By now everybody knows about the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, where three Muslim jihadists armed with AK-47’s and a rocket launcher stormed the offices of the French equivalent of Mad Magazine and ended up harvesting a dozen infidels for the sin of satire.

It’s the latest in an intensifying string of jihadist attacks on the French people, and it’s also the latest reprisal in the “Danish cartoon” mess. The terrorists apparently bellowed that they had “avenged the Prophet” as they left the scene of the crime.

And on their way out, this happened (the truly shocking part is about a minute in)…

That’s apparently one of the two policemen assigned to protect Charlie Hebdo’s offices (a detail that was assigned after the Muslims firebombed the place in 2011). They wounded him, and then ran up and shot him in the head.

Claire Berlinsky, writing at Ricochet, has an amazing first-hand account from the scene…

If I sound incoherent, it’s because I am shaken. The reasons will be obvious.

I had no intention of reporting on this from the scene of the Charlie-Hebdo massacre. I was walking up Boulevard Richard Lenoir to meet a friend who lives in the neighborhood. But the moment I saw what I did, I knew for sure what had happened. A decade in Turkey teaches you that. That many ambulances, that many cops, that many journalists, and those kinds of faces can mean only one thing: a massive terrorist attack.

I also knew from the location just who’d been attacked: Charlie-Hebdo, the magazine known for many things, but, above all, for its fearlessness in publishing caricatures of Mohamed. They’d been firebombed for this in 2011, but their response — in effect — was the only one free men would ever consider: “As long as we’re alive, you’ll never shut us up.”

They are no longer alive. They managed to shut them up.

The only thing I didn’t immediately know was how many of them had died.

All of them, it seems, or close enough. So did two police officers who had been assigned to protect their offices. Twelve are dead for sure; I assume that number will rise; seven are seriously injured. It was at the time I was there unclear how many were wounded.

And the attackers are still at large.

Given that two police officers are dead, now doesn’t seem the time to say what comes to mind about the fact that the assailants escaped. It will say this much though: if they’re not dead before nightfall, I’ll say exactly what comes to mind, respect for the dead be damned.

I did what I could as a journalist but — since it wasn’t my plan to be one — I was there with neither a camera nor even a notebook. And it didn’t seem the time to ask the police to prioritize me. There were more than enough journalists on the scene and I doubt I’d have done better than they will.

What we know is this: at least two masked attackers. Kalashnikovs. Gunmen who shouted, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad.” Rumors of a rocket launcher, but I suspect we should wait for confirmation on that; eyewitnesses tend to get confused about these things, especially when unused to seeing them.

This is the deadliest terrorist attack in France since World War II, and it’s the deadliest attack in Europe since the London Tube attacks in 2005.

Sure, this kind of atrocity isn’t what all Muslims want. Sure, it’s just a minority of Muslims. Sure, there are other things motivating people to commit terrorism. But are you kidding? Let’s not insult each other’s intelligence. We all know that we have a civilizational struggle going on that has been extant since the foundation of that ideology (and Islam is an ideology with a religion wrapped around it).

Nobody in the West, or at least nobody in a position of power, has shown the stones to deal with this problem. Nobody has recognized that Islam, or at least this brand of it which is being spread by Saudi petrodollars in mosques all over the world, is incompatible with western civilization. Instead the politicians just throw open the doors to unlimited immigration from Muslim countries and act surprised when those immigrants refuse to assimilate and act more like colonists.

Well, this is the result. This is what you get. France commits itself to freedom of speech, which includes satire, and the unassimilated respond to that satire with gunfire and death.

And how will the French respond?

How will they respond?