When the French mood finally snaps, Marine Le Pen will be waiting

Last Friday I noted that you don’t have to go back many months to get the latest mass-casualty terrorist atrocity in Europe these days.  But even while people were still trying to find ways to portray the Nice truck driver as a victim of urban-planning laws we had the next attack.

Yesterday it was an ‘Afghan asylum seeker’ who went around a train in Germany with an axe shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’.  That’s the same ‘Allahu Akbar’ (or ‘Allah is greatest’) that the man who drove the truck into the crowds in Nice was shouting as he ploughed through the crowded streets.  Like last week’s Nice attacker, yesterday’s attacker in Germany also happened to be called Mohammed. Across Europe whole schools of sociology professors will now be being deployed to come up with any explanation for why people called Mohammed keep on shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and killing everyone.  With appropriate levels of funding they could well come up with the perfect way in which to miss the point by the middle of the 22nd century.

Then today in France (again) a mother and her daughters (aged 8, 12 and 14) were assailed near Montpelier by a man with a knife who appeared to be shouting something about them being too scantily dressed. It remains possible that this was a Mormon attacker or a highly outgoing Orthodox Jew.  If so then I imagine we will all be very surprised.  But if it turns out that the perpetrator is another person called Mohammed with some connection to the inventor of Islam then no one will be remotely surprised.  And nor will the media or politicians want to spend much time dwelling on the fact.

It hardly needs to be said that the political repercussions of this are all dire.  Yesterday at a memorial for the victims in Nice the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, was booed by the crowds of mourners.