To be in Paris on the night of 13 November 2015, when 130 people were killed by an Islamist commando group, who within a few hours launched attacks on the Stade de France, the café terraces of the Right Bank and the Bataclan theatre, was to live through a night of unspeakable terror. Like most residents of the city, I watched the slaughter unfold in real-time on television. There was a stuttering commentary as French news presenters tried, and failed, to understand what was happening – the gunfire, the dead bodies, and the low, keening agony of survivors. All of this was taking place in familiar streets a mile or so from where I lived.
Five days after the massacre, the Islamic State, which by now had claimed proud responsibility for the attacks, published its own account of what had happened. Its official online propaganda magazine Dabiq produced a collage of images, mainly of the dead or dying in the streets of Paris, which were too disturbing to be reproduced in the Western media. Among these was a picture of a semi-naked corpse of a young woman, still dressed in clothes for a Friday night. In the photograph her legs were splayed out and her body ripped open by bullets. Still the editors of Dabiq had blanked out her breasts, genital area and her feet in high-heeled shoes. The Islamists could not lose their neurotic fear of female sexuality even in death, a marker of just how severe and alien their morality was to the Western mind.
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