Why Rule Out the Most Likely Explanation?

                                                                         The dog that didn't bark...

The Notre Dame fire started at 6:20pm on April 15th.

Within 2 hours French prosecutors 'ruled out' arson. Nothwithstanding the fact that the fire itself had only just got started.

On the face of it, that was a really odd thing to do.

Were they trying to deflect suspicion from the most obvious suspects, ie, radical Muslims? 

The problem with this explanation is that the declaration from the prosecutor's office just over an hour into the fire does the opposite. This is because at that point the cause of the fire was so obviously unknowable that ruling out arson could only attract attention to it as the cause and to Muslims as the likely perpetrators.

So why make such a weird statement while Notre Dame was burning?

The only other possibility is that 'We are ruling out arson' means 'We will not investigate arson and we are not interested in finding a particular group responsible.'

This has two purposes.

To reassure the 'Muslim community' that they are safe from censure and so keep those community tensions off the boil. 

But more importantly, it is a warning to the state's own investigators, and any journalist tempted to go rogue, not to find anything incriminating against Muslims.

Now I am not saying that the burning of Notre Dame was done by jihadis. I don't know, and I don't know of any hard evidence that it was.

But there sure are a lot of circumstantial indications:

• There have been a lot of attacks on French churches recently including arson and the evidence often points toward Muslims as the culprits.
• ISIS has called specifically for Notre Dame to be destroyed.
• A woman was jailed for 8 years just two weeks ago for being part of such a plot.
• The precautions taken against fire at Notre Dame were so stringent that an accident seems very unlikely.
• And anyhow all workmen had left an hour before the fire started.
• It happened in Holy Week.
• It happened at the most suspicious time just after closing.

The balance of probabilities therefore points clearly to arson.

The French prosecutor's statement could only be designed to warn people off from investigating the most likely cause.

The financial cost of the fire at Notre Dame is estimated at a billion euro.

The cost to France's heritage and sense of identity is infinitely greater.

The cost to people's trust in their authorities of making such obviously false declarations is also profound.

Isn't it amazing that despite such vast costs the French state is determined to turn a blind eye.

It seems that there is no cost too high to protect multicultural pieties.



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