I saw an article about how some guy tried to save his girlfriend from the gunmen by lying on top of her...I couldn't bring myself to read it.
Seriously, I'm usually the sort of person that finds something to love about everyone, but bloodletting like this is almost enough to turn me to outright misanthropy. It really keeps me awake at night that there are people out there who will laugh as they slaughter a man and everyone he loves. It's scary what ideology can do to people and it only gets worse when theology is added to the cocktail.
It also really bothers me that the common people are always the ones who pay the ultimate price when our governments are stupid enough to pour gas on the fire. The reason France is such an easy target for ISIS is because of how poor relations are between French Muslims and the French in general, what with the counterproductive ban on the burqa and hijab, telling Muslim schoolchildren they get pork for lunch or nothing, the French government's refusal to acknowledge (much less apologise for) the colonial atrocities it committed in Algeria (many French Muslims are either Algerian or descended from Algerians), and the fact that French Muslims live under practical apartheid in shitty little ghettos. It's made it easy for ISIS to radicalise them against their own country, all they need to do is train and furnish them and send word when the time comes.
The horror is only magnified by the fact that a similar attack was carried out in Beirut only hours later with around 250 dead. I wonder when the Lebanese flag will go up on Google, YouTube, Reddit, be made into a FB profile pic filter, etc. But it won't. And that's part of the problem. The West meddling endlessly in a region that, when it comes down to it, it doesn't care about beyond the oil that's under it and our determination to spread democracy to the "savages" in a way eerily resemblant of colonial missionaries, in a region that simply doesn't have the infrastructure to make democracy tenable, certainly not after being ravaged by years of war (the Middle East's tribal culture and Islam are also barriers, but ultimately, things like culture and religion are malleable and will modernise sooner or later). It doesn't exactly inspire love for us.
It honestly seems to me like the bloodshed is never going to end. The East-West divide hasn't claimed the last of it's victims, that's for certain. So many dead, and for what?
