Notre Dame Fire Strikes Amidst Wave of Vandalism and Arson at Christian Churches in France

This doesn't mean the Notre Dame fire was arson.

But people have been vandalizing churches, desecrating crucifixes with human excrement, and smashing stained glass.

And setting ancient churches on fire.

This might not explain the fire -- but it does explain the suspicions about the fire, and I won't join the media in embargoing newsworthy facts that illuminate why some are very suspicious about this fire.

While it probably was an accident, it is worth pointing out that it happened during Holy Week–the holiest week of the liturgical year– amid a disturbing wave of anti-Christian attacks on Catholic churches throughout France.

In just one week in March, a dozen churches were desecrated in different regions of France in what appeared to be "obvious" cases of anti-Christian vandalism, according to ABC Internacional, a conservative Spanish daily paper.

"In Nimes (Gard), the Notre-Dame-des-Enfants church was desecrated in a particularly odious way: strangers painted a cross with human excrement, looted the main altar and the tabernacle and stole the wafers , which were later discovered among piles of waste," the Spanish daily reported.

...

On March 17, the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris was set ablaze shortly after the twelve-o'clock Mass, Evangeliques Info reported. The fire was quickly controlled by firefighters, but resulted in damages that will reportedly cost several hundred million euros.

THE SAINT SULPICE IN PARIS JUST IGNITED WHILE I WAS INSIDE pic.twitter.com/40PHCZ177w

— lil g (@lili_gasparr) March 17, 2019

Investigators have concluded that the fire was the result of arson and are now looking for suspects, Evangeliques Info reported.

Lots more at the link. The Saint Denis cathedral, in which are interred the bones of Charles Martel, was also vandalized in March.

For what it's worth, while my mind is open and I don't have any facts, I lean against the intentional arson theory. The fire seems to me to have been such a perfect storm of bad circumstances that it was unlikely to have been intentional.

Consider: The fire was burning (or at least smoldering) for a half an hour before alarms went off, and then it took firefighters an hour to begin putting water on it.

Ninety minutes of burning before any firefighters intervened -- could an arsonist have planned on his slow-starting fire to have ninety minutes to get up to speed before firefighters began dousing it?

I don't think humans -- especially terrorists -- tend to be that patient and that willing to leave things to chance. I think they want to see that their plan has worked right away -- which is why I'd imagine a terrorist arson case would involve a firebomb that goes off, not some concealed slow-fuse fire that takes its time to become an inferno.

And which could be put out by a simple fire extinguisher if it is detected early. Or, having burned the fuel immediately around the small fire, could have self-extinguished without anyone having realized there had been a fire at all.

Sometimes people see a catastrophe like this and think human intention must have been responsible. I usually have the opposite sort of reaction: This calamity was so perfect that humans probably couldn't have carried it off, humans with their crude, clumsy, impatient hands.

Only random, unfeeling chance is so patient. Random chance can afford to wait, because it gets 100,000 bites at the apple every hour.

Note my "analysis," as it is, is pretty uninformed and based on nothing but hunches about probabilities.

What bothers me -- and bothers a lot of people -- is the unseemly speed with which western law enforcement eliminates any Politically Incorrect theory from the realm of possibility.

That's worrisome, because it's sending the message that the French police (and American police) fundamentally do not want to find any deliberate terrorist actor behind any crime, and thus makes the public suspicious that very obvious investigative trails are being deliberately closed off due to political/media relations considerations.

My hunch is that this was, in fact, accidental. Letting sparks rain down to the wood-dust coated roofbeams, something like that.

But I do not like the idea that the authorities charged with protecting us say two things almost in the same breath: that they have ruled out the possibility of any "voluntary" cause behind this and also that they have no idea what the cause was.

That makes no sense. We already know, as a fact, that police are actively searching for suspects in the deliberate arson of Saint Suplice cathedral, the second-biggest church in Paris.

Does it make sense to eliminate arson as a possibility in this latest church fire?

Before a single fireman even entered the structure?!!

No, it doesn't make sense.

And it's not supposed to make sense. It's a politicized claim and it's a step towards a politicized investigation.

I've said this about cases of possible terrorism, and I've said this about the US government's lies about the transmission of ebola: We would worry less if it seemed, from time to time, that the officials we've entrusted with public safety worried more.

posted by Ace of Spades at 08:35 PM

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