We need to talk about Paris. No-one’s talking about anything else today. Not just because Spurs aren’t playing, but because what happened last night over there was a horror of truly horrific proportions. And worry.

You can’ help but worry. And think ‘where next?’ According to today’s extensive radio coverage, exclusively relating to precisely that, over 2000 French kids have gone to join ISIS. The issue though is the 500 plus who’ve returned. Couple that with the apparent ease with which ‘radicalisation’ seems to occur even among the ‘so normal’, ‘so intelligent’, so Manchester United supporting (Jihadi John) and you don’t know who is walking in our midst.

People who revere death above all else. People for whom ‘freedom’ means something very very different from our own Western interpretation. People who value neither the concept of ‘innocent bystanders’ nor the sanctity of historical and cultural icons that may lack specific relevance to their own beliefs.

So do you get paranoid about it? Cancel plans, stop travel, avoid the tube, don’t go to football? Or do you accept that if you yield to the threat then ‘they’ have won? In which case life must go on, in all its diversity and splendour.

Those of us sufficiently life experienced (read: ‘old’) to remember the good old IRA bombing days, know that you just carry on as normal. More carefully perhaps but as normal. You simply have to. What use are our freedoms if we can’t enjoy them?

Europe has received, over the last 6 months, about a million refugees. The vast majority of whom are Muslims. Which is fine. Most are the ‘wrong kind of Muslim’ for ISIS and thus have run for their lives. Others simply don’t want to live somewhere in which death and destruction are all that occurs. Where music is banned. Where children have no future.

But none of these people have passports or papers. They’re all unknown. And some, it must be assumed, are terrorists, finding, for them, easy and anonymous passage into enemy territory.

Francoise Hollande today said that the attacks last night were a declaration of war. Which will be responded to in kind. But he’s not fighting an enemy. He’s fighting an ideology. Which is sick, twisted, merciless, indiscriminate and positively evil.

The bombing of ISIS started because of the murders of innocents. Filmed live for our ‘enjoyment’. Because you can’t let them win.

Jihadi John is dead (as son-in-law posted: ‘may he rest in pieces’) but there are many ready to replace him.

The fight goes on. Today in Paris, tomorrow…

Sad Saturday

A xxxx