The knife attack on a village ball in Crépol in the south of France which took the life of 16-year-old Thomas Perrotto and left two other partygoers in critical condition last weekend has been described as a “terror attack” (attentat) by attendees. The incident has been commonly described as a “brawl” (rixe) in French mainstream media, with the implication that it was sparked by some prior dispute. But attendees and their families adamantly reject this description, insisting on the fact that the assailants – teenagers and young adults like their victims – came armed and presumably with the intention of using their weapons.
The French regional newspaper the Dauphiné Libéré visited Crépol the day after the attack to talk with some 20 youngsters, aged 16 to 18, who witnessed the attack. Some of them were accompanied by their mothers. “Some media are saying that it was a brawl or payback,” one mother told the newspaper. “That’s not true! We can’t let them say that!”
The Dauphiné article provides the account of one young partygoer who was himself wounded in the attack:
We were having fun, we were with friends, having a good time together, and towards the end [of the ball], some people turned up. I heard there was a ruckus outside, people were crowded together. I went out and I was stabbed with a knife in the shoulder and in the back. I saw my friend Thomas get stabbed, I got scared and went back into the ballroom. I saw another friend of mine get stabbed in the back, I put pressure on his wound to make a tourniquet. His kidney was hit. It was horrifying. For me, it was clearly a terror attack [attentat]. The assailants said: “We’re here to stab white people.”
A second young man confirmed this account:
It wasn’t just a fight like we’re used to, where people throw little punches at each other. We all went to village balls this summer. In a good ball, there’s always a fight at the end. Otherwise, it’s not a good ball. But it wasn’t like that. We saw between 15 and 20 people turn up. We didn’t know them. They pulled out knives. They were there to kill. We experienced it as a terror attack!
The local affiliate of France3 public television gathered similar testimony in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Maxence, a friend of Thomas, described the violence as gratuitous:
A bouncer had his fingers and wrist slashed. One of my classmates was stabbed with a knife. My best friend [Thomas] being given CPR. It’s the worst feeling in the world.
A mother described her children’s reaction:
Their first words were: there’s blood everywhere. It was all over his clothes. It was a slaughter. It was a gratuitous attack… we don’t understand.
The racial or ethnic aspect evoked in some of this testimony has been treated gingerly or not at all in the French national media. (Though an interview with Thomas’s mother in the mass-circulation French weekly Paris-Match cites concordant testimony.) The assailants are reported to have mostly come from the housing projects of la Monnaie, a troubled neighbourhood in nearby Romans-sur-Isère with a large population of North African Arab origins.
This is undoubtedly what inspired the local Islamic Association of Romans to issue a statement to the Dauphiné libéré condemning the attack. It reads in part:
We are father, mother, brother, sister, we are residents of Romans, residents of the surrounding villages and it is for all these reasons that we are deeply affected by the attack which led to the death of Thomas and has given rise to so much sorrow for his family and his friends. … As representatives of the Muslim religious community, but also as actors involved in the life of our city, we strongly condemn these despicable acts which led to the death of a young man who was barely 16.
In the meanwhile, the Dauphiné libéré has released extensive audio of its encounter with the young people who lived through that Crépol attack. The youngsters’ testimony is harrowing. Many of them, especially the young women, are sobbing as they recount the experience.
Echoing the first, the second young man quoted above explicitly states, “I clearly heard the phrase, word for word: ‘We’re here to kill white people.'”
All of the youngsters emphasise that there was no dispute, no background to the attack, no ‘payback’: that they did not even know the assailants. Again and again, they use the word attentat – the French term for a terror attack – to describe what transpired. They describe taking refuge inside the ballroom while the ‘slaughter’, as they put it, continued outside; they describe the guards or bouncers who had been hired for the evening insisting that they stay inside, even as some wanted to go back out to help their fallen comrades; they describe seeing the floors and walls covered in the blood of those who had already been wounded.
Asked how the ‘slaughter’ finally came to an end, one young man responds simply: “They finished what they came to do.”
Translations from the French by the author.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
That too could backfire & morph into a digital ID for children, the very society which needs to be avoided at all costs, for their ‘safety’.
It will be tracking & tracing of children. Truly terrifying.
How about parents take some responsibility for setting up controls? Difficult to do? Yes. But parenting isn’t easy.
treason
/ˈtriːz(ə)n/
noun
the crime of betraying one’s country.
The abuse of our language becomes more aggregious day by day so I thought it pertinent to provide a dictionary definition and this is from ‘Oxford Dictionaries.’
Is anybody, certainly on here, under any allusions that our government is and has been for over 2.5 years acting daily in a treasonous manner?
We are being insulted, betrayed, denigrated, laughed at on a daily basis. Just one example from yesterday, the F & C spending, whoops ‘investing,’ £11.6 million, or was it billions, and who cares, in taking over coffee plantations in Mexico. Yet this government knows very well that people in this country will shortly be facing live or die questions such as ‘heat or eat.’ If this is not bald, naked treason I don’t know what is.
Would it be surprising if the BBC even now was rehearsing some funeral footage or doctoring some old Stalingrad films in order to present the nation’s dire Winter plight? The queues outside the soup kitchens doubling as warm centres and the pitiful sites outside food banks.
Let’s be in no doubt and no need to corrupt our wonderful language, we are being assaulted and betrayed by a treasonous government.
Government = Mafia
I wish I felt this wasn’t an eternal truth.
Knowing this makes a lot of things easier to understand and deal with.
I’ve posted this before but it bears reposting as it seems to me an excellent from the horse’s mouth insight into how these people think. It’s from Michael Wendling of the BBC disinformation unit, in answer to a complaint I made about unbalanced reporting of an early anti-lockdown protest. He clearly doesn’t see his customers as adults and he’s not ashamed to admit it.
“Of course those who believe in conspiracy theories are not going to call their beliefs conspiracy theories, and are going to call themselves mainstream, moderate people.
We viewed footage of the speakers and spoke to people who were there.
We have no obligation to give a platform to erroneous ideas. We don’t, to take an extreme example, broadcast the manifestos of mass murderers alongside police statements so that people can “make up their own minds”.
I’m not saying the people there were violent. Some of them were (as the story reflected) were drawn by legitimate concerns. But the speakers (Mr Icke and others) were not expressing mainstream views that would benefit from airing and debate.”
It’s that 1% again… 99% are worried about energy costs, rising prices, jobs, crime/policing, education, medical care, but top of the agenda for the 1% is climate change, ‘misinformation’, Russia/Ukraine, gender/homosexuality, racism, hate speech.
Indeed
A nut job conspiracy theorist would think that small groups of powerful people are manipulating the narrative and pushing the 1% issues for their own ends
I have a YouGov account and every second survey has questions about sustainability and diversity etc regardless of the subject- they want to make people think these things are what we should be worrying about
Why do you have a YouGov account?!
I started during covid when they kept quoting polls that said the public supported lockdowns. I thought I should try and correct the imbalance. I’ve carried on doing the same thing with questions regarding their or their clients’ woke agendas. They give you a bit of money from time to time, though that’s not my main reason for doing it.
Fair enough. I tried that for the same reasons but the endless questions about B list personalities was eroding my brain.
I’ve never heard of any of them so I just switch off for those bits
I find it an interesting insight into what the enemy are thinking
I would pay good money to know the extent to which all the woke agenda type questions are requested by clients or suggested by YouGov staff. I reckon mainly the latter as they are almost always worded the same.
The left are better at pushing their causes in general because they find the most abhorrent opponents to their causes and then paint everyone who doesn’t support them with the same brush.
If the right did the same thing then anyone who even said a peep in favour of the Online Safety Bill, even if the views were reasonable like wanting to make sure children didn’t see pornography, then we would loudly and aggressively call them totalitarians.
Our “problem” is that we don’t do that. We try to engage reasonably. But of course it’s a losing battle. We’re bringing knives to the fight while they’re bringing semi-automatic assault rifles.
Funny you should mention this, because this popped up in my YouTube suggestions today and Victor Davis Hanson from just under 4 minutes in has some interesting things to say on this subject: Victor Davis Hanson: This is why the left feels ‘morally superior’ – YouTube
Good stuff. VDH is a legend. I love the clarity with which he conveys his messages.
Unless some mandatory, digital ID scheme which can’t be forged, at least not easily, is introduced, there’s no way to determine if someone sitting in front of a web browser is legally minor or not. Hence, it makes ‘fuck all’ of a difference if this bill is said to be about child protection or about the proper rearing of wild Tibetan donkeys. The effect will be universal censorship by default in order to ensure that no unsupervised children can ever access something the goverment says they must not access.
Policing their children’s behaviour is responsibilty of the parents.
“Policing their children’s behaviour is responsibilty of the parents.”
Absolutely, and there are already lots of tools available to help with this, though I still think the best approach is to talk to them, set an example, and trust them as long as they repay that trust.
Precisely. To see what happens when it goes wrong, look to the publicity given to Ian Russell
Yes, but where ARE the adults these days, hm?
I would argue that the greatest source of misinformation in the last 50 years has been the US Government.
The list of prohibited subjects will be attached in a Statutory Instrument because that can be amended almost immediately by a Minister if “there is an emergency” – with no oversight by Parliament whatsoever.
It will be a Dictators charter.
We have been bombarded with misinformation by the Government for the past 2 years but they have sought to silence whistle-blower experts who were challenging the official narrative. That alone is proof that an Online Harms Bill should never go ahead. It will silence dissenters and critical-thinkers. It’s the equivalent of the Medieval Inquisition and the ban on the Bible being translated from Latin into languages ordinary people could understand for fear it would “challenge the Priesthood.”
But how can we posibly disagree with more censorship when Ian Russell is assuaging his feelings of guilt over his daughter’s suicide by emoting all over the MSM?