(French Interior Ministry personnel at the scene of the yeshiva shootings in Toulouse. Photo courtesy of the UK’s Telegraph.)

The murder of children is back in the news this week, not like it wasn’t last week, too.

It has happened down through the long bloody history of humankind, and in the clash of civilizations we have just observed a Citizen of France act out on his premise that school-kids are legitimate targets of deadly force.

Hey, wait. You got a minute? If there were world enough, or time, I could go on with some blather about how this is a relative phenomenon, culture norming, sensitivity, shared anger about the existence about an intrusive colonial presence, blah blah blah. Can we just use the language with some precision, and not cave into stupidity?

The “people” that do these things are overwhelmingly male. Men do these things. There is a clash of civilizations going one, if you had not noticed, or were too polite to point out in water-cooler conversation. The overwhelming number of beheadings, car bombings, IED attacks and other acts of savagery are conducted by one group of young men at war with the West.

In this rampage, this particular sick bastard is the prime suspect in the murders of three young children and a rabbi at a yeshiva in Toulouse, France.
He had gone on to shoot three French soldiers, and as of this writing is holed up in an apartment building with a Kalashnikov.

There was some thought, early on, that this might be a chapter in the continuing clash of other civilizations in France, with direct links to the Dreyfus affair, but this is much simpler. It is the act of another deluded young man who has been egged into acting out his violent religious anxiety against kids.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

It makes me sick. This guy can call himself a “jihadi.” I am sensitive to his need to cloak himself in some cloud of religious fervor, and understand his desire to translate himself direct to Paradise. The very concerned media can call him that too, as if there was some honor in a struggle for murder.

Here, in this place and in this morning, let us just call him what he is, in the Syrian dialect of Arabic, a “gath mal hmar.”

Of course, animals cannot do the evil that men do. I imagine the term would be offensive to donkeys.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com