Thomas Wictor

I was born in Venezuela. For the first four years of my life, my closest relationship was with a woman named Delia. She was technically our maid, but in reality she was my surrogate mother. I grew up speaking English and Spanish interchangeably. Although we lived in oil camps, we interacted with Venezuelans daily. Believe me when I tell you this: The attempt to create multicultural societies will end badly.

First, here I am with Delia. I’m crying, but only because I hated having my photo taken.

Paul is in the middle, and Tim is on the right. These three brothers show our German, Mexican, and Irish heritage.

Venezuelans are like any group; it’s not possible to generalize and be 100 percent accurate. However, people tend to be a product of their culture. My father wrote an unpublished memoir of his time in Venezuela, and it makes for extremely difficult reading. The level of violence was something most First Worlders can’t comprehend. After the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was overthrown in 1958, Venezuela became lawless.

My father wrote that during this period, everyone had to be armed. After receiving an unfavorable performance review, a Venezuelan oilfield supervisor shot to death one of my father’s American coworkers in the office next to my father’s. Although my father didn’t write what happened next, I have no doubt how the incident was concluded.

Another time a car crashed into a pipeline raised off the ground on wooden sleepers. The gasoline spilled and caught fire, engulfing the pipe in flames. Venezuelans living nearby demanded that the Americans shut off the oil flow. They didn’t understand that as long as the oil kept moving through the pipe, it would carry away the heat from the fire. If the oil were shut off, the oil could get hot enough that it would explode.

Though my father spoke fluent Spanish, he couldn’t get the increasingly agitated Venezuelans to comprehend that they were asking him to cause the very thing they feared. They attacked my father, and he defended himself with a three-foot pipe wrench.

Until he was almost eighty years old, my father was inhumanly strong. Here he is in 1958, the year this happened.

Don’t let his skinniness fool you. I’m sure he was one of the most physically powerful men who ever lived. He swung the pipe wrench like a baseball bat, right into peoples’ faces. The damage he inflicted can only be imagined.

The Americans were ultimately forced to leave Venezuela, and the country has been in horrendous decline ever since. Venezuelans as a culture believe in conspiracies and magic. In that sense they mirror the French Muslims interviewed for “In Paris’s Suburbs, Some blame Jews for Charlie.”

Mehdi Boular, 24, who said he was married with two children, and two of his friends, did not attend Sunday’s rally.

“We’re Muslims,” Boular said. “They might have killed us if we’d gone.”

But even though the flags of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were flying at the rally in Place de la République and Muslims were well represented among the marchers Sunday, Boular said the attacks in Paris were part of a plot masterminded by Jewish conspirators.

“The Kalashnikovs, the identity cards the [killers] supposedly left behind, it was all staged,” said Boular, as his friends nodded in agreement. “It was a conspiracy designed by the Jews to make Muslims look bad. We’d rather just stay where we are.”

This is the mindset. Nothing can be done to change it. Of course not all Muslim immigrants to Europe bring their ancient tribal lore with them.

Ahmed Aboutaleb is the major of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He said this during a live TV interview that had no delay.

Mayor Aboutaleb is a minority even among non-Muslims. Yet take another look at the Parisian Muslims who blame Jews for the terrorist attacks of January 7-9, 2015.

“A lot of what you hear about how bad it is here is just not true,” says Pathe Ndiay, 29, whose parents are Senegalese but who was born in France. Ndiay works as a security guard in Sevran and lives nearby. “There’s a lot of unemployment here but not that many young people are out looking for jobs.”

Ndiay said many young men in the banlieues prefer the easy money they can get selling drugs rather than seeking what is likely to be boring, poorly paid employment in Paris.

“They don’t want to be bothered with getting a job,” Ndiay said. “Some can make up to €1,000 to €2,000 a day selling drugs. They want to be rappers. They don’t want to start at some boring job and work their way up the ladder.”

Another young man of French-Algerian descent interviewed outside a gas station in the Saint-Denis suburb reacted angrily to a reporter’s presence and demanded to know her religion. “The worst thing is to be atheist,” he said.

The man, who gave his named as “Mohamed,” also said he was a devout Muslim but then changed his demeanor and added, grinning, that he was also “a delinquent.” Then he said he was a drug dealer and without prompting, invited the reporter into the (also very clean) gas station to show an array of hashish for sale in broad daylight on a shelf next to the ATM.

He also called the Paris terrorist attacks “un complot,” or conspiracy, and launched into a lengthy explanation of the “magical Jews” behind it. They were not ordinary Jews, he said, but a “hybrid race of shape shifters” who have extraordinary abilities. “They know how to get in everywhere,” he said. “They are master manipulators.”

For years I’ve heard it through the grapevine that France’s Muslims have secret weapons depots filled with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and heavy machine guns. What gives this rumor credence is that many Muslim neighborhoods have not been properly policed in decades.

That might be changing.

France will almost surely recoil from these latest acts of terror and proceed to tighten its grip on extremist elements operating within its borders, and especially those operating in dangerous no-go areas that are not being monitored regularly by normal police.

With all this in mind, France’s capable yet still relatively small-in-size anti-terrorism force may have a very large task in front of it if the leadership in Paris decides to go after extremist elements with a heavier hand. I don’t doubt that GIGN, GIPN, RAID or BRI are up to whatever task they are given as this is the exact mission they have trained so hard to accomplish, but the vastness of France’s extremist problem may push their limited but capable resources to their maximum capacity in coming weeks.

French intelligence made a dog’s lunch of tracking the terrorists who carried out the atrocities of January 7-9, 2015. It may be that a full-on war is inevitable. Nothing can be done for those who think that shape-shifting Jews conspire to make Muslims look bad.

If such a war breaks out, it’ll be short, and the outcome is a foregone conclusion. These men don’t lose.

Regardless, I think pretty much everyone will admit in their heart of hearts that this social experiment is a failure, and a new approach is needed.