15-Nov-15: Before anything else, call the enemy by its name

As it did last January, the Eiffel Tower again today
symbolizes the French condition [Image Source]

Here's the first part of a David Horovitz op ed in Times of Israel today. It's called "A three-step plan for facing down Islamist terrorism".

Holding mass solidarity marches, and vowing, stern-faced, to fight back against Islamic State just isn’t going to do it. Islamic extremist terror groups, and the states that sponsor them, are seeking to destroy open, democratic, egalitarian Western society and impose their bleak, bloody, perverted version of Islam. 

Facing them down will obviously not be simple. But it will be impossible unless the reality of the threat is genuinely internalized and the fight back mounted in earnest.
If the West continues to delude itself about the scale of the challenge, those who delight in the divine gift of life will find themselves becoming increasingly constrained and terrified by those who assert an imperative to kill and be killed in the name of God. 

The struggle to maintain fundamental Western freedoms involves a three-step process. 

First, name and acknowledge the enemy. 

The killers who struck in Paris — like those who brought down a Russian civilian airliner in the Sinai, and who carried out suicide bombings in Beirut last week, and who struck at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher in Paris in January, and in London on July 7, 2005, and on September 11, 2001, in New York, and who blew up the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, and, yes, who killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings in the Second Intifada, and on and on and on through an endless list of outrages worldwide — are not vague “militants.” They are Islamic extremists, adherents of that toxic kill-and-be-killed Islamist ideology. 

And their actions are not mere “violence” but terrorism — killing in order to terrorize, in order to weaken and cow their opposition, the better to impose that rapacious ideology. Islamic State is an exponent of particular depravity.

He goes on [here] to propose two additional steps. It's an excellent basis for the discussions that ought to be going on in every place where terror is a moral threat. That, as events keep making clear, is everywhere.

03-May-15: In Paris, you need to work hard to forget the victims but where there's a will, there's a way

Ilan Halimi, murdered in Paris in 2006

We mentioned Ilan Halimi in a post just last night - here: "02-May-15: On a Paris street with some history, a mob of 40 'activists' attacks a pair of young Jews".

His death, by exceptional cruelty and against a background of rampant Islamist terror in the heart of France's greatest city, had an impact on many people, just as the murders in January of other French people - some of them cartoonists, some of them just ordinary Jews - did. Nidra Poller's February 2006 article in the Wall Street Journal of his kidnapping, torture and death makes for hard reading.

We observed last night, in the wake of a thuggish attack by a racist mob of 40 'activists' (we're being deeply cynical when we use the word) on two young Jews, that the writing has been on France's walls for some time. But it's questionable whether anyone is actually reading it.

So on the subjects of France and hatred and killings and racism and the writing on the walls. there's a development worth reporting today.

It comes from a French language news report published online here. Courtesy of Google Translate, here's the English version:

The plaque in memory of Ilan Halimi found broken in Bagneux | 03.05.2015 at 11h56 | Plaque in memory of Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew killed by the gang of barbarians in 2006, was found broken in Bagneux, city of his ordeal. It would be an act of vandalism. "This is unacceptable." The mayor of Bagneux, in Hauts-de-Seine, does not hide his anger after the plaque in memory of Ilan Halimi was found broken Saturday. This young French Jewish had been tortured and killed by the gang of barbarians in 2006. Informed Saturday around 18 hours by email from a resident, the mayor made immediately remove plaque, placed at the foot of a young oak in the Richelieu Park, in the center of the city, after a commemoration ceremony in 2011. " It will be changed as soon as possible on Monday. We are the police of Bagneux to complain, "said the mayor. "For our city, it is a very strong symbol," says Marie-Hélène Amiable, which "strongly think vandalism". Very conservative, the elected does not exclude "the fall of a branch or a balloon," as the police will not do the full light on the facts. Nicolas Sarkozy, he did not wait to react. On his Twitter account he expressed his "dismay" and calls for "intransigence face of such acts." Same reaction on the side of Jean-Christophe Cambadélis. For the first secretary of the PS, you have to "redouble their determination in the face of anti-Semitism."

The memorial before it was destroyed [Image Source]

Ilan Halimi was found naked, gagged and handcuffed near a railway track in the Essonne after being kidnapped and tortured for three weeks in Bagneux by the "gang of barbarians" whose chief, Youssouf Fofana , was since condemned to life imprisonment.

The French article makes no mention of how two young Jews were terrorized yesterday by a baying mob on the same street from which Ilan Halimi was abducted nine years earlier, and on which (as we wrote last night) politicians from all over the world marched this past January to express abhorrence of racism, anti-semitism and terror.

Forgetting sometimes takes more effort than remembering.