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.

07-Nov-15: The news: how it's reported can completely color what its consumers think they know

From AP today:

[A certain political leader] presided over a ceremony in [vast stretch of land now occupied by his country] to launch a new development program on Saturday, the second day of his visit to mark the 40th anniversary of the country's annexation of [that vast stretch of land]...  [T]he visit is part of a campaign to promote the country's decentralization plan and boost investment. [That political leader's] appearance on Saturday was attended by several government ministers and business leaders. On Friday, he delivered a speech in [that vast stretch of land] proposing a number of development projects, spanning from a port in the coastal city... to a railway connecting XXX to the [occupied] town of YYY. He also leveled critiques against the [deleted] government and the [resistance group active in trying to recover that vast stretch of land from the occupier]"Where have the millions of dollars of humanitarian aid gone — more than 60 million euros ($65 million) a year?" [the political leader] said in his speech."How can one explain the fact that the [rebellious group's] leaders are obscenely rich and have real estate and bank accounts in Europe and Latin America?" he added.

Before clicking on the source to see what's being reported, consider: which leader, which occupied vast stretch of land, which corrupt resistance group making-out-like-thieves are under discussion. Yet notice how the word "occupied" is used just once by AP. It's not in the headline. And it's nowhere in the body text. It appears only at the end of the report where some basic facts, probably unknown to 99% of AP readers, are stated in one brief sentence.

Quick: Where is this open-air concentration camp? And when
were its challenges last debated in the UN Security
Council? [Image Source]

The headline refers to the occupied territories of the story as... "contested". In the circumstances, that's a good way to describe them. 

But now compare and contrast with the media coverage of a certain other conflict, one that happens to be close to our hearts and to our living room. Notice the very striking differences of tone and terminology and their effect on how you feel about what's been reported. And ask why.

Journalists, reporters, editors, photographers - they can and most certainly do have a massive influence on what people think they know about events going on far away. 

A shame that this influence turns out to be so prone to manipulation, exploitation and narrative-spinning.

22-Aug-15: Carnage on a high-speed European train and the quick-thinking that prevented it

The attempt at a massacre on board a train on Friday in Belgium
was prevented by three ordinary American guys [Image Source]

The latest high-profile attack on ordinary people traveling in Europe occurred on Friday on board a crowded Thalys train speeding from Amsterdam to Paris.

Travelling at speeds of 300 km/hr. the Thalys high-speed train connects 17 cities across Western Europe, including Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris. Thalys trains are well known for their efficient travel times and their excellent service. If you wish to travel in luxury and save as much time as you can for sightseeing, then the Thalys is your best choice. [From the Eurail website]

That excellent service actually plays a role in what happened.

An attempt at carrying out a rifle-powered massacre on-board was made on Friday by a male described as "a 26-year-old Moroccan" who boarded the high-speed train at the Brussels South station. Whatever security checks are carried out there are evidently inadequate to the task of stopping a determined terrorist equipped, as this "hero" was, with "a Kalashnikov, a knife, an automatic pistol and cartridges." In the end, he was neutralized not by paid and equipped security personnel but by fare-paying travelers who sized up the situation fast enough to do something effective. They are, hardly surprisingly, not Europeans.

Brussels South, the station where the gunman boarded,
is the largest in Belgium's capital city [Image South]

Before being overpowered by the travelers, the gunman managed to shoot one passenger in the head and stab another. Belgium's prime minister Charles Michel in a statement released to the news media on Friday evening called it a "terrorist attack". With that achieved, he consulted with Belgium's Interior Minister and the Chief Commissioner of its Federal Police Service on Friday evening and - suspend the skepticism - something actually came out of that:

It was decided that security will be step up (sic). [Deractie (Belgium), August 22, 2015]

That's an actual Belgian quote. Here's another:

Sources within the security services say that that it is too early to confirm whether the gunman is also known to the Belgian security services. [Deractie]

According to the BBC, France's Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve speaking in a press conference today (Saturday), said the suspect's identity had yet to be confirmed

but it was believed that he had radical Islamist beliefs... [and] had lived in Spain until 2014, and in Belgium this year. Spanish intelligence passed on information about the suspect to France in February 2014, he said... [BBC]

Just to clarify, and quoting that senior French politician: no one is too sure who the Islamist with infidel blood on his mind actually is yet. But we do know enough to say he's a Moroccan who has been under the noses of the Spanish and French anti-terror authorities for some time. Despite this, the clever bugger got onto a train in Belgium where they don't seem to have opened a file on him till now, equipped with a deadly arsenal serious enough to carry out what every commentator is calling carnage.

The Spanish (according to Telegraph UK) know enough to say his name is Ayoub El Qahzzani and that he traveled to Syria in 2014 from his base in Spain, returning to France soon after that,)

There were 554 passengers on board.

Thalys train [Image Source]

You're wondering about that excellent Thalys service? The French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade (from "I Am a Soldier", "Betty Blue" and "Nikita", and who was slightly injured when he broke the glass window of the alarm to call security on the train) says, according to the BBC which is translating Paris Match, that the

train staff entered a private cabin and locked it when they heard gunshots, leaving the passengers alone. "I thought it was the end, that we were going to die, that he was going to kill us all," he said. "I really could see us all dying because we were all prisoners in that train, it would have been impossible to escape from that nightmare." [BBC]

The real heroes of this appalling tale are a handful of fast-moving Americans, on-board the train as tourists: a US Air Force service man, an inactive member of the US National Guard, and an ordinary American civilian. They came away with box-cutter wounds (including a mutilated hand), and other non-life-threatening injuries, along with the gratitude of countless slower-moving Europeans.

Here's a prediction. The attacker is going to be called a lone wolf, and the involvement of helpers and associates and spiritual advisers and weapons providers and funders and the people making "calls" to devout followers of Islam to show their faith by killing other people will be ignored, or postponed, or downplayed for as long the news cycle permits.

22-May-15: Tough, crucial questions at Europe's borders

Nice Moroccan boy wanting to spend more time with immigrant mother
in Italy? Or murder-minded gunman with no problem shooting
dozens of tourists in the back? [Image Source]

Go back and take a look at our comments on the most recent random murder attack on people in Tunisia ["19-Mar-15: In Tunisia, terrorists target tourists... again"] and you can see that there were all manner of speculations about what triggered the terror attack on a busload of foreign tourists (from Italy, Japan, France, Spain, Colombia, Australia, Britain, Belgium, Poland and Russia) exiting a bus to visit a museum in Tunis. Two dozen victims lay dead, most of them shot in the back by two masked gunmen, before the shooters were done.

A key suspect has been arrested. Here's what's known today:

• He was arrested in Gaggiano, Italy, a few kilometers south of Milan. His mother and two siblings have lived there legally for "many years". It's a known tourist town.
• His name is Abdel Majid Touil. He's a Moroccan national, age 22. How much he actually appreciates tourism and tourists is now an open question.
• Italian police are saying he arrived in Italy on a so-called "migrant boat" loaded with 90 others, that set sale for Italy from somewhere in North Africa in February. Photographs of the freshly arrived migrants are above and below.
• How did a "migrant", desperate enough to sail across the Mediterranean to rejoin his mother and siblings (who have been residing in Italy for years at that point), manage to then leave Italy within a few weeks, go back to north Africa, take part in a shooting attack on unarmed people, killing nearly two dozen of them, then slip (march?, parachute?) back into Italy in time to be arrested there for terrorism and murder? The Wall Street Journal asked officials at Italy's Interior Ministry: they say they don't know. [Source: "Tunis Attack Suspect Arrested with Migrants", Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2015]
• AFP says Touil is wanted "for premeditated murder, kidnapping and terrorism" on an international warrant. The arrest was executed by Italy’s counter-terrorism DIGOS police.

Other people are probably asking larger questions, like: if there are boatloads of "migrants" arriving on Europe's shores and it turns out one or more of them has terror, murder and mayhem on his mind, what ought to be done? Who checks them? How cautious ought European society to be?

An Italian newspaper report from yesterday drills down on the outlook and attitudes of people living in Gaggiano ["a characterless series of streets, buildings, and link roads"], and their views of what has been going on in the "four-storey 1960s building of 16 apartments at 14 Via Pitagora... inhabited by pensioners and blue-collar workers" where the suspect lived. For neighbours:

judgment has already been passed. For them, the Moroccan is guilty, no doubt about it. What they remember about the Touil family is “€32,000 of unpaid condominium charges,” and rubbish, including nappies and sanitary towels, “thrown out of the window”. They had to call in a special cleaning firm, “not once, but twice”, to “deal with the pigsty on the top floor” inhabited by the family. Six people are crammed into a 60-m² apartment, with a living room, kitchenette, bedroom and bathroom: the mother, Fatima, the eldest son with his partner and daughter, one of Fatima’s two daughters, and lastly, Abdel Majid... In Via Pitagora, neighbours say that the Touil family are squatters, who broke down the door to take possession of their house...  [Corriere della Serra, May 21, 2015]

As for the suspect himself

Instead of going to the mosque, he spent his time in the local bars, such as Novella 73, frequented by pensioners, with whom he used to spend the evenings chatting. When he went further afield, it was only to attend Italian lessons in Trezzano sul Naviglio, which is where he was the week of the attack in Tunis; according to the school’s teachers and principal, Abdel Majid was in class. However, the youth had not been seen for the last two weeks. According to his mother, there was nothing strange in this, since “he had been ill.” Apart from Novella 73 and the school, Abdel Majid Touilin seems to have led a quiet life. His brother has a criminal record for drug pushing, but since becoming a father may have changed his ways. [Same Italian source]

And the plot?

Early in February, his father and sister, who lived with him in Morocco, near Casablanca, are reported to have taken him to the airport. On this first leg of his journey, Abdel Majid allegedly flew to Tunisia with a low-cost airline. In Tunis, he is thought to have stayed for three days in a hotel, and from there to have moved on to Libya, where he boarded a boat of migrants heading for Sicily, to be subsequently rescued on 15th or 16th February. He may be the victim of a terrible mistake by the Tunisian authorities, or perhaps has been confused with somebody else with the same name. Alternatively, Abdel Majid Touil may be a well-trained terrorist, who first of all deceived his own mother, or even “enlisted” her, getting her to cover for him and provide an alibi. It was in fact his mother who failed to report the disappearance of her son’s passport to the police until two months after the event. The idea of enrolling in an Italian course may also have been a bluff, aimed at showing his willingness to integrate. [Same Italian source]

There's more. According to the occasionally-reputable Daily Mail UK

Touil arrived in Porto Empedocle in Sicily on February 17 using the alias Abdullah after being rescued by Italian authorities on a migrant boat in the Mediterranean. But he received an expulsion order demanding he leave Italy within 15 days.

They publish these photos today leaving readers to wonder whether the face and attitude belong to a skillful traveling-shooting-murdering terrorist thug they call "ISIS fanatic" or just a well-meaning son wanting more time with his mother:

The suspect [Image Source]

 Little doubt they're pleased - but about what, exactly? [Image Source]

Not surprisingly, there are those focusing on the smirks and the triumphant V-for-Victory raised hands and trying to interpret the mindsets behind them. 

But there are larger and serious issues at work here. Should European authorities be driven by the notion that some unknown proportion of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs making their way into Europe by sea on open boats and avoiding conventional migration channels (like the 900 or so received on Wednesday) have terrorism on their minds?

Or should they be considered hard-luck cases looking for a better life until proven otherwise? 

Whatever they conclude, there's no room for doubting any more that Europe is in the cross-hairs of some highly ideological killers and planners. Getting this wrong is going to come at a very high price. The issues are anything but theoretical, even if arriving at the answers calls for some unpleasant checking, thinking and acting. Either way, there are concrete consequences.

3-Dec-11: The Islamists are marching...

The centrality of the religious factor in Arab public life is increasingly a talking point in media coverage as major changes wash across the entire area.

Under the headline "Jordan apology to Hamas baffles many", a mainstream Arab news publication is reporting today on Jordanian overtures to the most dangerous of this region's terrorist organizations.

The mea culpa was offered by Jordan's prime minister, Awn Khasawneh, for the 1999 decision to close the Islamist group's offices and expel its members - action widely believed to have been taken under pressure from the US. Calling it a "constitutional and political mistake", his regret was extended soon after Jordan's King Abdullah II appointed him to the premiership in October. Further, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, reportedly is arriving in Jordan today for talks. Mending relations with Hamas has raised eyebrows among the king's loyalists and his detractors, and not only because Washington considers the Palestinian group a terrorist organisation. Increasingly, it is perceived as an attempt to outflank the king's domestic critics and bolster his standing in the Arab world... Beginning this year with calls to end official corruption, [widespread Jordanian] protests have escalated into angry demonstrations - increasingly by members of the monarchy's tribal support base. By reaching out to Hamas, however, suspicion has mounted that the king is trying to put off reforms by cutting a deal with the group's influential brethren in Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood. Their support could prove useful for restraining dissent..."

In Egypt, where the outcome of this past week's elections have been held back by the military who are the actual post-"Arab spring" rulers, first numbers are emerging and they bode ill for those who understand the close ties between the Muslim Brotherhood in its various forms, and jihadist terror. From AFP ("Islamists sweep Egypt elections") in the past hour (late Saturday night):

Early results from Egypt's first post-revolution election showed Islamist parties sweeping to victory, including hardline Salafists, with secular parties trounced in many areas.

Earlier today, there were reports that "the Muslim Brotherhood claimed the first round in the Egyptian parliamentary elections Saturday, after polls said it has won 40% of the votes. The official results of the elections are still pending."

In last week's elections in Morocco, the Islamist Justice and Development Party dominated, taking 107 seats out of the 395 seats, almost twice as many as the second place party. AP says this means "King Mohammed VI must pick the next prime minister from its ranks and to form the next government."

In elections in Tunisia in late October, the Islamist Ennahda party, banned for decades until January 2011, won 41% of the vote, securing 90 seats in the 217-member parliament. Today in the Tunisian capital, thousands of Islamists and secularists staged competing protests outside the parliament. Reuters says tensions are high:

"The latest round of protests was sparked when a group of hardline Islamists occupied a university campus near the capital to demand segregation of sexes in class and the right for women students to wear a full-face veil."

For the terrorist leadership of Hamas in Gaza, this is all great news. One of its more outspoken insiders, Musa Abu Marzouk, said this week the Egyptian win "serves the interests of Hamas", while his colleague Fawzi Barhoum, one of the Hamas designated spokespeople, said the election results we mentioned will "strengthen Hamas in the face of Israeli, American and European efforts" to isolate the terrorists.

Meanwhile an Arab voice of a different kind sees things via a different, more practical lens. Jeannette Bougrab, minister for youth in the government of France, and a self-described "French woman of Arab origin", said to the Le Parisien newspaper that that the electoral outcomes are 

"very worrying... I don’t know of any moderate Islam... There are no half measures with sharia. I am a lawyer and you can make all the theological, literal or fundamental interpretations of it that you like but law based on sharia is inevitably a restriction on freedom, especially freedom of conscience.”

Muslim Brotherhood activists "clash" with plainclothes
Egyptian police at an anti-Israel rally [Source]

The Moslem Brotherhood's official motto is: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." Establishing an Islamic state based on sharia is at the center of its ideology. Egyptians - according to an April 2010 Pew Research Center poll  - very much like what it has to say about such core values as stoning adulterers (82% support), whipping and/or chopping off the hands of thieves (77%), and imposing the death penalty on apostates (84%)

They held a rally a week ago in Cairo's most prominent mosque, Al-Azhar. This report says 5,000 people took part. The main preacher was its Grand Imam, Ahmed al-Tayeb who said: "The al-Aqsa Mosque is currently under an offensive by the Jews…we shall not allow the Zionists to Judaize al-Quds (Jerusalem.) We are telling Israel and Europe that we shall not allow even one stone to be moved there." The report says Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen, as well as Palestinian guest speakers, made explicit calls for Jihad and for liberating the whole of Palestine. Time and again, a Koran quote vowing that "one day we shall kill all the Jews" was uttered at the site... Throughout the event, Muslim Brotherhood activists chanted: "Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, judgment day has come."

With the Egyptian election behind us, it's worth recalling what a leading expert on the Muslim Brotherhood ("Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood: In Their Own Words") wrote nearly a year ago:

The Muslim Brotherhood does not hide its global aspirations and the violent path it intends to follow to achieve them. The Brotherhood is meticulous in its step-by-step plan, first to take over the soul of the individual and then the family, people, nation and union of Islamic nations, until the global Islamic state has been realized. The principle of stages dictates the Muslim Brotherhood's supposed "moderation." However, that "moderation" will gradually vanish as Muslim Brotherhood achievements increase and its acceptance of the existing situation is replaced by a strict, orthodox Muslim rule whose foreign policy is based on jihad. 

And now it appears they're taking power in our largest neighbour.