I would love to say, when someone claims their deity commanded them to randomly stab three women in a Western capital, that this is indeed novel, random, and totally isolated.
I, of course, cannot, because you can almost certainly guess which deity is involved, and that this is hardly an isolated thing.
According to numerous reports, a man was detained by an off-duty policeman after he attacked three women with butcher knives on Monday in Paris.
Two of the women were in critical condition after the attack, French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez confirmed. One of them was stabbed in the back, the other in the abdomen.
One of the women was pregnant.
“We saw a man walk by with two knives and stab three people,” waitress Kheira Dellabed, who was washing dishes at the time of the attack, said. “Then a young man with a small suitcase hit him with his bag, knocking him to the ground.”
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Here’s the second paragraph of the CBS News report on the stabbing: “The identity of the suspect and his motive were not immediately clear. Parisian authorities were still determining whether to launch a terrorism investigation into the attack.”
Hmm. Unclear motive, no identification. Let’s see if we can get any clarification from The Times of Israel:
“It is Allah who commanded me,” the man lying on the floor said. The Times reported that a police source said the man told officers, “Allah sent me to kill women.”
Well, I mean, secondhand reports. It’s not like there’s video of this.
Ah. Well.
This man obviously seems mentally ill, to be fair. However, this comes after a week in which people who always initially had “unclear motives” in media reports engaged in attacks with very clear motives.
In Berlin, for instance, an LGBT “pride” parade was attacked by an Islamist radical who drove a vehicle into the crowd, killing one. Initial headlines, like this one from The New York Times, seemed to blame this on the… car.
Breaking News: A car plowed through a park during Berlin’s biggest LGBTQ Pride event, killing at least one person and injuring more than a dozen others, city police officials said on Saturday. https://t.co/NlqLMjtJB1
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 25, 2026
After it came out that this was the work of a Muslim terrorist who had tried to join the Islamic State group, who was later killed in a police raid, organizers of the “pride” parade insisted that this not be politicized.
And meanwhile, in New York City itself, two men were recently stabbed by an assailant yelling “Allahu Akbar!” At least Mayor Zohran Mamdani would call it what it was and didn’t insinuate that there was no motive or that the knife committed the attack.
However, he added this: “The NYPD’s initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor. They are also evaluating these stabbings as potential hate crimes.”
Perhaps. In fact, in all three instances, I’d argue that mental health probably played a role. If, in three separate countries, three Christians or three Jewish people committed acts of terror in the name of their God, we’d be talking about Christian nationalism or Zionism being a scourge, even if mental health was a factor.
That these hypotheticals rarely if ever happen shows precisely why we can’t just wave this away as if it were merely an isolated episode, especially when three episodes drop in three different Western cities in one week.
This article originally appeared on The Western Journal and is reposted with permission.
