The Paris Syndrome

Forget Stockholm: Paris is now the emblematic European capital for victims who would excuse their tormentors and identify with those who brutalize them.

A couple of days ago I posted the video of a young man who was assaulted by several culturally-enriched thugs on a late-night Paris bus. Now the victim has come forward to tell his story to Le Figaro. As several readers theorized, he is indeed of a progressive mindset, and unwilling to think ill of the punks who attacked him.

Notice the points he is at pains to emphasize:

1.		There was no racial element in the attack, and to prove it,
2.		He notes that one of his attackers had pale skin.
3.		People with radical political views will see this opportunity, and
4.		He wants to make sure he has no part in that.
5.		He was targeted because he appeared “bourgeois”.

In other words, to this unfortunate young man, the most important thing is neither to appear to be a racist, nor to give any aid and comfort to racists.

The fact that he was himself attacked by racist scum makes no difference. And never mind that these thugs could have easily harmed him far more grievously than they did.

Not being seen as a racist is more important than anything else, even life itself.

Here’s the full interview, my translation:

An account by the victim of the bus assault

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — The victim tells how he survived the attack and the recent publicity about it.

Very poised, 19 years old and a first-year student at Sciences Po Paris, F. G. has not forgotten the assault on the night between the 6th and 7th of December: taken while leaving the Noctilien bus in Paris, he was beaten by four thugs. The scene, filmed by a video surveillance camera, was circulated on the Internet before sparking the controversy. A police officer suspected of having posted it online has been suspended.

F.G. revisits the events. In a Parisian station brasserie where he was preparing to take a TGV [Train Grande Vitesse — High Speed Train], he gave an interview “exclusively for Le Figaro, who found me first. Afterwards, I will say nothing. I want to move on to other things…”

LE FIGARO — What really happened on the Noctilien that night?

- - - - - - - - -

I spent an evening with friends and I was about to go home to the seventeenth arrondissement. I took the Noctilien Gare de l’Est, alone. I turned my back to four young men. While one asked me for a cigarette, the other went through my pockets. When I turned around, I saw one of them handling my wallet. On instinct, I tried to retrieve it. Then the confrontation began…

The attack on you, which was so violent, must have seemed endless to you…

From any spatial or temporal viewpoint, I have great difficulty in assessing what I experienced. Seeing the video, this allowed me to anchor the aggression against me in the real world. I only know that they drove me to the rear of the bus, where I was struck to the ground. In a second phase, I returned to the bus driver before being kicked and punched. As shown in the video, other passengers were also beaten, including a young man trying to rescue me.

And the driver, who remained seated?

I have nothing against him. It was very difficult for him to respond. He acted in his own way, following the rules: he immediately stopped the bus and phoned the police. Very quickly, on the spot, they arrested two persons, and their presumed accomplices a few days later.

Internet sites say that racial insults were made against you…

Personally, I heard nothing of the sort. These words, if in fact they were said, occurred in a context in which my attackers were on drugs or drunk. Moreover, they were not all immigrants. Video of my aggression appears to be very stereotypical because that evening I was dressed in a bourgeois fashion facing four youths who made a lot of noise. In any case, I don’t want to be taken for a certain social type who has it in for foreigners. I didn’t feel like that. One of the attackers in a tracksuit with a shaved head had a very pale color of skin…

How did you fare after such a trial?

Apart from a black eye and bruises, no injuries were evident. Two days later I went to see a psychiatrist at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris who told me I seemed to have survived the incident well. Since then, I have been taking public transportation, and even the Noctilien…

This story came back like a boomerang through the Internet…

Yes, on April 6th a friend told me that a video was posted on Facebook. Seeing the link, I was about to ask the user who had posted to take it down. I didn’t realize it would be broadcast on such a scale…

This distribution seems to be as disturbed as aggression?

It’s true that the situation is very difficult, very difficult. Many of my friends were shocked by this diffusion, which harmed me. Disseminating these images on the Internet is very serious because they raise certain legal questions. There was serious confusion between the reality of this scene and its representation. The video was circulated on extremist websites and has been exploited by politicians. But I don’t want to be used. This subject is an opportunity for radical ideas and I don’t want to feed it. I had to get out of this simplistic caricature. To appear suddenly in the center of such a huge controversy is never very pleasant. That hurts me a lot, given that I was able to overcome the incident itself. I left Paris without hatred, to recover in a peace and quiet with my family.

Hat tip: Steen. Many thanks to Gaia for help with the difficult idioms.