A bitter irony

Back in November of 2011, I collated a list of various Westerners who up to that point had been threatened with death by Muslims, or who reasonably feared reprisal by the fanatics of Islam, or who had been killed by same.  The essay -- "Muslims, Free Speech and Death Threats" -- figures on my front page under my blogroll.  I got most of the list from the blogger Quoting Islam (featured on said blogroll), supplementing it here and there.

There was on that list at least one example of a victim (or, rather, victims) of Muslims who at the time bravely defied them.  The bitter irony of it is revealed when I mention who that was.  In 2011, they were so unfamiliar to me, I didn't even note them by name.  Here was my entry:

French newspaper (after being firebombed for printing a cartoon of Muhammad, the next day the paper prints that cartoon again, and more! Bravo!)

The "French newspaper", I remind the reader now with a grim aftertaste in my mouth, was Charlie Hebdo.  At the time, I echoed the blogger Quoting Islam in cheering them on for their bravery at republishing the Mohammed cartoons despite the firebombing of their publishing house in Paris. This was approximately four years before a commando unit of Mohammedans raided that same publishing house.  As the Left-leaning BBC (not a source to exaggerate the jihad threat) put it at the time, in early January of 2015:

France is emerging from one of its worst security crises in decades after three days of attacks by gunmen brought bloodshed to the capital Paris and its surrounding areas. It began with a massacre at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday 7 January and ended with a huge police operation and two sieges two days later.

That story was fresh after the atrocity;  in the immediate aftermath, and over ensuing weeks, the French people collectively considered that attack "our 911". An editorial written soon after, by an American in Paris (who considers France his home away from home) details well the full calamity of the horrific event.  I quote in part from that editorial:

They [the Muslims] killed 11 people in the building as well as a policeman lying on a sidewalk nearby. Eleven others were wounded in the deadliest terror attack in France since 28 people were killed in a 1961 train bombing by a paramilitary group opposed to Algerian independence during the Algerian War.

And he goes on to mention that the carnage continued as a nation-wide manhunt was on for the Muslim perpetrators:

The intersection in Montrouge where a policewoman was killed the next day by co-conspirator Amedy Coulibaly and the kosher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes where Coulibaly murdered an additional four people a day after that...

The editorial, long and detailed, should disabuse all but the most obtusely obstinate of their complacency regarding the systemic and metastasizing threat of Islamic terrorism.

And that was before the worse attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris nearly a year later in November of 2015 (including attacks on two restaurants and an attempted suicide bombing by two Muslims of the sports stadium where the President of France, Hollande, was in attendance).

That was when I "snapped".

Then, after that, came the horrendous, monstrously ghoulish mass-murder, by truck and gunfire, of French men, women and children by a Muslim in Nice, France; and this isn't even counting dozens of other attacks in France before (such as, to pluck from a fez one example of many, the killings by Mohamed Merah in the south of France, who in 2012 assassinated three French paratroopers of North African background and then went on a razzia on a Jewish school, murdering a rabbi, his two young sons and an 8-year-old girl) and after, along with scores of attempted plots to mass-murder French people and destroy property.)

And what of the "bravery" of the staff at Charlie Hebdo?

Jihad massacres work: Charlie Hebdo not only surrenders, but switches sides

Journalist quits Charlie Hebdo because it now bows to jihadis’ demand: “Mohammed is no longer depicted”

Charlie Hebdo surrenders, will no longer draw Muhammad