York City had been hit, with one huge difference — while Bush could claim ignorance of the true scope of Islamist hate for the West, Hollande failed to prepare for this attack following a full fourteen years of nothing but hate attacks, many of them on French soil.
The President said ISIS was responsible for the attacks—which they had duly confirmed. “It’s an act of war, committed by a terrorist army [ISIS], an army of Jihadists, against France.” Earlier, still on Friday, Hollande vowed: “We will lead the fight and we will be ruthless, and we had to be here among the people who were subject to these atrocities because when the terrorists are capable of doing such acts they must know that they will face a France very determined — a France united.”
Yes, but quite possibly united under a different president. According to an Institut Français d’Opinion Publique (IFOP) poll last week, should former prime minister (under Jacques Chirac) Alain Juppé run for president, he would be ahead of the leader of the National Front Marine Le Pen by 2 points, and by 11 points ahead of the Socialist Hollande.