By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
During the weekend of June 20, the Fete de la Musique took place in France. This annual collection of mostly-outdoor concerts was held in multiple cities across the country, and was accompanied this year with reports of numerous young women, primarily teenagers, being jabbed with syringes by strangers moving quickly through the crowds.
It has apparently happened in past years and escaped global notice before; in the past, the government dismissed it as merely a lot of girls imagining things. France’s alleged Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul-Malak brushed off past reports as “a psychotic phenomenon rather than a real one.”
This time, however, with at least 145 reported attacks – and hundreds more unreported ones estimated – there is no covering it up. The story has made the world news, and the French public is calling for the issue to be taken seriously.
Some of the girls are believed to have been jabbed with an empty needle, just to scare them; others were certainly injected with something, though the reporting (English language, at least) has little detail as of this writing. All that’s been publicized so far is that some felt sick, or felt the kind of soreness at the injection site that one gets after receiving a vaccine.
French bureaucrats asked about the issue say they naturally assume it’s Rohypnol (the most famous of the date-rape drugs), but that’s a guess without toxicological reports to back it up; it sounds unlikely, doesn’t it, that random attackers would use a date-rape drug on someone they weren’t planning on raping?
Whatever the injection may be – and it could easily be a variety of substances – the crime is definitely a dangerous one. In addition to the inherent hazards of the drug itself, there’s the risk of spreading infections as (presumably) the same needle is used, again and again, to attack multiple victims at a single festival.
The press reports that at least 14 people have been detained, not all yet placed under arrest, for these nationwide, and presumably coordinated, attacks. All that the government was willing to say about the suspects is that some are French citizens and others are foreign nationals. In France, this usually means the criminals in question are muslim immigrants of middle eastern ethnicity, but of course that, too, is just an educated guess, as of now.
The professional activist class always warns Western Society of the threat of mass shootings, but as we see from these French Music Festival injections, there are certainly plenty of other types of mass attacks to worry about.
We have, for example, seen dozens of automobile attacks in Europe and North American in recent years, such as the Waukesha, WI Christmas Parade in 2021, in which Darrell Brooks, a violent lifelong criminal and black muslim jihadist, inexplicably out on a no-cash bail at the time, intentionally drove an SUV into a suburban parade, killing six innocent pedestrians and injuring 62 more.
We have seen numerous mass stabbing attacks, such as the Pilot gas station attack in Knoxville, TN in 2020, in which Idris Abdus-Salaam attacked four innocent victims with a knife, killing three and severely injuring the fourth. There are more of these in Western countries with gun control, which the killers happily use knives, swords or axes just as lethally.
We have seen public transit bombing attacks, in which innocent, unrelated commuters, with nothing in common other than having chosen the same bus or train that day, are murdered by terrorists with explosives. In the 2004 Madrid bombings known as 11M, for example, coordinated bombings took almost 200 lives and injured 2500 more. Al Qaeda took credit for that one.
We have seen poisonings, in which toxins are introduced to foods, beverages, even ventilation systems to attack as many people as possible. In 1995, a coordinated sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway system killed 12 and injured 5500 others. In 1982, a few pills of over-the-counter painkiller Tylenol were poisoned with cyanide, killing several random victims in Illinois and changing the way the industry packages pharmaceutical products.
These are just a few of the most famous cases of each of these types of mass murders, representing countless more stabbings, bombings, poisonings, and vehicular rammings over the years. Every year there are many more of these attacks, in big cities and small, both in the United States and abroad. Some make the national and international news; most do not.
And now, perhaps, we need to add syringe injections to this list of fears. Not to unnecessarily frighten the readers, but because we all need to be aware of the risks of the modern world. Note that this series of needle stabbings doesn’t appear to have been fatal. The 2025 Music Festival attacks may have been a dress rehearsal for some future coordinated attacks – next time, who knows what might be in those syringes?
More importantly, why should we pay attention to this issue? Why remember all these attacks, most of them in public places – to scare us all out of going out in public? To keep us home, locked up in our apartments or basements, like the nanny state told us to do during the Covid panic of 2020?
Certainly not.
We should consider these cases, keeping this broad and terrible variety in mind, whenever politicians and pundits sanctimoniously tell us that the one and only primary solution to crime is “gun control.”
“Just take away the guns,” we are told, and the dangers will dissolve into the ether.
Well, the real world doesn’t work like that. Guns are just one of many potential murder weapons.
With rudimentary knowledge of chemicals, a criminal can build a bomb or distribute poison. With a simple kitchen knife, a maniac can slash and stab numerous victims before he is subdued. Every doctor and nurse, every hospital, every patient who needs to self-medicate must have access to syringes. And practically everyone in the civilized world has access to a vehicle.
For far too long, the Left’s one-size-fits-all, knee-jerk response to the problems of crime and violence in society has been to disregard the criminals, and just take away the firearms of innocent people.
The multitude of vicious crimes committed with weapons other than firearms proves the emptiness of their approach.
Crimes are committed by criminals. The only way to control crime is to reduce the number of criminals walking around free.
That means border controls, to keep foreign criminals out of our country. It means gang crime units and RICO prosecutions to eradicate organized crime. It means getting rid of the popular “thousand dollar minimum” for prosecuting crimes in our big cities, which lets almost all criminals off the hook. It means stiff sentencing of convicted offenders, to keep proven criminals off the streets for years instead of hours.
And most importantly, it means returning to the Judeo-Christian values on which our nation was founded.
As much as possible, children need to be raised in traditional nuclear families, with law-abiding parents as role models, who take their kids to church or synagogue – who help them do their homework at night, and who instill in their children the great American “Protestant work ethic” that built this nation.
At this writing, we don’t know exactly who went around the French music festivals, jabbing innocent young women with needles. Sometimes we know who commits these crimes, and sometimes we never find out.
But we know what we can do to reduce the odds of such crimes. Removing known criminals from society through the criminal justice system. Controlling the borders to keep out foreign threats. And relying on the American people, family by family, church by church, community by community, to raise their own children with the proper respect for life, liberty and property that the modern Left disdains.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
