Clear And Present Danger

"I saw two people dead in front of the school, an adult and a child. Inside, it was a vision of horror - the bodies of two small children." French Jew whose child attends the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school.

"We know that it is the same person and the same weapon that killed the soldiers, the children and the teacher. This act is odious and cannot remain unpunished." French President Nicolas Sarkozy

An act of hatred-deranged brutality beyond the imagination of most people. Psychotic derangement, what else might explain the willingness of a man to grasp an eight-year-old little girl's hair as she desperately attempted to escape the scene of a bloody atrocity to find shelter in the confines of her school, so he could retain her, and shoot her at point-blank range?

How could any human being find satisfaction in this kind of unspeakable depravity? Yet, if reports are correct in their interpretation, this sadistic monster wore around his neck a video camera to enable him to film the carnage that his psychotic rampage in a schoolyard resulted in. In cold blood and with cold intent he murdered a man, his two young boys and a young girl.

He used a 9-mm weapon until it jammed, then switched to a .45-calibre gun, entering the school gates and running after the children as they desperately attempted to evade him. One 17-year-old is battling for his life in hospital. The murderer fled the scene on the same motorized scooter on which he had arrived to commit his barbaric atrocity on innocent young people.

Whoever he is, dismissed former military man whom the army rejected when it discovered him to be a neo-Nazi infused with hatred for minorities and immigrants, or just another of the world's many vicious psychopaths, he has alerted a nation to the vulnerability of their minorities. Racial bigotry is nothing new in France, and anti-Semitism has a long inglorious history there.

The nation is not inordinately fond of immigrants and visible minorities, those who come to France and inexorably, by the weight of their presence and their singular customs and heritage values begin to add their traditions to those of nativist France. The current electioneering is addressing the issues of French dissatisfaction with immigration.

All the pieces of the puzzle come together to complete a puzzling conundrum: does the ultimate rejection of 'others', satisfactorily conclude that their very otherness condemns them in France to vulnerability and clear and present danger?