‘You will not have my hatred,’ husband of Paris victim tells IS

The husband of one of the 129 victims of the Paris terror attacks last Friday wrote a defiant message on Facebook Monday addressed to the Islamic State, lamenting the loss of his wife in the massacre at the Bataclan music hall, that has since gone viral.

The Bataclan theater, where 89 people were killed by a three-member IS terror squad, was one of seven targets hit Friday night across Paris, which also included the Stade de France, bars and restaurants.

Some 1,500 people were at the Bataclan, attending a concert by the US band, the Eagles of Death Metal, when the terrorists burst through the door and began mowing down people using AK-47s and grenades. A siege then ensued in which those trapped inside were held hostage, some of them picked off one by one by the terrorists.

Police raided the venue hours after the ordeal began, prompting two of the terrorists to detonate their suicide vests, and killing the third.

Helene Muyal-Leiris, a 35-year-old Parisian hair and makeup artist, was one of the victims. She left behind a husband and a 17-month old toddler.

Her husband Antoine Leiris wrote the Facebook post three days after the attack, lashing out at the Islamic State terror group which took responsibility for the sophisticated series of attacks, but promising that they would not have the “gift of [his] hatred.”

In the post, titled “You will not have my hate” — now shared over 70,000 times on the social media site — Leiris speaks of his late wife, his love for her over 12 years and their young son who “for his whole life… will threaten you by being happy and free.”

“Friday night, you took an exceptional life — the love of my life, the mother of my son — but you will not have my hatred. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know, you are dead souls. If this God, for whom you kill blindly, made us in his image, every bullet in the body of my wife would have been one more wound in his heart,” he wrote, in a translation published on The Huffington Post.

“So, no, I will not grant you the gift of my hatred. You’re asking for it, but responding to hatred with anger is falling victim to the same ignorance that has made you what you are. You want me to be scared, to view my countrymen with mistrust, to sacrifice my liberty for my security. You lost,” he went on.

Leiris said that although his wife was no longer alive and that he was devastated by the pain, he believed that “she will be with us every day and that we will find ourselves again in this paradise of free souls to which you have no access.”

“We are just two, my son and me, but we are stronger than all the armies in the world. I don’t have any more time to devote to you, I have to join Melvil who is waking up from his nap. He is barely 17 months old. He will eat his meals as usual, and then we are going to play as usual, and for his whole life this little boy will threaten you by being happy and free. Because no, you will not have his hatred either,” he concludes.