Bastille Day is France’s biggest holiday of the year.
There was a big, happy celebration in Nice…
…until a truck, traveling at high speed, intentionally crashed into the crowd.
Initial estimates are 30 to 50 dead, God alone knows how many injured. And it is an excellent bet those numbers will rise. They always seem to.
French TV is reporting the driver was shot dead. They don’t do that because the crash was unintentional.
We do not yet know conclusively that this was another radical Islamic terrorist attack. But if it wasn’t, it an amazingly good imitation of one.
So, if it is, what will France and the rest of the world do about it? Put out a lot of flowers and write poignant squibs about the dead?
Talk loudly and angrily, then do pretty much nothing….like Francois Hollande did after the attacks in Paris last November?
Or maybe something a bit more significant this time, on the theory that when war is declared, you don’t sit passively by and wait for the next attack, you fight back.
I’ll wait and see…
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UPDATE: There is new information, and it is truly grisly.
London’s Daily Mail is reporting that after crashing the truck into the crowd, its driver got out of the truck’s cab with a gun and started firing. Again, there are reports that he wound up dead…on to eternity in the lowest form of hell.
But there is more. There are reports that, apparently in coordinated attacks, other gunmen have taken hostages in the Meridien Hotel, the Hotel Negresco and the Buffalo Grill restaurant. They are not confirmed…let’s hope they never are.
I hope I am wrong, but this has the potential for a death toll to exceed that of the 130 dead (and hundreds more injured) at the Bataclan Theater and other Parisian venues last November 13th.
