An Islamic terrorist slaughtered four French police officers in the heart of France’s anti-terrorism headquarters last week, using nothing but a foot-long knife.
The seriousness and implications are hard to overstate, analysts said.
The killer, who had a top-secret clearance, literally infiltrated the very French unit charged with tracking Islamist terrorists in France.
Somehow, he managed to fatally slit four officials’ throats, along with slashing and wounding several more, before finally being stopped 7 minutes into the massacre.
It all went down in the intelligence section at the Paris Police Prefecture — one of the most secure buildings in France — as the perpetrator wildly shouted “Allahu Akbar.”
That has French commentators acknowledging that nobody in France is safe anymore.
But officials are trying to downplay it, with the interior minister saying the jihadist had “never given any reason for alarm or shown any behavioral problems.”
Unsurprisingly, the attack received virtually no serious coverage in the U.S. media.
But France, along with the West more broadly, clearly has an enormous problem. That reality is now becoming impossible to ignore.
“This is a major turning point in Islamist terrorism,” jihad expert Gilles Kepel was quoted as saying in media reports. “It’s hard to believe that the police, which we rely on to protect us and is supposed to be our last rampart against terrorism, can itself be the victim of terrorism, with throats slit in the holy of holies of the Police Prefecture.”
One Western analyst compared it to an FBI Special Agent at the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force or a CIA operative with top-secret clearance in the Counterterrorism Center were to slit the throats of his colleagues.
“Ironically, this is the very National Police office in charge of tracking terrorists, the beating heart of the country’s counterterrorism campaign, and the collection point for data on jihadists in France,” wrote Paris-based correspondent Joseph Harriss in The American Spectator.
“Yet it couldn’t detect a terrorist within its own ranks,” he added. “You couldn’t make this up.”
Harris described the perpetrator as “a member of the jihadist fifth column, a sleeping agent ready to act when the call came.”
In recent years, jihadists have slaughtered hundreds of French citizens in numerous terrorist attacks.
In early 2015, jihadists targeted the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store, slaughtering a dozen people.
Later that year, jihadists killed 130 people using guns across Paris as Frenchmen disarmed by their government cowered in helpless terror waiting for armed police to arrive. There were some 500 causalities in those attacks.
The next year, a jihadist with a truck massacred nearly 100 people and wounded over 200 more in Nice.
Another jihadist slaughtered a Catholic priest as he was saying mass.
Two police officers, a husband and wife, were slaughtered in their own home by yet another Islamic terrorist just three years ago.
And the carnage continues unabated.
France has responded to the tsunami of terror by importing more Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa, while cracking down on the free-speech rights of those who speak out against Islamism.
The latest attack took place at Île de la Cité near Notre-Dame, which more than a few experts and analysts have suggested was deliberately set on fire.
The perpetrator of the police attack was a 45-year-old jihadist convert who worked as a computer technician at the headquarters for 15 years, according to media reports.
He was an administrator of the intelligence unit’s networks, giving him access to virtually everything.
After the attack, investigators discovered a memory stick in the terrorist’s office that included the names and addresses of hundreds of French intelligence officials. Their sources, the identities of undercover officers, and the jihadists under surveillance were also included in the data, along with videos of jihadists beheading non-Muslims or apostate Muslims.
Again, the implications are enormous.
The attack was simple. After returning to work from lunch, the jihadist slit his supervisor’s throat, stabbed a nearby officer, went to another office and stabbed another person, then stabbed a policewoman in the stairwell.
A trainee finally shot the jihadist before being stabbed himself. And now, unsurprisingly, that trainee fears for his life, according to reports. He is requesting a transfer as authorities scramble to deal with the fallout.
Across France, police are under siege, with over 50 suicides so far this year amid growing public hostility and millions in unpaid overtime still due.
France, once a key bastion of Western civilization, is a canary in the coalmine for the broader Western world.
While virtually nobody in uber-secular France would admit it, it appears that France and the broader Western world are already under God’s judgment.
Only God can help the French now.