As I'm sure has now been heard around the world, Toulouse was struck by tragedy a few weeks ago; a gunman on a moto-scooter committed a series of attacks, first against French soldiers and then, apparently unable to find another soldier that morning, against a Jewish primary school. There are news sources that can give all the various factual details and background, so I'm going to leave most of it to them, but here are the basics: Mohammed Merah was a 23-year old raised in Toulouse who claimed allegiance to al-Qaida after visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his shootings were to protest the French forces currently as an occupying military presence around the world (thus the soldiers), the recent French legislation discriminating against strict Islam (such as banning the full face veil), and the deaths of Palestinian children (thus the sick retribution against the Jewish school). He was found by the police two days after the school shooting and after a 30 something hour stand-off trapped inside his apartment, he was shot in the final raid as the police tried to arrest him.
In total, he killed seven people, three soldiers in two incidents and at the school, a teacher and three children. There have been many horrifying events in this world, throughout human history, and certainly many insipid horrors too embedded in our everyday normalcy for us to notice that cause all sorts of pain, but there is something particularly evil about the cold-blooded murder of children that makes me think that the only way for such an act to be worse could only be in terms of scale. I do not want to imagine there being anything more horrible than executing innocent children, and there is no way children of 3, 6, and 8 years old are anything but the most beautiful kind of innocent. He killed the younger two and their father, a professor and rabbi at the school, as soon as he got off his bike and started firing, and then chased the other children while firing wildly, before catching the beautiful blonde 8 year old by the hair, holding her for long enough to change to a new gun after the first one jammed, and then putting a bullet in her head. It makes me sick. Evil is not a word or concept I use or think of too often -- normally I acknowledge our world of grays, of motives and a need for understanding and reason and multiple points of view -- but I can't think of any other way to describe something like this. There had to have been a piece of his humanity that was just fundamentally broken.
The pictures are from as close as I was allowed to go to the school the next day, where the police blockade was holding back the media storm and many other Toulousains had a similar idea of leaving flowers, notes, and candles. The number of hand-drawn cards was a clear reminder of how children were caught up in this tragedy specifically and directly, affecting both students at the school and anyone with empathy around the world.
The following piece of the whole event was dramatic, but with so much less importance than the rest of it that I'm not all that convinced I need to talk about it, but given there were some Facebook posts of "I think I just heard gunshots" I figure I might as well talk about it a little. Two days after the school shooting, French police tracked the shooter to his apartment, which they raided at 3 am, where they were engaged in a small firefight, wounding I believe three officers and trapping the shooter in his apartment. I woke up to a text from a coworker making sure everything was ok, (not knowing any of this had happened while I was fast asleep) and quickly checked the news to realize that it just so happened that the shooter lived 3 blocks down from me. A little jumpy, my bus was in the opposite direction of the flurry of activity, so I went off to work where the news was on all day, and the door man and I worked out a thumbs up-thumbs down-big boom hand signals in case something happened while we were in rehearsal. Merah was saying he was willing to give himself up to authorities (and had admitted guilt to all the shootings and claimed a link to al-Qaida) but in the afternoon. My worry then was what exactly he was wanting more time for -- just to be alive, to prove he had power over the police, to prepare some of the videos he had taken of his murders, or to build a bomb in the apartment. By afternoon, he moved the goal posts and it was at 10 pm that he was going to surrender... By 10 pm, it became clear he was just playing with negotiators, and declared he wanted to die with guns in his hands.
I went to tea with a friend after work, thinking it'd all be done soon, to no avail, but was reassured by Christine, the mother of the family, that it was all quiet around our house. Lots of watching the news but not all that much discussion in front of the children, it was nice regardless to have them as a presence right next door. From our doorways, however, we could see the red lampposts of police lights just over a neighbour's house, reminding us precisely how close all of this was. I was on skype with Mum, Nana, and Papa, all together watching curling in Pincher Creek, when "a little jumpy" had a lot more energy put into the system, as loud bangs sounded all too nearby. The police -- at 11:34 pm now -- had set off flash-bangs to try to scare Merah into coming back to negotiations after he had cut off all contact with them. I found a live news feed focused only on the stand-off, where I spent the next few hours thinking that suuuurely it would be finished soon, as we were now over twenty hours into the episode. Talking to friends from home and drinking hot chocolate, I tried to wait it out so I could see how it was going to finish. Finally around I think 2 or 3 am, I decided there certainly wasn't anything my being awake was going to accomplish, so I went to sleep, knowing it would all be over when I woke up.... Not. Shaking my head at how it could be lasting this long, I headed off to work again, where after class we finally got the news that the police finally raided the apartment and Merah was killed in the shootout that ensued. It was over, at least, though unfortunate that he couldn't be taken alive so we could know more about his contacts and networks and future plans, and he could be forced to live with his guilt for the rest of a long long life in prison.
The following piece of the whole event was dramatic, but with so much less importance than the rest of it that I'm not all that convinced I need to talk about it, but given there were some Facebook posts of "I think I just heard gunshots" I figure I might as well talk about it a little. Two days after the school shooting, French police tracked the shooter to his apartment, which they raided at 3 am, where they were engaged in a small firefight, wounding I believe three officers and trapping the shooter in his apartment. I woke up to a text from a coworker making sure everything was ok, (not knowing any of this had happened while I was fast asleep) and quickly checked the news to realize that it just so happened that the shooter lived 3 blocks down from me. A little jumpy, my bus was in the opposite direction of the flurry of activity, so I went off to work where the news was on all day, and the door man and I worked out a thumbs up-thumbs down-big boom hand signals in case something happened while we were in rehearsal. Merah was saying he was willing to give himself up to authorities (and had admitted guilt to all the shootings and claimed a link to al-Qaida) but in the afternoon. My worry then was what exactly he was wanting more time for -- just to be alive, to prove he had power over the police, to prepare some of the videos he had taken of his murders, or to build a bomb in the apartment. By afternoon, he moved the goal posts and it was at 10 pm that he was going to surrender... By 10 pm, it became clear he was just playing with negotiators, and declared he wanted to die with guns in his hands.
I went to tea with a friend after work, thinking it'd all be done soon, to no avail, but was reassured by Christine, the mother of the family, that it was all quiet around our house. Lots of watching the news but not all that much discussion in front of the children, it was nice regardless to have them as a presence right next door. From our doorways, however, we could see the red lampposts of police lights just over a neighbour's house, reminding us precisely how close all of this was. I was on skype with Mum, Nana, and Papa, all together watching curling in Pincher Creek, when "a little jumpy" had a lot more energy put into the system, as loud bangs sounded all too nearby. The police -- at 11:34 pm now -- had set off flash-bangs to try to scare Merah into coming back to negotiations after he had cut off all contact with them. I found a live news feed focused only on the stand-off, where I spent the next few hours thinking that suuuurely it would be finished soon, as we were now over twenty hours into the episode. Talking to friends from home and drinking hot chocolate, I tried to wait it out so I could see how it was going to finish. Finally around I think 2 or 3 am, I decided there certainly wasn't anything my being awake was going to accomplish, so I went to sleep, knowing it would all be over when I woke up.... Not. Shaking my head at how it could be lasting this long, I headed off to work again, where after class we finally got the news that the police finally raided the apartment and Merah was killed in the shootout that ensued. It was over, at least, though unfortunate that he couldn't be taken alive so we could know more about his contacts and networks and future plans, and he could be forced to live with his guilt for the rest of a long long life in prison.
