08-Jan-16: In Paris, a religious man with a butcher knife (but no bomb) is stopped

Police at the scene in Paris yesterday [Image Source]

France, after the mass Islamist-terror killings of Friday November 13, 2015, is not the place it was, and might not ever be again.

Yesterday (Thursday), almost a year to the minute after the Islamist killings at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris (followed a few days later by the murders at the Hypercacher Jewish supermarket), a young man  shouting "Allahu akbar!" ("God is greater"), wielding a butcher knife and carrying a document with an Islamic State emblem and what AFP calls "an unequivocal claim of responsibility in Arabic", was shot dead by French police. This happened just before noon in the "multi-ethnic" Goutte d'Or neighborhood of nothern Paris.

The shouting man was said to be wearing an explosives vest, creating the impression of being a human bomb with some ideology on his mind. But after he had been killed, the vest turned out to be some sort of fake. The butcher knife however was a butcher knife.

Scores of police descended Thursday on the northern neighborhood that was the site of the attempted attack, blocking it off to pedestrians and ordering shops to close. Metro stations in the area, which is not far from the Montmartre district that is home to the Sacre Coeur Cathedral, were closed and buses halted, leaving scores of residents, including many elderly, to walk long distances only to find they could not get into their homes. "It's like the Charlie Hebdo affair isn't over," said Nora Borrias, a 27-year-old waiting for her barricaded street to reopen. She said she no longer feels a sense of safety...  [Agence France-Press, January 8, 2016]

Goutte d’Ord neighborhood: Martin Parr has been photographing its
cultural diversity for years [Image Source]

The assailant has not yet been publicly identified. French security officials are said to be "working on the hypothesis" that he is a 20-year-old Moroccan Arab who took part in a robbery in France's Var region in 2013. Fingerprints are reported to be part of the reason for the connection. That robber identified himself at the time as Ali Sallah of Casablanca. The authorities worked out that whatever his name, he had been in France illegally and was ordered to leave the country after robbery. Did he leave? Is this the same person? No one seems to know.

But identities tend to be fluid in matters like urban Islamist terror. And so too are matters of individual and public security:

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve praised the “remarkable work” of the security forces in the incident. “In a country where the level of threat is extremely high, the police, gendarmes, the security forces... are on the frontline,” he said... “Faced with these adversaries, it is essential that every service – police, gendarmerie, intelligence, military – work in perfect harmony, with the greatest transparency, and that they share all the information at their disposal,” he said. [Agence France-Press, January 8, 2016]

French criticism of Israel's pre-occupation with Palestinian Arab terror has long been a fixture in France/Israel discourse. For instance, this mild-ish statement from not so long ago by a foreign ministry spokesperson in Paris objecting to measures taken by Israel against Islamist and other terrorist actions:

"France condemns the consequences of the raid," he said. "While we are all for Israeli security, France recalls the utmost necessity to avoid civilian harm,"

In Israel, there's wall-to-wall agreement about that necessity. But France's security people and Israel's know there are times when you must act quickly and decisively even when there's a risk, as seems to have happened in Paris yesterday, that the attacker did not actually have a bomb on his body - only a butcher knife.

17-Dec-15: Trying to understand why there's so much understanding of incomprehensible barbarism

The caption to this Independent UK news photo from January 2015
says it shows Kerry giving “Paris a big hug” by "clasping Francois
Hollande in a warm embrace... after America failed to send
a senior figure to last Sunday’s huge march in Paris."

Nick Cohen's place in the world to come was assured once he published "What's Left?: How the Left Lost Its Way" (2007), which he describes as the story of how the liberal left of the 20th century came to support the far-right of the 21st.

We have just read a powerful opinion piece of his in the on-line edition of Standpoint Magazine (January/February 2016), "Shame On The Liberals Who Rationalise Terror". We hope it gets plenty of attention and comment. Here is how it starts:

After the massacres in Paris on November 13, the US Secretary of State John Kerry made a statement so disgraceful you had to read it, rub your eyes, and read it again to comprehend the extent of his folly: “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” Kerry began in the laboured English of an over-promoted middle manager. 

“There was a sort of particularised focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorise people.” 

Did you get that? Then allow me to translate. Kerry believes the satirists Islamist gunmen killed at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris’s 11th arrondissement on January 5 had it coming. It is not that they deserved to die. John Kerry is a New England liberal, after all, and does not endorse the death penalty for journalists. But liberalism is a two-faced creed. It can mean that you believe in individual freedom and abhor every variety of prejudice, including the prejudice that allows men to shoot journalists dead for producing a magazine they disapprove of.  Or it can mean that you go to such lengths to take account of your enemy’s opinions you become indistinguishable from him. 

Cohen's 2007 book

John Kerry’s liberalism, and the liberalism of millions like him, ignores Chesterton’s warning not to be so open-minded that your brains fall out. Kerry wanted to understand radical Islam and to seek the root causes of its apparently psychopathic violence. Not for him the knee-jerk condemnations of a red-state redneck. When Kerry applied his nuanced and expensively educated mind to the corpses in the magazine office, he discovered that the dead had provoked their own murders. The assassins had, well, if not quite legitimate reasons, then certainly a “rationale” which explained why they were “really angry because of this and that”. 

Charlie Hebdo mocked the prophet Muhammad, Islamic State and Boko Haram. Its editor Stéphane Charbonnier (aka Charb), the cartoonists and columnists who wrote for him, and the police officers who died protecting their freedom (and ours) knew the risks and paid the price. They went looking for trouble and we should not be shocked that they found it. 

All the rest of us had to do was to moderate our behaviour. If we were careful not to make terrorists “really angry” about “this and that”, we would be safe... ["Shame On The Liberals Who Rationalise Terror", Nick Cohen, Standpoint Magazine]

(The full text of Secretary of State John Kerry's November 17, 2015 speech is here.)

We see far too much of the approach Cohen describes in the work-product not only of political figures but also of journalists, reporters and analysts. It's not called "avoid offending the terrorists and that way we'll be OK". That's a pity because if it were, the underlying psychological process of intimidation/compliance would be more obvious. And people might be able to make better assessments of what their political leaders are doing. It really matters.

It's not merely compliance. Consider what Kerry said towards the end of the remarks - speaking to staff and families at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, quoted above:

So our challenge is to stop the immediate threat, obviously, and destroy it, while we eliminate the people going into the pool by providing those other options – by reaching them before they’re radicalized; by getting people to see there is better governance, there are better opportunities. And globally, we have a lot of work to do that. That’s what’s brought all of you into this place, into this business of diplomacy, of caring and trying to take America’s values and help to spread them around the world. But we don’t force them on people. We give people a choice. Everybody has their choice. We offer them because we believe it’s the best way to provide security, the best way to provide opportunity, and the best way to respect individual rights and the ability of any individual to be able to choose for themselves who they want to be and what they want to be, without disturbing other people, and certainly without killing.

Disturbing. How many moons are there on the planet where the Secretary of State lives?

15-Dec-15: Unwanted questions that today's European terror arrests raise

Coulibaly: How lone was he? [Image Source]

What do we know about the terrorists behind the bloody attacks in Paris on a kosher food-market in January, and on multiple Paris restaurant and concert venue targets on Friday, November 13? Less than we need to know. Less than most people think we know.

There's a wave of terror-related arrests going on in Western Europe today.

Concerning those multiple Paris massacres that cost the lives of 130, here's what the news services say today:

But three of the nine attackers have yet to be identified, including two of the three suicide bombers who blew themselves up outside the Stade de France stadium, who appear to have used fake passports to sneak into Europe posing as refugees... Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old French citizen thought to have played a key logistical role, is still on the run and subject to an international arrest warrant... [Aljazeera, December 15, 2015]

There has been anxious debate inside Europe over the need to review its internal open border policies. Some politicians and policy-makers and plenty of observers, have been asserting that the terrorist attackers were born in the EU or had EU citizenship, which is another way of suggesting that terror-minded people sneaking into Europe posing as refugees is not the essence of the problem.

But if the hordes penetrating Europe from the Arab world - not all of them, but that's hardly the point - are more involved in terror than many want to believe, then the challenges facing governments and police are orders of magnitude more complicated. It's not a viewpoint that brings much joy. But it might be inescapable.

It was also widely publicized back in January that those Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher terrorists were "self-radicalized" (a very difficult expression to parse) and essentially lone-wolf operators. Now we learn that two of three suspected terrorists in today's news headlines are being interrogated in relation to those Hypercacher killings where the mainstream view had been of a lone wolf attack done by Amedy Coulibaly, an Islamist.

Seen via the prism of today's developments, it's possible that both core assumptions are wrong. If so, the issue of terrorists posing as refugees might have to become a bi-partisan concern, not merely a political slogan.

14-Nov-15: The Friday 13th terror assault on Paris

CNN Friday night

The shocking Friday 13th terror attacks reported from Paris last night penetrated our awareness only this evening (Saturday night) with the departure of the Sabbath.

Before trying to make any sense of the events, here (for our benefit as much as for those following our blog) is a rundown on what happened, based on timelines published by FRANCE 24 and The Guardian.

To start with what we know now, the bare numbers. 129 people were killed (as of late Saturday evening), scores have been injured, about 80 people are in critical condition, after a series of coordinated terror attacks late Friday at six separate sites in Paris, including a football stadium, several restaurants and a concert/events hall. The jihadists of ISIS have claimed that this was their work.

Friday, November 13 | 9:20 pm Paris time

• First reports of multiple shootings and explosions in Paris. At the Stade de France stadium, about 80,000 spectators, including French President François Hollande and the German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, are watching the French soccer team play Germany in a non-competition match. Three explosions shake the stadium at 9.17 pm local time, 9.30 pm and 9.53 pm. Two of them are at the entrances; one is just outside a McDonalds fast-food shop. Police tell everyone to move out of the stands and onto the pitch and await further instructions. One person was killed in the blast. There are three human bombs. They die in the explosions.
• Eagles of Death Metal, a music group on tour from the US, are performing to a sell-out crowd of about 1,500 at the Bataclan concert hall in the 11th Arrondissement. Gunfire directed at people sitting in the audience kills several starting at 9:50 pm while the gunmen shriek "Allahu Akbar". (FRANCE 24 translates this as "God is great". In fact, it means "God is greater", which means something significantly different. The Guardian report renders it as "God is greatest".) The four shooters are wearing black and firing AK-47s. All are young - under 25. The Guardian says they "fire calmly, repeatedly and randomly into the densely packed audience. It is dark. The venue is filled with screams. The shooters reload three to four times". The gunmen take about 20 hostages and a stand-off starts as people try to flee the building by every possible means. The Guardian quotes one of many social media messages evidently emerging from inside: "I’m heavily wounded. Please police you have to launch an assault, there are still people alive here but they are killing them one by one.” Around midnight, French special forces storm the building. Three of the gunman die by their own hand, possibly with the help of explosive belts. The fourth is shot dead. By dawn, reports say the death toll is a horrific 87. 
• Reports come in of a series of murderous attacks on people in restaurants. Just outside La Belle Equipe, a restaurant at the corner of Rue de Charonne and rue Faidherbe a gunman is seen emerging from a car holding a high calibre weapon that he begins to fire ("calmly" says The Guardian) at patrons sitting outside on the terrace. The shootings lasted about 3 minutes and the gunman got back into his car and left.” The death toll: 19 people.
• On Boulevard Voltaire, a man explodes with the help of an explosive belt, at 9.45 pm. It's thought he may have been "involved" in the attack on the nearby Bataclan concert hall. Voltaire is the broad avenue along which a handful of the world's political leaders walked, and preened for the news cameras, exactly ten months ago on January 12, 2015 in the wake of the Islamist murders at the Charlie Hebdo cartoon offices. (Here's a reminder via Associated Press.)
• Two restaurants - Le Carillon bar and restaurant; and le Petit Camboge, both on Rue Alibert, close to Place de la République - come under attack at about the same time as the other assaults. One eye-witness (here) says there are two assailants driving cars with Belgian license plates, young, perhaps late teens or 20. Fourteen are left dead. Many more are seriously injured. 
• Casa Nostra, Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi, close to the landmark Place de la République in the 11th Arrondissement, Gunman in black, with a heavy weapon, opens fire on people seated on the terrace of the popular pizzeria, while standing in a shooting position: right leg forward, left leg back. Eyewitness: Gunmen appears calm, does not utter a word, swivels, shoots through a car driver’s window before walking into the cafe. More shots, then quiet. Police arrive and find five people have been murdered. The gunman escapes.

Rue Voltaire ten months ago when world leaders united to assure Parisians
of endless support in their struggle against militantism [Image Source]

Friday, November 13 | 10:30 pm Paris time

• French President François Hollande arrives at the Interior Ministry to "monitor the situation".
• Several Paris metro stations are shut down on police instructions.

Friday, November 13 | 11:45 pm Paris time

• Death toll announced as "at least 35"
• President Barack Obama condemns the attacks as an "attack on all of humanity".
• Paris hospitals go into emergency mode.

Saturday, November 14 | 12:01 am

• Hollande declares a state of emergency and announces the closure of France's borders.
• A few minutes later, police storm the Bataclan with the horrifying results we mentioned above.
• Hollande visits the Bataclan; vows to lead a "merciless" fight against terrorists.
• Additional 1,500 French soldiers are immediately deployed to Paris.
• Death toll is raised to "at least 120".

Saturday, November 14 | Early morning hours

• Cancellation of numerous sporting events is announced, along with closing of numerous public facilities, schools, markets, museums, tourist sites in Paris area.
• Security checks (according to The Guardian) are immediately stepped up in several European capitals.
• ISIS (which large parts of the mainstream media are still calling a "militant group" today) claims responsibility for the attacks.

How shocking is this from the perspective of the French authorities? It's worth recalling now some prescient words expressed in the pages of French Match, a news magazine, just two months ago. Marc Trevidic, France’s outgoing examining magistrate in counter-terrorism cases, said this in September 2015, as rendered into English today in an article headlined "French intelligence under scrutiny in wake of Paris attacks" in The Guardian:

We have now become the Islamic State’s enemy number one... France is the principal target for an army of terrorists of unlimited means. Furthermore it’s also clear that we are particularly vulnerable because of our geographical position, for the ease of entrance on to our territory for jihadists of European origin... Our darkest days are ahead of us. The real war that ISIS intends to wage on our soil has not yet begun.

Now it has.

08-Nov-15: Ten months after murderous "lone wolf" terror attack on HyperCacher Paris, turns out he wasn't alone at all

Paris, January 11, 2015 [Image Source]

Here's a report from a French news source published yesterday that provides evidence - far too late - that yet another so-called "lone wolf" jihadist was connected all along to handlers. And very likely to enablers, to inspirers and to users as well.

The source is "Emails from Paris Kosher store gunman to ‘handler’ revealed" | France24, November 7, 2015]

Amedy Coulibaly, one of the gunmen behind the January attacks on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a Kosher supermarket, shared detailed information before the attacks with an unknown individual from abroad, according to French daily Le Monde.
The newspaper reported on Saturday that it was given access to emails recovered by investigators, including exchanges between Amedy Coulibaly, who held up a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris on January 9 killing four people, and his supposed “handler”. Most of these messages were encrypted according to Le Monde, but a few were written “in clear”, giving an insight into the preparations for the attack.
“I’ve got an AK47 with 275 rounds and six Tokarevs [semi-automatic handguns] with 69 rounds,” wrote Coulibaly, just hours after Said and Cherif Kouachi attacked the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo on the morning of January 7, killing 12 people. “I also have three bullet-proof vests, tactical jackets, tear gas grenades and a stun gun”.
According to Le Monde the person who received the message, whom investigators believe may have been outside of France, replied later that day in recognisably idiomatic French “SMS-speak” giving further instructions.
“OK, do what you can, go home and sleep then hide and check [email] address 1 every day,” the message reads. “Further information will come soon regarding friends who will help. Get rid of your SIM card, check address 1, address 2 is finished.”
A final email from the apparent mission controller, sent on January 8 and obtained by BFM TV on October 13, gave further instructions.
“Impossible to find friends [to help], work alone,” the message reads. “If possible track down and work with the ‘Zigots’ [the code name for the Kouachi brothers]. If possible, in your video explain that you gave them the tools in the name of D [for Daesh, the Arabic word for the Islamic State group] and say which weapons you used.”
The Kouachi brothers, in a call to BFMTV hours before they were killed by police breaking a siege at a print works near Paris, said they had acted in the name of the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabic Paninsula AQAP.
Cherif had travelled to Yemen in 2011. This claim was backed up later on January 9 in a video posted by AQAP spokesman Nasser Ben Ali Al Anassi.
In his suicide video, Coulibaly said he had acted in the name of the Islamic State (IS) group.
Le Monde reported that the latest revelations “suggest that there may have been a link between the two groups.”
Coulibaly's final message, titled “Salam”, asked his handler to take care of his wife, Hayat Boumedienne: “I want the brother to take care of her under the rules of Islam, and to make sure that she does not find herself alone or in a bad financial situation. “Above all, I want her to learn Arabic, the Koran and religious science. The most important is her religion and faith, and here she is going to need help. May Allah help you.”

Coulibaly in Le Monde, October 13, 2015 [Image Source]

The French revelations match similar reports publicized in October:

A day before Amedy Coulibaly took more than 20 hostages and killed four of them, all Jews, at the Hyper Cacher in January, he received an email from an unknown individual with instructions to contact a third party or parties with the code name “zigotos,” the BFMTV station reported yesterday (Oct. 13) based on documents it obtained. The interlocutor, described by some French media as Coulibaly’s handler, provided an email address associated with a communications firm in Pennsylvania, the French news agency AFP reported... “Work alone. Go for the easiest, the surest and most numerous. Maybe in the [city] edges in case of problems in the center. You know best,” one set of instructions transmitted to Coulibaly read... [Source]

Back in January, the idea that Coulibaly was operating as a "lone wolf", perhaps inspired by feelings of alienation or frustration, or maybe just having a really bad hair day, were everywhere in the news media. A Washington Post analysis published on January 11, 2015, referred to the absence of evidence that the killer

had been in contact with the Islamic State before his assault on the supermarket [and] may represent another example of the “lone wolf” attacks that the Islamic State has inspired, analysts said.

The then-US attorney general Eric Holder, interviewed the same day in The Guardian,

said the US was “at war” with “lone wolf” terrorists... Speaking to NBC from Paris, where he was attending a counter-terrorism summit and the march, Holder said: “That is the thing that I think keeps me up most at night, this concern about the lone wolf who goes undetected.” ["Eric Holder says US ‘at war’ with ‘lone wolf’ terrorists after Paris attacks", The Guardian UK, January 11, 2015]

And Aljazeera, not so terribly surprisingly, went to some lengths to actually refute the idea that the lone-wolf might have secretly been controlled by others:

The complete story behind Coulibaly and the Kouachis may never be known — all three are now dead — but analysts have begun to suspect the men may not have been acting under direct orders from [jihadist] groups. [Aljazeera America, January 13, 2015] 

Making all of this worse is the fact that those French murders from January 2015 continue to be invoked by jihad-minded, would-be killers as a report from just yesterday ["Madrid jihadists planned to kill Jews in Paris copycat action", Times of Israel, November 6, 2015] reminds us. Turns out three members of what's alleged to be a jihadist terror cell in Madrid, all of them Moroccans in their late twenties, all living in Spain on what are called "valid staying permits"

planned to carry out attacks similar to the ones perpetrated by Amedy Coulibaly, who in January murdered four people at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris a day after he gunned down a police officer south of the city. The report, based on information provided by unnamed officials, did not name specific targets... It said they had “planned an imminent attack on security forces or attacks against Jewish interests in the Spanish capital.”

It doesn't say here that these terrorists were "lone wolves". Only that

[T]hey considered themselves affiliated to the Islamic State terrorist organization but never traveled to the Middle East to participate in fighting there... [Times of Israel]

Coulibaly's partner/wife Hayat Boumeddiene escaped to Syria via Turkey a few days before the January massacre and is still at large. Did she manage that on her own?

02-May-15: On a Paris street with some history, a mob of 40 'activists' attacks a pair of young Jews

Boulevard Voltaire, Paris, January 10, 2015: Four months
before Friday's racist attack on two Jews, international leaders march
in solidarity with victims of Islamist acts of murder in Paris.
Lessons plainly not yet learned [Image Source]

Ilan Halimi is the name of a French Jew who, at the age of 23 in 2006 was kidnapped on a Parisian street, then held hostage ("The Barbarians Affair") at a house in the Bagneux neighbourhood and horribly tortured for three full weeks while ransom demands were made on his parents. He was eventually released in shocking condition ("more than 80% of his body had been burned with acid, as well as gasoline") and rushed to hospital but died before getting there.

The street on which Ilan Halimi was abducted is Boulevard Voltaire, in Paris' 11 arrondissement. A French news report [here] says two young Jews were assaulted there yesterday (Friday) afternoon around 2:30 pm and injured. The attackers were... a mob of 40 people.

It's the same street that played a central role in the events described in this report from less than four months ago:

An extraordinary chain of 1.5 million people, led by a group of world leaders linking arms, marched down the Boulevard Voltaire in a show of force Sunday meant to illustrate the power of unity and freedom of expression over the sting of fanaticism and terror. After a barrage of violence that traumatized the nation and left 17 victims dead, the boulevards of Paris produced a striking counterimage: French President François Hollande, arm in arm with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and a host of European and African leaders. An estimated 4 million people nationwide — more than a third of them in Paris — mobilized [etc] ..."Paris is the capital of the world today," Hollande said. ["Massive crowds join march for solidarity in Paris" | Washington Post, January 11, 2015]

According to a French group that monitors anti-semitic attacks in France, Friday's attack mob was made up of individuals belonging to the Israel-hating BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) campaign and a second group called Gaza Firm. Police are investigating.

The writing has long been on France's walls. The question is who is reading.

15-Feb-15: A question from December 2010 that never received a satisfying answer

Copenhagen, 2006 [Image Source: AP]

We responded more than four years ago, here, to Danish reports of a thwarted scheme to "kill as many people as possible" with several questions. In light of events in Copenhagen in the past 18 hours, here is one of them again, verbatim:

Is the essence of this frightening story really the struggle to defend free speech and liberal values, as the Danish prime minister said today? Or (which we believe) is it actually about the enormous life-and-death risks of hosting a militant minority within a democracy-minded, mild-mannered and liberal majority society while growing to understand (slowly, ever so slowly) that the hate-based values being incubated in their midst are not growing more moderate but rather are becoming sharper, more brazen, more toxic and more deadly with time?

15-Feb-15: In Denmark, they may be thinking hard about Charlie Hebdo this morning

Copenhagen overnight [Image Source]

The authorities in Denmark have declared their country to be on high alert. It's too soon for the rest of us, supplied with updates via online news sources and Twitter flashes, to actually know all the facts. But what's known seems to fit with what we knew till now about Europe's ever-sharpening hatred problems.

What we know:

• There was a shooting attack around 3:40 pm Saturday afternoon on the Krudttønden cafe in Østerbro, near the centre of Copenhagen. An event entitled "Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression" was taking place inside. Several people, among them police who were guarding the place and the participants, were injured. One person was killed but no names have been published yet. Inside the cafe, the ambassador to Denmark of France, M Francois Zimeray whom we personally know as an outspoken advocate of human rights, was among the speakers in a forum organized by the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks. Vilks has been the target of death threats for caricatures depicting Muhammad the prophet as an animal, and said yesterday "he believed he was the intended target of the attack. He was unhurt" [BBC] The threats to Vilks over the years have come not only from un-named individuals but from governments including those of Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Jordan [The Guardian UK]. The shooter fled.
• Soon afterwards, Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said Denmark was on high alert.
• Then Saturday night, a gunman opened fire on Copenhagen's Krystalgade street, about 5km (three miles) from the scene of the first attack. Reports say this was at the location of a synagogue, and that one person is dead from a shot to the head and several are injured. The shooter fled.
• It appears [according to a report on Israel radio's 8 am news bulletin] the person shot dead outside the synagogue was a member of the Jewish community doing volunteer guard duty (as has become the practice throughout the world during these tense and dangerous days) while inside a bat mitzvah (coming of age) party was underway with dozens of guests attending. 
• Are the police in Denmark securing Jewish communal events and premises? We don't know but we do recall that a month ago (according to this January 14, 2015 Associated Press report] "Denmark's Jewish community has asked for a police presence outside the Copenhagen synagogue during services and when students arrive and leave the city's Jewish school following the terror attacks in Paris."
• In the night and early hours of this morning, the Danish capital was "abuzz with sirens and helicopters, amid fears that other attacks could be imminent. Police have warned residents that it is not safe to be in the city centre." [BBC].
• At Copenhagen's Noerrebro train station, Danish police said they shot dead a man who opened fire on them [ABC News]. "The police are now investigating if the person could be behind the shootings at Krudttoenden and the synagogue in Krystalgade," according to a police statement.

Assuming the three shooting attacks share a connection and that the first two are not instances of random victims being assaulted for random reasons by random individuals, there may be some conclusions worth writing about.

Meanwhile, in the interests of throwing light on how events of such significance rarely occur in a vacuum, and while keeping our minds open, some comments we published here about Danish events in the past:

• 29-Dec-10: Five questions prompted by a cartoon, several riots and a thwarted massacre
• 13-Dec-12: Europe's ongoing moral collapse: the next chapter
• 27-Feb-13: In Denmark, they have been thinking for a decade about how to deal with racial intolerance. And gotten nowhere.

22-Jan-15: Sleeping lions, hidden vipers: Jewish anxieties are rising in London

Stamford Hill, London: Haredi men walk home from prayer
services last Shabbat [Image Source] 

Jewish life in Europe is going through its most testing phase since the end of the Nazi Holocaust in the Eastern and Central parts of the continent. As happens when people pass through periods of great historic significance, the implications are unclear and confusing now. Time will provide the perspective and context that are eluding people for now. But the signs are there if we only give them our attention.

Several immediate instances to share, all relating to the UK. The first is from a month ago, before the latest murderous outbursts of Islamist violence in Paris:

BBC chief: Anti-Semitism makes me question Jews’ future in UK | Times of Israel | December 21, 2014 | The director of BBC Television said rising anti-Semitism has made him question the long-term future for Jews in the UK. Speaking at a conference in Jerusalem on Sunday, Danny Cohen said the past year had been the most difficult for him as a Jew living in the United Kingdom. “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable being a Jew in the UK as I’ve felt in the last 12 months. And it’s made me think about, you know, is it our long-term home, actually. Because you feel it. I’ve felt it in a way I’ve never felt before actually,”... “And you’ve seen the number of attacks rise. You've seen murders in France. You've seen murders in Belgium. It’s been pretty grim actually. And having lived all my life in the UK, I’ve never felt as I do now about anti-Semitism in Europe.”
Cohen, who grew up and went to school in London — including to a Jewish elementary school — is a TV whiz kid. Still only 40, he was previously the controller of BBC1 TV, the youngest appointee to that post, before taking over a director of BBC Television last year.

London: Armed police on the streets [Image Source]

Yesterday, we saw some quantitative evidence to back up the BBC man's gut feel:

Scotland Yard reveals huge rise in antisemitic crime in London | Rosa Doherty | The Jewish Chronicle | January 21, 2015 | Hate crimes against Jews in London have more than doubled, according to the latest figures from Scotland Yard. The statistics showed there were 299 hate crimes against Jewish people between the start of April and the end of December. That represented a rise of 128 per cent on the same period in 2013, when there were 131 hate crimes. The period in question included the months during the Gaza conflict last summer which led to a substantial increase in antisemitic incidents in Britain. Police said last week that they were increasing patrols in areas with large Jewish communities following the terror attacks in Paris. Scotland Yard said officers were continually liaising with the community. They said they were also reviewing overall security measures and looking at the safety of other minority communities including Muslims, as well as the force’s own officers. Assistant commissioner Mark Rowley said: “The global picture of terrorist activity does give us heightened concern about the risk to the Jewish community in the UK. We are seeing continuing antisemitic rhetoric from extremists and attacks on this community in France and elsewhere.” The new data shows overall hate crime was up 22 per cent to 9,103 incidents between April and the end of December.

While there will always be parts of the mass media that put a sensational spin on the events of reality (for instance, "Britain on beheading alert: Security stepped up for police and Jewish schools", Daily Mail, January 16, 2015; "Could London suffer an attack like Paris? British Jews on alert" in Haaretz, January 15, 2015), it's plain that reality is going through some seriously impactful changes.

Here below, captured inside a London Jewish school (established by Holocaust survivors, it's worth noting) by the BBC, is how those statistics and anecdotes and the visceral anxiety all translate into reality for Jewish children in today's United Kingdom.

As you will hear, they are being taught to act like sleeping lions which may sound morale boosting and vaguely uplifting. It's the exact opposite, and you can hear that the children know it. Click below for the radio program audio, or click here to go to the BBC article page.



One more angle.

When a branch of the J. Sainsbury supermarket chain in London removed all its identifiably-kosher products from  shelves during this past summer, the branch manager of the store in Holborn, central London, justified the astonishing move because of "fears that anti-Israeli protesters would attack it".

A report at the time ["Sainsbury's removes kosher food from shelves amid fears over protesters", The Guardian, August 17, 2014] illustrated how perfectly normal such measures can seem if you are in the mood for them:

"...A staff member defended the decision, saying: "We support Free Gaza"...  A spokesperson for Sainsbury's said it was "an absolutely non-political organisation" and said the food was returned to the shelves "as soon as was practically possible". "It was an isolated decision made by in a very challenging situation," she said. "It was chilled food and he was simply trying to preserve it." ...There would be no investigation or action taken against the branch manager. "It was the manager's decision there and then – not company policy at all. We have had similar demonstrations at stores where people have gone in and removed goods, though no great damage was done. A decision was taken by a store manager faced with a challenging situation outside the store."

In London and the UK and probably Europe too, we fear Jews can expect business managers and public officials to pay very close attention to the preservation of chilled food, and possibly a little less to the rights of people in those societies to go about their lives free of hateful intimidation and life-threatening violence.

The Jewish future in Europe is not what it used to be, and probably never will be again.

20-Jan-15: From the warzones

Belgian armed troops guard a courthouse in Brussels [Image Source]

Berlin, today: Associated Press: After two suspected members of an Islamic terror cell were taken into custody by German police this past Friday (see our post: "16-Jan-15: Scenes from a warzone"), thirteen homes, mostly in Berlin, were raided today by a force of some 200 police "looking for further evidence". Most are Turks, and members of a mosque in Berlin’s Moabit neighborhood, as are the two suspects already in the hands of the police. The group’s leader, identified only as Ismet D. because his privacy is a major pre-occupation of the German law, is accused of recruiting Turkish and Russian nationals to fight against “infidels” in Syria. Emin F. is accused of being in charge of finances. It appears the police think the group's plans did not include attacks within Germany and "were unrelated to the recent attacks in Paris or raids in Belgium". German citizens are doubtless hoping the security men and woman are right.

Paris: How confident ought we to be that sooner or later the authorities in Western Europe are going to get on top of the rapidly metastasizing spread of Islamist terror? CNN doesn't reach a conclusion but reports on a list of what it calls "mishaps" (intelligence failures might be a more useful term) that culminated in the January 7, 2015, Charlie Hebdo massacre.

• French security ended its surveillance of one of the murdering brothers, Cherif Kouachi, in November 2013. They knew he had gotten into the business of selling counterfeit goods, but failed to realize this was how he was financing his purchase of the weapons arsenal discovered after he had been shot dead by police. So he was not on their radar for the year leading up to the execution of the lethal plan.
• A French surveillance agency received an unspecified alert concerning one of the Kouachi brothers in February 2014. How long before this intelligence was passed on to the country's main domestic spy agency? A mere four months. By then, neither of the brothers was under surveillance. Presumably the intelligence was then trashed.
• French surveillance on the other brother, Said Kouachi, ended in June 2014. Why? No one is volunteering an answer, at least not to CNN.
• The authorities in France now say both Kouachis traveled from their homes in Paris to Yemen in 2011 via Oman. But note that Cherif Kouachi's passport had been officially confiscated in 2010. So how could he have gotten across the borders? And neither brother's name has been discovered in any of the relevant government databases of travelers. Which brings up the next point...

Europe: The Wall Street Journal noted yesterday that

"Borderless travel across most of the European Union makes it easy for suspects to cover their tracks. Terror suspects are exploiting the ease of travel across the Continent to stay one step ahead of authorities as they move militants, cash and weapons across the bloc without raising alarms, according to European officials. In some cases, suspects are evading tough antiterrorism laws in countries like France—where travel to Syria and Iraq has been banned—by moving through other EU countries en route to Syria or Iraq. The problem is compounded, officials say, by a lack of coordination between national law-enforcement and intelligence agencies from Brussels to Athens who are straining to pursue suspects across European borders."

14-Jan-15: A reminder that hateful conspiracy theories are not only found in dark corners

The mayor of Turkey's capital city: Dangerous and offensive
conspiratorial views that ought to be more widely recognized [Image Source]

It's too easy for Westerners to skim an article mentioning a man called Melih Gökçek and to ignore what it says.

But for those prepared to drill down a little and to try to understand the non-English-language viewpoints on offer in the world of ideas, what he has been saying is worthy of urgent attention.

The man in the photo on the right is a Turkish lawyer and journalist who been mayor of Turkey's capital city Ankara (population: 4.6 million) for more than two decades, having won municipal elections in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. For the three years before that term began, he was an elected member of the Turkish parliament. Politically, he is aligned with Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP, which "developed from the tradition of Islamism, but has officially abandoned this ideology in favour of "conservative democracy"" [Wikipedia]. That's the political home (and creation) of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's former prime minister and current president, Gökçek has more than two million Twitter followers.

Plainly no fool and by no means an underachiever, the signs are he is a man of considerable malevolence. Consider this for instance:

In early July 2014 Gökçek supported the antisemitic tweet made by Turkish singer Yıldız Tilbe: "God bless Hitler, it was even too few what he did to the Jews, he was right" and "The Jews will be destroyed by Muslims, in the name of Allah, not much time left for it be done". [Wikipedia]

He has our attention today because of something new:

Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek has alleged that last week's deadly attacks on a French satirical magazine and a kosher supermarket in Paris that left 17 people dead are the result of France expressing support for Palestine, and that Israeli intelligence is behind the attacks, the semi-official Anadolu news agency reported.
According to a report from Anadolu circulating in the Turkish media, Gökçek attended the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) Gölbaşı youth branch fourth ordinary district congress on Sunday and mentioned the terrorist attacks in France. He said Israel was annoyed with the lower house of French parliament for voting for the recognition of a Palestinian state and with France's vote in favor of a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for the same recognition.
“Israel certainly doesn't want this sentiment to expand in Europe. That's why it is certain that Mossad is behind these kinds of incidents. Mossad enflames Islamophobia by causing such incidents,” Gökçek said.
He claimed that after the Paris attacks, around 50 mosques and some Muslim individuals had been targeted but such incidents were not reported on by the international media. “Palestine being recognized as a state is why these [attacks] have taken place,” he concluded. [Today's Zaman, a major Turkish newspaper, January 12, 2015]

ANZAC legend, Simpson and his donkey: A special
place in Australian affections and history
[Image Source]

For blog readers in Australia, keep this dangerous rabble-rouser's words in mind as the centenary commemoration of Australia's baptism under fire at Gallipoli gets closer:

In memory of the Gallipoli Campaign of World War I, on the occasion of which Australians and Turks first met, fighting on opposing sides, Turkey and Australia are preparing to jointly celebrate, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of this encounter, the year 2015 as a year of culture. “Cultural, academic, musical, artistic and sporting events in both countries are being organized,” Ian Biggs, Australian ambassador to Ankara, told Today's Zaman in an exclusive interview. In the years following World War I, the two countries established closer relations. Around 150,000 Turks now live in Australia, having migrated there in search of a better life. Every year, thousands of Australians come to Çanakkale (Gallipoli) to commemorate their ancestors who fought there on April 25, the day the Allied forces landed in Gallipoli in 1915. This year, around 8,000 Australians arrived in Çanakkale for the ceremonies, including Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. [Today's Zaman, August 23, 2012]

This coming Anzac Day, April 25, "probably Australia's most important national occasion", is certain to see an even larger Australian presence than previous years' at the centennial commemoration in Turkey. It's still some months off, which means there's time to ensure no invitation reaches the hands of the hateful Mr Gökçek. Or for him to issue a public retraction.

13-Jan-15: Is victory in the struggle with Islamist extremism now closer?

Boulevard Voltaire, Paris, Sunday: Did millions on French
streets bring about a change? [Image Source]

Extract from a passionate op-ed by The Times of Israel's editor, David Horovitz:

France rallied on Sunday like its life depended on it. Three and a half million people took to the streets in an unprecedented show of solidarity with the 17 victims murdered by three Islamist gunmen last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. “I am Charlie,” “I am a police officer,” “I am a Jew,” their placards asserted, identifying in turn with each category of victim — the journalists, the cops, the Jews. “We will not be divided,” “We will not be terrorized,” “We will not give up our freedom,” they declared.
We will fight Islamist terrorism with every sinew of our being, in order to ensure the protection of the freedoms that we cherish and that it seeks to destroy? That, they didn’t say.

He asks whether people seriously believe

that France is about to launch a crackdown on Islamist groupings at its higher-education institutions, or devote serious resources to investigating potential incitement at local mosques? Are France and the rest of Europe about to introduce passenger profiling at EU entry points, in the way that Israel does? Is the EU set to sanction Turkey for facilitating the flow of radicalized European Muslims to and from the Islamic State terror group in Syria and Iraq?
Not terribly likely, is it, when the French president declares that “these terrorists and fanatics have nothing to do with the Islamic religion”? Not terribly likely, is it, when the French president, reportedly, didn’t want his day of dignified identification with the victims of terrorism spoiled by the presence of those, like Netanyahu, who might distract from the solemn harmony and focus furious attention, instead, on the specific cause, that great big elephant stuck in among the masses in central Paris: Islamic extremism?
Three and a half million people took to the streets of France on Sunday in a show of solidarity for the latest fatalities of a ruthless ideology. But they couldn’t bring themselves to call that death-cult by its name.
Do the last few days of Islamist murder in France constitute a watershed moment for one of the Diaspora’s largest communities? The beginning of the end? I rather think so.
A watershed moment in the Western battle against Islamic extremism? I fear not. [The death-cult ideology that France prefers not to name | The Times of Israel, January 12, 2015]

 Unless you know you are in a war, there is little chance of winning.

12-Jan-15: France, the day after

Jewish school in France, today: a new reality [Image Source]

No one should minimize the power and impact of millions of pairs of feet standing together on France's streets and expressing powerful feelings of unity and solidarity. But here's what it boils down to:

...it was announced by the Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve that around 5,000 police officers, gendarmes and soldiers will be sent to guard the 717 Jewish schools in France [The Independent UK, today]

All those slogans and all those colour pencils have tremendous symbolic significance. But the arms borne by those service personnel have their place too. As the Jewish community of Toulouse learned to its sorrow nearly three years ago, that's how it is in war.

11-Jan-15: Does the king need to fly to Paris to stand with terror victims? He can do it better back in Jordan.

2012 graduating class at Jordan Media Institute. Its founder, HRH Princess Rym Ali addresses the audience [Image Source]

An announcement a few hours ago says Jordan's king and queen are going to attend a mass national rally in Paris on Sunday in tribute to the 17 victims of "a three-day Islamist killing spree". Agence France Press adds that

Some 45 foreign leaders and officials will be present at the historic march in the French capital, which is expected to attract around a million people under high security.

We understand how joining such august company has its attractions. But respectfully, we think HRH King Abdullah II of the Hashemite Kingdom could make a more meaningful contribution to the cause by staying in Jordan and taking steps well within his power on behalf of the victims of an earlier Islamist killing spree much closer to (his) home. Here's why.

The graduate students of the Jordan Media Institute (JMI), most of them currently-working journalists, have a website [http://www.jmijournalists.com] which serves as a showcase for their professional output and work. It is prominently promoted on the JMI’s principal website [http://www.jmi.edu.jo/] where a large button on the homepage links to the home page of the grad students’ website. The school itself seeks

to become a Centre of Excellence in journalism education in Jordan and the region... [and] to offer the best standards of journalistic practice with an emphasis on the traditional aspects of journalism such as writing and reporting, ethics and community issues. This, combined with new media courses, will enable JMI’s graduates to compete regionally and internationally... World-class facilities, including newsrooms and studios, enable our students to learn production techniques on the very equipment they will later use as professionals. "JMI’s goal is to offer a new level of journalism education in Jordan and the region, to help improve the public trust in journalism and empower a new generation of writers and thinkers capable of setting the standard for professional journalism in the Kingdom as well as the region and pushing Arab journalists to the forefront of international media activity" [About JMI]

Jordan Media Institute, Amman 

Why the JMI leadership takes such pride in the work of its journalists is easy to understand. They and their talents are the most important possible advertisement for JMI and its ambitious program.

Three weeks ago, during early December, we became aware that a prominent homage had been published by JMI under the astonishing headline نماذج نجاح  (translation from Arabic: “Success Model”). It was posted at  http://www.jmijournalists.com/Articles/2391 but you won't find it there now. 

We recognized the person being honoured and were outraged. We published a critical article on December 10, 2014 in The Times of Israel ["By their role models shall ye know them"]. Then we followed it up with two blog posts on this site, one December 10, 2014, the other on December 11, 2014.

The woman honored by the journalists of JMI, Ahlam Tamimi, is the killer of our fifteen year-old daughter Malki. She was convicted for carrying out 15 acts of murder, and confessed to all the charges. Once imprisoned, she took every opportunity on television, in the written media and via social media to express pride at the killings. She continues to do this today, now that she is out of prison and free as a bird, released - despite the 16 terms of life imprisonment to which the judicial system sentenced her - in a mystifying surrender by Israel to an act of Islamist terrorist extortion. She lives freely and openly in King Abdullah's Jordan where she is treated as a celebrity.

The obscene statement by JMI’s students calling her their 'success model' amounts to a cry for more support for terrorism as well as for the murder of more Jewish children. If the school's management is not infuriated by the way this totally betrays the principles on which it was created, they ought to be.

We're not naive. We know that many, many, many people see nothing wrong with supporting the targeted murder of Jewish children, or with doing it. 

We know that Tamimi appears in thousands - yes, thousands - of YouTube video clips. (Check here.) Some depict her smiling delightedly as she explains she has nothing for which to apologize. Almost all of them showcase her 'achievement'. If she is sad, she says, it is only because the human bomb, a freshly-devout young man from a wealthy family and with an exploding guitar case slung across his back, died in the course of their attack on the Jewish children. 

Her message falls on receptive ears; she has a huge following in the Arabic-speaking world, and is the presenter of her own weekly television show, recorded from her home base in Jordan and beamed around the world by Hamas and via YouTube.

The JMI journalists' website - the whole thing - was taken down in mid December 2014, a few days after our letters of complaint began arriving on the desks of officials around the world. (As an aside, whoever did it put up a fig-leaf explanation about the domain name having expired. We checked; this was nonsense, though it presumably saved someone some face.) The entire site re-emerged some days later. But now, all references to Tamimi, the murderer, had been expunged. 

In itself, this was a welcome development, no matter what the reasons behind it. But given what the original tribute to the terrorist/killer signifies, we did not see the matter as at an end. We also feared (justifiably as it turned out) the JMI people would bury it. So as a precaution we arranged for an archived copy - outside their control - to be posted here. Check it out.

There was not a word on the main JMI site or on the JMI journalists' site about the Tamimi homage or the fact that it was removed, or why it was removed. Not in English, not in Arabic (the tribute was in Arabic), not in any other language. Nada. Clearly showcasing a jihad-minded killer of children is now seen as a strategic embarrassment.

We see it as a teaching moment. 

In the past three weeks, we have been in contact with the people who manage JMI, as well as with most of the governments and NGOs who provide it with indispensable funding, backing, patronage, guidance and momentum. They are listed here. We have explained to them politely and patiently the matters you have just read. We presumed that, like decent people everywhere, all of them, including the JMI's leadership, are horrified by what the JMI journalists did. As the privileged beneficiaries of an unusually generous and rich program, funded in large part by foreigners, they are on a fast track to join the ranks of the best journalists in the world. A great initiative, given the huge problems facing Jordan (and the Arab world in general) and therefore an even greater shame if it turns out to have been undermined by a passion for jihad from within.

JMI journalists pay tribute to their 'success model', a convicted murderer and
jihadist who operates freely in Jordan and broadcasts throughout the world
[Image Source]

It surprises us that some of the backers and sponsors have ignored us until now (we're not disclosing names at this stage). And as of tonight, the JMI people themselves have only responded tersely and without addressing the issues at all. 

That's why we think King Abdullah II can help. And did we mention that the Jordan Media Institute was founded by his sister-in-law? 

As parents who have not stopped grieving for the terrible loss we suffered at Tamimi's hands, we are going to persist with our efforts. They are intended to persuade the JMI people, including their graduate students, that glorifying Tamimi is a catastrophic miscalculation. Also, that removing the tribute made sense given the values they so prominently espouse [here] but instead of concealing their about-face, they ought to be taking pride in wiping this sociopath from their site. 

They should amplify that message by very publicly explaining in the languages of their backers (French, Dutch, German, English and especially Arabic) the importance of repudiating terrorism in every possible way. It's a simple enough message. If they have a problem with it, then we think their supporters may have a problem with that.

There are going to be many leaders at Sunday's mass rally in Paris and their message is essentially the same as the one we are waiting to hear from Jordan. All in all, we think the Jordanians will gain hugely if their monarch chooses to stay home and address a problem that none of those other VIPs can.

Just a brief word about the charity we created thirteen years ago (whose certificate of registration was issued on the morning of September 11, 2001, the day that later became 9/11) as a memorial to our daughter's life. The Malki Foundation does exceptionally fine and meaningful work for the benefit of thousands of families including Druze, Jews, Moslems and Christians on a strictly non-sectarian, non-political basis. It exists purely to do good – the exact opposite of the hateful evil that Tamimi, the JMI’s “success model”, represents.

---

A version of this post appears today at The Times of Israel.