Programming note: Tonight, Mark will be back here with another episode in our new Tales for Our Time for Mark Steyn Club members: The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie.
~It has been exactly a decade since the attack by Islamic terrorists at the Bataclan theatre in Paris. Which in turn presaged a terrible year of Bastille Day truck carnage and Catholic priest decapitations. A few months later, Mark visited the square in Molenbeek, where the Bataclan perp, the so-called "most wanted man in Europe", lived directly across from and in plain view of the Belgian police. Steyn took espresso and bakhlava at the family café in the square where the "most wanted man" took his own coffee, again in full view of the cops, most mornings.
Last night there was an official ceremony marking the tenth anniversary. It had its high points...
L'émouvante et puissante Marseillaise chantée par Axelle Saint-Cirel au coeur du jardin mémoriel du 13 novembre 2015.#13novembre pic.twitter.com/PftM6rmr2r
— France tv (@FranceTV) November 13, 2025
...and its lows:
« Mon Amour est plus fort que ta haine ne le sera jamais. »
La joie, les sourires et les larmes du Choeur du 13 pour l'émouvant final de la cérémonie. #13novembre pic.twitter.com/H1PNpSIQaG
— France tv (@FranceTV) November 13, 2025
The father of victim Nathalie Jardin (pictured) declined to attend:
oui vous avez bien deviné https://t.co/ygDkhEHUuK
— Patrick Jardin (@jardin599) November 13, 2025
Loosely translated:
Q: I imagine that you will be absent from the ceremony this day? Impossible to shake hands with hypocrites or cowards...
A: Yes, you guessed right.
It seems unlikely Mr Jardin - who later tweeted ma haine va vers les islamistes [my hatred is directed towards Islamists] - would have enjoyed all that "my love is stronger than your hatred will ever be" bollocks...
As always, it's important to be on the look-out for Islamophobia on such occasions:
It's the 13th day of Islamophobia Awareness Month
In Paris 10 years ago today Muslims massacred 130 people in the name of Islam
I hope you're all feeling aware. pic.twitter.com/psW1ldtgQn
— Basil the Great (@Basil_TGMD) November 13, 2025
What was not yet known ten years ago was the extent of the torture of the victims - some were disembowelled; some were beheaded; others were castrated, with their severed genitals in their mouths. All because they went to a rock concert. The good news is that there will be fewer risks of mid-concert castration in the new France, because there will be no music. The only thing that would change this course would be an end to mass immigration and a policy of mass deportations. Instead, the Islamisation of western Europe has accelerated. So ten years on all that can be officially permitted is the old soothing delusion that "our love is stronger than your hatred", even though it's hard to sing with your genitals in your gullet. Here is Mark's immediate reaction to the events of that day:
As I write, Paris is under curfew for the first time since the German occupation, and the death toll from the multiple attacks stands at 158, the vast majority of them slaughtered during a concert at the Bataclan theatre, a delightful bit of 19th century Chinoiserie on the boulevard Voltaire. The last time I was there, if memory serves, was to see Julie Pietri. I'm so bloody sick of these savages shooting and bombing and killing and blowing up everything I like - whether it's the small Quebec town where my little girl's favorite fondue restaurant is or my favorite hotel in Amman or the brave freespeecher who hosted me in Copenhagen ...or a music hall where I liked to go to hear a little jazz and pop and get away from the cares of the world for a couple of hours. But look at the photographs from Paris: there's nowhere to get away from it; the barbarians who yell "Allahu Akbar!" are there waiting for you ...when you go to a soccer match, you go to a concert, you go for a drink on a Friday night. They're there on the train... at the magazine office... in the Kosher supermarket... at the museum in Brussels... outside the barracks in Woolwich...
Twenty-four hours ago, I said on the radio apropos the latest campus "safe space" nonsense:
This is what we're going to be talking about when the mullahs nuke us.
Almost. When the Allahu Akbar boys opened fire, Paris was talking about the climate-change conference due to start later this month, when the world's leaders will fly in to "solve" a "problem" that doesn't exist rather than to address the one that does. But don't worry: we already have a hashtag (#PrayForParis) and doubtless there'll be another candlelight vigil of weepy tilty-headed wankers. Because as long as we all advertise how sad and sorrowful we are, who needs to do anything?
With his usual killer comedy timing, the "leader of the free world" told George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning, America" this very morning that he'd "contained" ISIS and that they're not "gaining strength". A few hours later, a cell whose members claim to have been recruited by ISIS slaughtered over 150 people in the heart of Paris and succeeded in getting two suicide bombers and a third bomb to within a few yards of the French president.
Visiting the Bataclan, M Hollande declared that "nous allons mener le combat, il sera impitoyable": We are going to wage a war that will be pitiless.
Does he mean it? Or is he just killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away.
Among his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight's events as "an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share".
But that's not true, is it? He's right that it's an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world - an attack on one portion of "humanity" by those who claim to speak for another portion of "humanity". And these are not "universal values" but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta "universal" when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those "universal values" are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.
And then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people don't want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live - modern, pluralist, western societies and those "universal values" of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy who's been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.
And all Chancellor Merkel and the EU want to do is make that large comfort zone even larger by letting millions more "Syrian" "refugees" walk into the Continent and settle wherever they want. As I wrote after the Copenhagen attacks in February:
I would like to ask Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt what's their happy ending here? What's their roadmap for fewer "acts of violence" in the years ahead? Or are they riding on a wing and a prayer that they can manage the situation and hold it down to what cynical British civil servants used to call during the Irish "Troubles" "an acceptable level of violence"? In Pakistan and Nigeria, the citizenry are expected to live with the reality that every so often Boko Haram will kick open the door of the schoolhouse and kidnap your daughters for sex-slavery or the Taliban will gun down your kids and behead their teacher in front of the class. And it's all entirely "random", as President Obama would say, so you just have to put up with it once in a while, and it's tough if it's your kid, but that's just the way it is. If we're being honest here, isn't that all Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt are offering their citizens? Spasms of violence as a routine feature of life, but don't worry, we'll do our best to contain it - and you can help mitigate it by not going to "controversial" art events, or synagogues, or gay bars, or...
...or soccer matches, or concerts, or restaurants...
To repeat what I said a few days ago, I'm Islamed out. I'm tired of Islam 24/7, at Colorado colleges, Marseilles synagogues, Sydney coffee shops, day after day after day. The west cannot win this thing with a schizophrenic strategy of targeting things and people but not targeting the ideology, of intervening ineffectually overseas and not intervening at all when it comes to the remorseless Islamization and self-segregation of large segments of their own countries.
So I say again: What's the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn't prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his "pitiless war" isn't serious. And, if they're still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel's mad plan to reverse Germany's demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization, then Europeans aren't serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.
So screw the candlelight vigil.
~from Steyn on Europe, November 13th 2015
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