Thomas Wictor

Last night I posted on the near-total lack of training shown by the terrorists who killed 129 civilians and four police officers in Paris on November 13, 2015. As expected, I upset some people. A man on social media asked me why I would write such a post; was I not satisfied with the number of dead? My answer is that everyone must see the murderers as the evil clowns they were. Our safety depends on our ability to keep our heads even when under attack.

There were two false alarms in Paris last night. People panicked and began running for no reason.

I understand panic. On December 28, 1995, a man tried to murder me in the parking lot of the bookstore where I worked. I painted him years later in an effort to banish the lingering stress of the incident.

He came out of the darkness—strutting, bobbing, and weaving, dressed head to toe in black, with body armor, heavy gloves, and combat boots.

“Yeah? Yeah? DON’T F*CK WITH ME, MAN!” he squealed. I could see that he was smiling broadly under his balaclava. He raised his semiautomatic pistol and pointed it at my face from less than an arm’s length away, and I instantly went psychotic. The reason I lost my mind is that I’d witnessed murders as a small child but had blocked it out. I eventually wrote down everything I thought about as I turned and ran from the gunman. You can read it below.

During the two seconds it took me to circle my boss’s van, I had two audio hallucinations. The first sounded like Tibetan religious music.

As I heard that, here is what I was thinking.

The circus. Ferris wheel. Boston Pops. Happy New Year. God save me. Orson Welles. Nazi bastards. Christmas lights. Pinwheels.

You are going to die.

Five.

Four.

I’m a motorcycle. Zoooooom. Where’d all the sound go? What did I do to deserve this?

Three.

My feet aren’t making any noise, like they’re really small. I’m walking on the moon. I’m in a vacuum.

Look at those pigs in that airliner headed to LAX. They don’t know I’m being murdered. I hate them. I wish their plane would crash.

Who’s that screaming? Oh, it’s me. I’m screaming because I’m being murdered.

The Tibetan music changed into the orchestral swelling in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”

Before this night, that song had always chilled me. Now I knew why: The orchestral cacophony was the sound of my life ending.

Burnt-out street lamp. Store front. Stars. Clouds. Tree. Goodbye, street lamp. Goodbye, clouds. Goodbye, tree.

He’s going to shoot me in the back of the head. I’m going to see teeth and bone fragments and pieces of my brain spray out in front of me. It’s going to feel like water up my nose and an electric shock, but it’s also going to be cold and crunchy. It’ll be pulpy and probing and intimate. Being murdered is so intimate. Much more intimate than sex.

I’m very sad. My death is going to be so ugly.

Two.

The bullet’s going to hit the back of my head right above the nape of my neck. I can’t feel anything except for that little dot. When I fall down and skid across the asphalt, my skull will be empty and the cool night air will rush into the rawness. It’ll burn like acid. I’ll feel the pebbles gouging my palms, my knees, and my cheek, and then I’ll be gone.

It’s just about to happen. Lab rat. Marshmallow pie. I love you, Carmen. Sapphire. Golden rod. Welder’s fees. Samsonite. Here I go. Here I go. Here I go.

One.

Nothing? You-didn’t-why-there’s-no-teeth-alive-what

That was twenty years ago. It may as well have happened last night. I never “got over” that experience. It diminished me greatly and contributed to my eventual fate as a hermit. So that’s why I’m writing these posts. Nobody should have the course of their lives dictated by others, especially evil clowns. I know the identity of the guy who tried to murder me. He was a wall-eyed military wannabe who was about the size of a ten-year-old.

The reason he failed is that he chose a pistol that requires rigorous cleaning after each use, or else it’ll jam.

Like the evil clowns in Paris, he was putting on a show, starring himself as the hero. Being a moron, he didn’t clean the gun, so it didn’t fire. He and my boss had worked out an insurance scam that would require the murders of my brother Tim and me. Then our boss would claim that an entire truckload of rare books had been stolen. In reality the truck was full of rotted paper and forty years of rat droppings.

My former boss lived to be eighty-six. That doesn’t bother me. I’ve seen the final moments of those who have great misdeeds on their souls. They don’t go peacefully into the night, believe me.

Now: Here’s the video proof of how incompetent the Paris terrorists were.

This is the sound of the drive-by shooting at the restaurant La Belle Equipe at 9:36 p.m.

Three rifles fire over sixty rounds; at 0:31 you can hear the screeching tires of the fleeing vehicle. The person who shot the video began several seconds into the attack, so my guess is that the three terrorists emptied their rifles. A total of at least ninety rounds was fired.

They killed nineteen people. That means they had no skill whatsoever. The indiscriminate firing indicates a complete lack of discipline and training. They shot at defenseless civilians, but it sounds like a gun battle. Nobody returned fire, yet the terrorists behaved as though they were out of their minds with fear.

The terrorists may have been even more incompetent than we realized initially.

An Iraqi intelligence dispatch warned that Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had ordered his followers to immediately launch gun and bomb attacks and take hostages inside the countries of the coalition fighting them in Iraq and Syria.

The Iraqi dispatch, which was obtained by the AP, provided no details on when or where the attack would take place, and a senior French security official told the AP that French intelligence gets these kinds of warnings “all the time” and “every day.”

However, Iraqi intelligence officials told the AP that they also warned France about specific details: Among them, that the attackers were trained for this operation and sent back to France from Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de-facto capital.

The officials also said that a sleeper cell in France then met with the attackers after their training and helped them to execute the plan. There were 24 people involved in the operation, they said: 19 attackers and five others in charge of logistics and planning.

Nineteen attackers armed with military assault rifles, hand grenades, and suicide vests. They could’ve killed several hundred. The reason they didn’t is because despite the fact that their victims were helpless, these were not brave men. It appears that the vast majority were crippled by fear.

More firing was caught on video. This time the targets were French police officers and rescue personnel outside the Bataclan theater.

I’ve marked where the bullets struck.

This is the “spray and pray” method of firing. As you can see, the terrorist hit the street, a tree, and buildings, but his expended rounds came nowhere near the police officers. Such wild inaccuracy indicates that the terrorist was neither trained to shoot nor taught how to control his fear. French police special forces feel fear; they just ignore it.

According to the Iraqis, the caliph of the Islamic State has ordered his followers to “immediately” begin attacks all over Europe. So far we’ve had one massacre committed by evil clowns. It’s likely that the national-police special forces of each nation had a plan for this scenario, and they quietly implemented it.

To Americana and Israelis reading this: Do not underestimate the Europeans. Guess how long Europe was at peace after World War II.

Four months. Then the British and French went to war in Indochina, the Dutch and British went to war in Indonesia, the French went to war in Indochina again, the Greeks had a civil war, the French went to war in Madagascar, the British went to war in Malaya, and so on. They’ve been fighting ever since Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe 45,000 years ago. War is in their blood.

This will end badly for the terrorists.