What is so complicated about the Paris Attacks?

I keep hearing people describe the Paris attacks as sophisticated, complicated, brilliant. What is so brilliant about them? The only skills the murderers needed was the ability to tell time and operate a weapon. The plan itself? Be at such and such a place, check your watch, and at such and such a time, kill people. Finding someone who knows how to make bombs? How hard can that be? We have a world full of angry deranged people. Put the word out. The same with buying weapons.

I agree that the attacks are getting increasingly unnerving, but I don’t see them as growing in sophistication so much as variety. They are not criminal masterminds. They’re just more fucked up than anyone else and persistent.

I just read very insightful comments from Susie Bright about the way in which they are fucked up. She was responding to the statement of the group who will now be called Daesh claiming responsibility, and references information about the group from this New York Times article.

Voila, the “manifesto” of the Paris suicide bombers, in their own words (see below).

Their obsession with sexual revenge, the revenge of the sexually rejected, is intense: They referred to the Bataclan nightclub as a place where where hundreds of “apostates” had gathered in a “profligate prostitution party” — that means a rock concert.

Bohemian Paris is on top of ISIS’ target list because it is the country of “obscenity and perversity.” Again, it’s Paris’ mythic reputation for the libertine, for free sexual exchange, for romance and unashamed ecstasy.

This “faith army,” this death cult built on sexual repression masked as religious purity– has a detailed manual about how to run a sex-slave market of their war captives, including rules of inheritance. Essentially, you can’t be a soldier in their army unless you buy into the faith that beautiful women everywhere are taunting and rejecting you, but you will teach them all a lesson by enslaving and raping them all day long — same with young boys. Everything “depraved” is holy when you’re inflicting it upon a slave — makes perfect sense, right?

At some point your Grand Wizard arranges a marriage with an appointed virgin your parents picked out for her dowry. She is of no erotic interest; she is a nonperson except as your baby-receptacle and income source. Siring sons is her husbandry.

Meanwhile, you monitor all the women’s menstrual cycles and the puberty of the young boys and girls in your slave pen so you can be sure to rape the right person on the most advantageous day, repeatedly shouting God’s name when you come.

VOMIT. Vomit. Vomit.

Every fundamentalist religion today is running on the fumes of sexual psychosis. They are huffing and huffing and huffing until they annihilate everything including themselves.

Thank you Susie Bright. From this year’s Gay Pride Parade. Thought this picture was appropriate.

Gay Pride Parade, New York City, 2015

Stacy Horn

I've written six non-fiction books, the most recent is Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York.

View all posts by Stacy Horn →

2 thoughts on “What is so complicated about the Paris Attacks?

  1. It may not be comforting much, but the level of sophistication isn’t that much different than that in the London (2005) and Mumbai (2008). Consider it vs. what was being thought after 9/11, re: “if this is what they can do now, what’s next?” That was in the back of a lot of people’s minds during the WMD debate over Iraq.

    If anything, Daesh/ISIS isn’t learning from their predecessor’s mistakes. The Taliban before 9/11 was seen as a terrible, bad regime, but mostly a problem that was “over there” and not worth more than sanctions. All that changed after Sept. 11th. Islamic State is in much the same position, and these pinprick attacks are stupid from a larger viewpoint, since they’re running the risk of waking the West up. Would be much smarter to lay low, keep gathering their strength, and trust in our ability to be easily distracted to keep us from finding the will to get our act together and actually stop them.

  2. I hope you’re right. I take heart in the fact that their numbers are small. Still, as seen, small numbers can still cause a lot of heartache and loss.

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