Were the other attacks a diversion to take out the main target?
Of all the attacks in Paris yesterday, the attack on the Bataclan Theater was the most devastating.
French authorities said more than 80 people died in the club where California-based band Eagles of Death Metal had been playing for about an hour. When the shooting started after four gunmen entered the front of the 1,500-seat theater, dozens struggled to flee out the back alleyway as shots were being fired.
Gunmen who had entered, dressed all in black and armed with AK-47 rifles, calmly opened fire randomly at patrons who dived for cover on the floor, according to radio reporter Julien Pearce, who was near the stage when the shooting started. “The terrorists were very calm, very determined, and they reloaded three or four times,” Pearce said. “I saw 20 to 25 bodies lying on the floor.”
But why the Bataclan, of all the theaters and gathering places in Paris?
The answer may lie in the fact that it is Jewish-owned, and has been a target for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions BDS movement and terrorist threats for years.
This history was first publicized yesterday by the French Le Point magazine (via Google Translate[…]
“We had a planned attack against the Bataclan because the owners were Jewish. “This sentence, chilling under the taking of hostages and the carnage that would have made this Friday,” a hundred dead, “according to police sources, was delivered to the offices of the DCRI, in February 2011. The French services then questioned members of “Jaish al-Islam,” the Army of Islam, suspected of the attack that killed a French student in Cairo in February 2009. They were planning an attack in France and had therefore taken targeted the famous Parisian theater.