In an area specially set aside for wheelchair users
Here’s a disgusting new detail, from the Telegraph:
The Foriegn Office has confirmed that a British man was among those who died in the attack on the Bataclan venue.
Nick Alexander, 36, from London, was killed at the venue. He was shot in front of Helen Wilson, an American expat who herself was wounded in both legs.
In a statement his family said he was “everyone’s best friend” and died “doing the job he loved”.
“It is with huge sorrow that we can confirm that our beloved Nick lost his life at the Bataclan last night,” the statement said.
“Nick was not just our brother, son and uncle, he was everyone’s best friend – generous, funny and fiercely loyal.
“Nick died doing the job he loved and we take great comfort in knowing how much he was cherished by his friends around the world. Thank you for your thoughts and respect for our family at this difficult time. Peace and light.”
Miss Wilson, speaking from her hospital bed, told The Telegraph how she had tried to keep him alive as they lay on the ground at the Bataclan concert hall.
She tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and held him in her arms as he struggled for his life.
Miss Wilson, 49, originally from New Orleans, also told how she witnessed the gunmen deliberately targeting concert-goers in wheelchairs. The gunmen hunted down disabled people who were sat in an area specially set aside for wheelchair users.
They call their god “merciful.”
I wonder if their religious beliefs include the twisted idea that illness or injury is a sign of divine disfavor. Or did they just want to target the most vulnerable?
Disgusting either way.
There has always been a small sub-group of (mostly) men who take pleasure in violence, and particularly against those who are unable to fight back. After the first world war, the British government solved both the problem they had with trying to rehabilitate into civilian life these now highly-trained-as-soldiers violent psychopaths, and the problem they had with the rebellious Irish.
They formed the Black and Tans.
Last century, there were a series of terrorist cults and ’causes’ all over Africa, India, Europe… so many, indeed, that I have trouble keeping them straight in my mind*.
The current generation of violent psychopaths are evidently finding a home in Islamist organisations.
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*Fortunately, I don’t have to. Wikipedia has this.
Disgusting, sure. Maybe the apex of it, in all of this, and that, that’s saying something. But then, if you’re already standing there, with a rifle, shooting into a crowd of unarmed, terrified, screaming people, who can only run away and are as likely to hurt each other in their panic as escape, I don’t imagine it’s much more of a leap to shoot at someone who can’t even run.
And I feel a little sick even having had to imagine that. This is no exaggeration.
I guess you have to think about the dehumanization that has preceded this. Read that rhetoric about how this is a city of the monstrous and the damned. A satanic other. And so they can imagine themselves shooting alien horrors, things that turned evil and rebellious against their divine and righteous authority and which must therefore be stopped. We see people in wheelchairs, young people at a concert who will die and be mourned in aching agony for months and years and decades. They see alien warthogs.
The lesson in this? I say: don’t become that. Don’t, for all that it’s the natural and perfectly understandable rage of the moment, start seeing them that way. Those fucking idiots with guns and suicide vests are just pawns in this, too, drawn in and poisoned by alienation and idiot delusions of heavenly victories and ever more fantastic, phantasmagoric rhetoric, moonbeams and rainbows and flying horses. They don’t get virgins after the spree killings they attempt to dignify as political statements. They die and rot. And to the extent they ever even get their earthly kingdom, so far as they have, so far as they ever will, for most of them, it will be hell on earth. Those ugly old closed hierarchies generally were, for almost everyone, mostly even when you are damned lucky at where you land in the pyramid.
The world is screaming for blood, now, naturally enough, but I think if you want to really answer this thing right, you mourn, you square your shoulders, and you go on–you go right on trying to make a world people want to live in. Sympathy for all who have been injured, all who will miss the dead, all who were terrified, all who will wake up in the middle of the night, shaking, for years. But no again to all this panicked clampdown on security and let’s become ever more police states, because some ugly old should-be dead letter philosophies have found this dangerous traction in war and chaos and yawning inequities. You want to frustrate the fucking assholes cheering this on, that’s how you do so. You say: right. So they can kill. We can live.
Three of those who were severely wounded have died today.
That the killers would go after people in wheelchairs is disgusting.
QFT
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France has dropped 20 bombs on Raqqa in retaliation.
Daesh used exactly the same tactics in Beirut on Thursday: suicide bombers with guns shot up a number of public venues. 43 people were killed and 200 injured. It beggars belief they can find so many people to carry out acts like this.