As Bill says, I’m sure this is nothing.

A cell of radicalised French women guided by Islamic State commanders in Syria was behind a failed terrorist attack near Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral last weekend and planned another violent attack this week before they were intercepted by police, the Paris prosecutor has said.

This too.

A sampling of the Facebook users taking delight in the tragedy…see if you notice anything in common:

Wahid Hadji
Oubbad Jsk
Yusuf Mohammedzai
Hessam Massa
Mohamed Hiadi
Mohamed Bensalem
Alaa Atfeh
Raidh Khaled
Ammar Sofiane
Abdelhakim Noui Oua
Mohamed Amin

You get the picture.

And then there’s this:

The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, the BBC reported. The fire comes at the beginning of Holy Week, the week celebrating the days between Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and His Crucifixion on Good Friday and His Resurrection on Easter Sunday.

The timing of this fire is quite suspicious.

Ain’t it just. Pro tip: we’ll know for sure it was Mooselimbs behind the fire if the story suddenly disappears from all Enemedia coverage by the end of the week. ZMan says we all already know what’s really going on here.

As news spread of the fire consuming the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the first reaction of most people was shock and sadness. You don’t have to be Catholic or French to feel as if some part of you has been lost. That was not just an old building or a historically important place. It was a symbol of Western civilization. Stand inside a great church and you feel the awe and power that inspired the builders. That cathedral was the primal roar of a people celebrating their creator and the essence of who they were as a people.

Of course, it did not take long for people to notice that its burning was a metaphor for the current crisis in the West. As Europe is swamped by Muslims, promising to replace Europeans in their own lands, it is only a matter of time before the great churches are turned into mosques or destroyed. Despite the endless propaganda from our rulers, most people here and there, are well aware of what’s happening. They don’t know how to articulate it or react to it, but they know. Watching the fire, they knew what it meant.

That anger people feel is not the sort of barbaric rage our rulers assume is in the heart of every white man. There will be no occidental riots or calls for pogroms against the invaders. It’s a slow buzz as the batteries charge up, waiting for the moment somewhere down the line when the circuit is finally closed. That’s how these things go. Decent people are willing to tolerate what seems like an unlimited amount of deprivation from their rulers, but it reaches a point when the batteries are charged and the circuit is closed.

That’s why it is good to watch the footage and follow the coverage of this thing. Many of us have disconnected from the news, because it’s just propaganda. You can be sure the media will first try to wave it all away as an accident, but we know how they would be reacting if it was a dumpy old mosque or a synagogue that burned, rather than a masterpiece of Western civilization. We know. Everyone knows. Watching it will make you a little angry, but that’s a good thing. We need to charge those batteries.

Obviously, we’ll never know what really caused the fire. A black church burns and the usual suspects tell us there is a rash of hate crimes against black churches. Catholic churches all over France have been burning for years and we’re told it is a racist conspiracy theory to see a pattern. The same will happen here to people who wonder how an unoccupied building that withstood air raids suddenly caught fire in two places. It will be infuriating, but it just charges those batteries a little more each time you hear it.

Even if the cause was recklessness by some workers, that’s probably worse. Like America, this kind of work in Paris is done by foreigners now. The work crews are no doubt Algerians, Tunisians and maybe some Africans. The few French involved spend their time keeping these tribes from murdering one another. To these strangers, that cathedral was as meaningless to them as the fire. There, as here, the cost of cheap labor is the loss of your heritage. Is cheap stuff really worth feeling like this every day?

I can’t find the thing now, but earlier I saw a Tweet from somebody or other that, paraphrased as closely as my piss-poor memory can manage, said this: “It took 200 years to build it; it stood for 800 years since. In that span, it endured through 2 World Wars, the Nazi occupation, five French revolutions, innumerable violent protests and riots, and more. But in the end, it couldn’t withstand Diversity.” A good friend, CF lifer, and regular e-mail correspondent ain’t surprised:

I have a good friend, a prominent businessman in his 60s, who is a genuine, authentic, practicing Catholic. That is to say that he has changed churches three times in the past few years when the priest tacitly endorsed symbols of moral decay such as abortion and faggotry. I asked him what he thought of it this morning, and he said that he believes it might be genuine wrath of God stuff. After all, in his opinion, the Church has spent the last several decades turning away from all it claimed it believed in – so why not? Catholics used to believe in a wrathful God, and perhaps that God has visited them. Of course – in his opinion – the Church leaders wouldn’t know it if that’s what it was.

He has a point. The Catholic church is but a shadow of what it used to be. From turning a blind eye to the Holocaust, to actively participating in Nazi ratlines after World War II (this is particularly galling, since Nazism was completely secular and anti-religious in nature), to allowing “Cafeteria Catholicism,” to the ongoing homosexual child molestation scandals (and yes, it’s homosexual – you could host a meeting of female victims in a broom closet), to endorsement of gay marriage, to not excommunicating abortion advocates such as Nancy Pelosi, to Pope Frankie washing the feet of Muslims, to advocating for mass third world immigration, it’s difficult to find exactly what the Church stands FOR these days. Perhaps it’s better that not only Notre Dame, but the entire Church, burns to the ground.

Other denominations, of course, are no better, and many are worse. The fact is that no Western religion is true to its purpose. Nearly all ‘leaders’ are but false prophets these days. Is there anything dumber, or more counter to purpose, than Jews advocating for more Muslim immigration? It’s no wonder that church membership and attendance are down – what centering philosophy or moral code can one find there, except, “Hey, dude, it’s okay, do what you feel.” Shit, I can get that anywhere.

There is one thing you do have to give the Muslims. They are low IQ savages (in fact, there is an inverse correlation of acceptance of Islam and societal average IQ), barbarians, and a drag on human society. It’s been centuries since a single Muslim did anything to add to the human condition. BUT – dammit – they have the courage of their convictions, and that’s why they are winning. They don’t equivocate, they don’t virtue signal, and they don’t back down. They have ZERO guilt. They tell you, right to your face, what they believe, and dare you to disagree. Too few are willing to take that on head to head.

So, maybe it really was an accident, although I doubt it. If it was truly the wrath of God, as my friend thinks, it might be appropriate. And, if it was Muslims doing what Muslims do – conquering and destroying – well, that would be appropriate, too, would it not? France has certainly been overrun from within. Better not to have those symbols of a past defeated society and culture.

It all comes back to the old joke: “How many soldiers does it take to defend Paris? Don’t know, it’s never been tried.” So, no, you won’t see me posting any memes about “standing with Paris,” or wailing over the fact that I never got to see the Cathedral, or that I never visited Paris. I no longer want to, because I don’t visit Muslim countries.

I can’t argue with a word of it, no matter how hard I might wish it weren’t so. In a damned-right-it’s-related story:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the midst of a regional and municipal elections campaign, has again threatened to turn the Byzantine Patriarchal Cathedral of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom of God) , which after the fall of Constantinople was turned into an imperial mosque and into a museum in the 1930s, into a mosque once again.

For centuries the largest and most resplendent cathedral in Christendom, Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum by the founder of the modern Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk, who brought sweeping secularisation to his country.

Erdogan’s comments come after the manifesto of the mass murderer who killed dozens of Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand, in which the terrorist stated that Istanbul will be renamed Constantinople and that the Turks will be limited to the Asian side of the city.

Of course, defiling Christian churches and holy sites and either converting them to mosques or just reducing them to rubble is a longstanding tradition among the Musselmen after a conquest. Let us note, too, that Erdogan’s pestilential Moslem shitrapy is a member in good standing of the useless and outdated NATO. Yeah, shriek at me again about how stupid and insane Trump was to propose extricating ourselves from that clusterfuck, whydon’tcha.

Miraculous update! Steyn brings news both good and…well, depressing.

Twenty-four hours after Notre Dame de Paris began to burn, there is better news than we might have expected: More of the cathedral than appeared likely to has, in fact, survived intact – including the famous rose windows, among the most beautiful human creations I’ve ever seen. The “new” Notre Dame will be mostly high up and out of sight, which is just as well given that modern man prides himself on having no smidgeonette of empathy with his flawed forebears and thus the chances of historic recreation of the animating spirit of 1160 are near zero.

There is an architectural debate to be had, I suppose, about whether a reconstructed twelfth-century cathedral requires nineteeth-century appurtenances such as its spire. But the minute that starts you risk some insecure dweeb like Macron, on whose watch the thing went up in smoke, getting fanciful ideas about bequeathing to posterity some I M Pei pyramid on the top of the roof. France’s revolution, unlike America’s, was aggressively secular, and it ultimately found expression in the 1905 law on the separation of churches and the state. Since then the French state has owned the cathedral, and thus it will be Macron who ultimately decides what arises in its place.

Beyond that are the larger questions: When the iconic house of worship at the heart of French Christianity decides to mark Holy Week by going up in flames, it’s too obviously symbolic of something …but of what exactly? Two thousand churches have been vandalized in the last two years: Valérie Boyer, who represents Bouches-du-Rhône in the National Assembly, said earlier this month that “every day at least two churches are profaned” – by which she means arson, smashed statutes of Jesus and Mary, and protestors who leave human fecal matter in the shape of a cross. This is a fact of life in modern France.

As it is, there is no shortage of excitable young Mohammedans gleefully celebrating on social media. In 2017 some inept hammer-wielding nutter yelling “Allahu Akbar!” had a crack at Notre Dame, and a couple of years before that the historian Dominique Venner blew his brains out on the altar to protest same-sex marriage. I love France but, in recent years, it’s hard not to pick up on the sense that it’s coming apart – and that, when the center cannot hold, the things at that center, the obsolete embodiments of a once cohesive society, are a natural target.

In addition, the authorities’ eagerness to assure us that it was an accident at a time when such a conclusion could not possibly be known – and when their own response to the emergency was, to put it politely, somewhat dilatory – was itself enough to invite suspicion: “Sure, it might be an accident. But, even if it weren’t, they’d still tell us it was…”

So, precisely because Paris is full of people who would love to burn down Notre Dame four days before Good Friday, it seems bizarrely improbable that it should happen by accident: that a highly desirable target should be taken out by some slapdash workman leaving a cigarette butt near his combustible foam take-out box – the lunchpack of Notre Dame – and letting the dried-out twelfth-century timbers do the rest.

The cornerstone for the cathedral was laid in April 1163 in the presence of King Louis VII and Pope Alexander III. The builders who raised up those stones through great vaulted spaces soaring to heaven were primitive, ill-educated men who nevertheless had a sense of something beyond themselves and the present tense. Once lost, that’s hard to re-inculcate. Douglas Murray’s Spectator colleague Jonathan Miller writes: “Perhaps this will be the wake-up call that France needed.” Perhaps. But there have been so many others, haven’t there?

And yet the next time in Paris I shall visit again those magnificent rose windows and feel something akin to the connection Keats did to the figures on that Greek urn. Civilization is always a paradox: deep roots and yet a thin veneer. To raze Notre Dame to the ground would have been a grand victory for barbarism. If not a “wake-up call”, the sight that arises this Tuesday on the Île de la Cité is a kind of pre-Easter resurrection, or at least a reprieve.

I expected Francis to have something worthwhile to say about this, and he didn’t let me down.

It wasn’t the most glorious of Christendom’s cathedrals, but it was one of the oldest. It was deeply embedded in the history of France. Now a lot of it is gone. Will it be restored? A good question, given Europe’s flight from Christianity and its welcome of Muslim savages. Indeed, I would expect restoration efforts to be opposed rather vigorously, especially if the French government proposes to lend a hand. Can’t afford to anger the Muslims!

This is what Europe has done to itself. Yes, I know the “official story” is that the fire was “an accident.” I also remember the old maxim about such things: “Never believe anything political until it is officially denied.”

The despicable Ilhan Omar referred to the cathedral somewhat dismissively as “art and architecture.” But then, Omar is a Somali Muslim, and is given to excusing Muslims and Islam for anything and everything. (Hey, so “some people did something.” So what?) On the other hand, she regards depictions of the horrors of September 11, 2001, which I still call Black Tuesday, as a threat to her life. She got some concurrence from the equally despicable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called a video of the attack “triggering.”

My God, yes, it’s “triggering.” Any red-blooded American should feel his trigger finger twitching as he watches it. He should yearn for a properly sighted-in rifle, ten thousand rounds to hand, and a federal declaration of “open season,” to continue until every Muslim within our borders is a corpse.

How can any American worthy of the name watch what Europe is suffering yet support the continued importation of Muslims to our shores? For many do, as if we owe them something, though specifics on that matter are sorely lacking. After those Muslim “refugees” have been here a short while, they strat trying to recreate the hellholes from which they emerged, by creating Islamic exclaves, bullying and terrorizing American Christians and Jews, and “progressively” inflicting shari’a law upon regions of American cities. Yet the Left tells us we’re supposed to welcome them, in the name of “diversity.” Note that these selfsame cheerleaders for mass Islamic immigration have no sympathy for Christian refugees from Islamic persecution. I can’t help but wonder why.

Oh, I think we can all take a pretty fair guess at that one.

Eyes on update! My old friend Claire Berlinski provides an up close and personal account:

My doorbell rang insistently. It was my father. “Notre Dame is on fire,” he said through the intercom. I rushed downstairs. “It’s burning to the ground,” he said. I was speechless.

He had been evacuated. He had not brought his phone or his glasses. “You’ll stay with me,” I said. He wanted to go home. He lives by the cathedral. It has been part of his daily life for 20 years. My grandfather gave a recital there once, when I was a child, playing the organ in the stone platform above the West portal. Inevitably, I think of him whenever I hear that organ. (Thankfully, the organ has been saved.)

We walked toward his home together. It was horrible to see. The spire was no longer there. How could that be? It’s always there, rising against a stormy horizon or a clear morning, juxtaposed against the sky. It will always be there, even when we’re long gone, a permanent thing in an impermanent world. But it isn’t. My grandfather is in that cathedral, somehow, and my father will be, too, and somehow, like this, civilization endures. But it doesn’t.

The police wouldn’t allow us back. They were worried that the fire would spread to the neighboring buildings, or that parts of the cathedral would collapse on top of them. So we stood across the Seine and watched it burn, the forest of symbols that had gazed on us with familiar glances.

Read all of it; Claire is just brilliant at real journalism like this, one of the very best I know of out there.