08-Feb-15: In France, anti-terror police focus on the enabling role of money

Image Source: Reuters

We posted here earlier today ["08-Feb-15: Foreign money and the Palestinian Arab terror it buys"] about the enabling role that funding and money play in terror.

At about the time we were writing it, the police in France were arresting six more suspects in connection with the recruiting of jihadists. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said

that anti-terrorism magistrates in Paris had ordered Sunday's raid following a probe opened in January last year into "conspiracy to commit a terrorist act and financing of terrorism." A source close to the probe said five people were held in the southern city of Albi and another in the southwest of France. All in their 30s, they are suspected of handling questionable money transfers and having recruited candidates to wage jihad. [AFP, today]

There's more. Five other people were charged Saturday in the Paris and Lyon regions, while yet another four are remanded in custody. It's actually a drop in the bucket given that French Prime Minister Manuel Valls says the French authorities were monitoring about 3,000 people involved in “terrorist networks.”

A cluster of investigations into suspected jihadi networks is happening in and around Toulouse, where Mohammed Merah killed seven people, including three children outside a Jewish school, in 2012. (We reflected on Merah and the significance of those Toulouse slayings: "19-Apr-12: How the murder of three French children has become the launch of a new chapter in the conquest of Europe by the terrorists").

As for Moussa Coulibaly, the knife-wielding man who attacked soldiers in Nice who were guarding a Jewish community center ["03-Feb-15: Jewish community center in France is scene of yet another stabbing attack"], he has now been charged with attempted murder in connection with terrorism.

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.

19-Apr-12: How the murder of three French children has become the launch of a new chapter in the conquest of Europe by the terrorists

London

The murders of three French servicemen followed shortly afterwards by the killing of four innocent Jews – a young schoolteacher and two of his small children and then a third little girl – are receding into the background. 

Not for the families, not for the friends. Perhaps not entirely for Toulouse and Montauban. But probably for France. Certainly for Europe and the rest of us. 

The tragedy becomes an event, and the event turns into a small bump in a long road. So it goes. 

But there are people out there who understand its significance and will not allow it to blend into the background. They are the jihadists. For them, the cold-blooded murder of four innocent Jews in France has become an inspiration, a treasure – literally. Astonishingly, they are terming it an “operation”, a “raid”, even a “battle”. 

A brief analysis, "Jihadis' New Toulouse Inspiration", published this week on the website of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), looks at how the killings are being celebrated by means of a widely circulated (and translated) essay called "Lessons and Treasures from the Battle of Toulouse". To remind us, the killer was Mohamed Merah, 24, a French citizen of Algerian origin, who boasted [The Guardian, March 22, 2012 ] to police negotiators that he had brought France to its knees and that his one regret was not having been able to carry out plans for more killings.

Madrid

The Merah killings are being represented as a turning point for Moslems born in Europe and other parts of the non-Arab world. The murders are

"particularly unique and noteworthy... Unlike other successful operations carried out by immigrants, Western-born Muslims are rejecting local governmental attempts to promote non-violent forms of Islam. The operation has also reminded jihadis about the importance of attacking France, which has been spared the successful mass attacks experienced in the United States and elsewhere in Europe. Ultimately, the goal of this raid and others like it, is to produce an al-Qaida "in Western dress with blue eyes" and with a "totally Western appearance."

The source of this terrorist self-worship is an online al-Qaida forum [click to view it]. It describes the murderer as being one of the "fighting men of a special class". The killings of the children are a "practical lesson in bravery". The essay was first released in late March and documented in early April by Middle East Media Research Institute. MEMRI is one of the few - and certainly among the most important - agencies making Arabic source materials available to non-Arabic readers.

IPT refers to other key points in the jihadist manifest:

• The al-Qaida essay targets the large class of unemployed and frustrated Muslim youth in Europe, touching on the frustration of young Europe-born Moslems with life in the West. It says their anger makes them "the best soldiers in al-Qaida's ranks". 
• "The hero of the battle of Toulouse will be an example and a role model for whoever is behind him among the Muslim youth in the West, especially those who have not joined up with Mujahid groups."
• The murders are "a realization of al-Qaida's call... the route to jihad is open and available". This is a way to join the "heroes for Islam". The murders embody "the rejection of the West's anti-extremism campaigns by a Western Muslim."
• "The hardest strike against the Crusader West" is that Western Muslim youth are still joining al-Qaida.
• These young European Moslems "have no social value, no jobs to mention, and no weight or consideration." As long as they believe in Islam's "divine law," they will be "marginalized and allegations would be made against them of being terrorists and radicals". If they get past those "allegations", they will find that Taliban, al-Qaida and Islamic law are the keys to their "honor" being restored. 
• The "wide margins of liberty" in the West, which the al-Qaida writer demonizes throughout his essay, prevent them from becoming downtrodden like the Arabs living under tyrannical rule in their home countries.



Toulouse

• "The economic and social drain on the West is just as much a success as the damage of the raids."
• Euromoslems are becoming "a special and distinguished type of hidden soldiers who are not known or cared about by many people and who are not easy for the enemy to spot, through whatever methods and ways are available to the enemy."
• The London and Madrid "operations" are role models of what can be achieved. 
• "In London and Madrid, local terrorists used explosives to kill dozens using buses and subways. In Mumbai, gunman targeted popular Western hangouts as well as a Jewish center. These "Mujahideen have broken the fear barrier and took the [Muslim] nation to a stage of challenge, by staging quick and unique attacks that target the enemy's economic, political, and military positions in their own homes".

Do we need to expand on why we call it This Ongoing War?

3-Apr-12: After Toulouse

Huguette Chomski Magnis is the Secretary General of Mouvement Pour la Paix et Contre le Terrorisme, and spokesperson of the International Alliance Against Terrorism. Her guest blog appears here at our request, with gratitude for her tireless activism in the struggle against terror and its proponents.

Thoughts from France: Terrorism and resistance                

Huguette Chomski Magnis

Toulouse, March 2012

On the morning of Monday, March 19, 2012, a man called Mohamed Merah grabbed a child, Myriam Monsonego, by the hair. The seconds that followed were an eternity of suffering for the terrified little girl whom he dragged along the ground and then murdered by means of a gunshot to the head.

In doing this, Merah carried out an act of resistance.

We are shocked by such a statement? We cough, we hesitate, we find this a bit exaggerated. 

We find it scandalous that a certain French schoolteacher asked her students to observe a minute’s silence in memory of the child-killer, Merah.   

We stress that almost everyone who matters in France unreservedly condemned his horrifying actions. And this, of course, is true and as it should be.   

But does this mean civil society has satisfied its obligations, and is thereby relieved of further self-examination?   

Is it so extraordinary that one of the lost children of our republic murdered three unarmed French soldiers? All three were of North African origin. Were their deaths an accident? Or did Merah and his accomplices target them as ‘traitors’ on the assumption that they had fought the Taliban?   

Is it so extraordinary that – unable to find a soldier to murder on that Monday – he turned his attentions to the natural alternative: Jewish children, a Jewish school? Have not Jewish children been considered a legitimate target by many whom «those who matter in the world» judge as respectable? 

The call to murder Jews – with no minimum age – is a recurring theme in the broadcasts and sermons of the Tunisian Salafists. The Tunisian authorities remain silent in the face of this murderous hatred.   

A similar message, only slightly more disguised, also exists in the ranks of Egypt’s Moslem Brotherhood with which France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United States administration are approving of «dialogue», regarding it as interesting and promising.   

It also exists in the Charter of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Moslem Brotherhood, and the party that claims responsibility for countless massacres of Israeli children – they praise such massacres as glorious acts of resistance.

They are hardly alone. The Popular Resistance Committees and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a unit of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, among others, do the same.   

Appallingly, even the official television station of the Palestinian Authority recently broadcast a sermon by the PA-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hussein, calling for more killing of Jews. [Source]   

Is the slaughter at the Jewish school in Toulouse worse than the horrifying May 2004 massacre of the Hatuel family: a pregnant mother and her four daughters aged from 9 years old to two?  The mis-named Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees claimed this as one of its heroic military achievements!

Is Toulouse worse than the massacre in Itamar a year ago in which the Fogel family was decimated: both parents and three of their five children, the youngest of whom was three months old?   

No, it is not worse. The reality is that Itamar is Toulouse.   

But we shall be told that what happens in France, by comparison with events far away, affects us to a much larger extent – and this is a thousand times right. The massacre in Toulouse has stunned us. We are still struggling to recover.   

But there is a problem here that cannot be swept under the rug.

There are very «proper» people, not in the least of immigrant background, who found that we made too much of these Jewish children who, although French, were also Israeli and buried in Israel, while the children of Gaza… suggestive suspension dots.

Little wonder that Baroness Catherine Ashton, a luminary among luminaries, found it necessary to associate the memory of the murdered children of Toulouse with the children of Gaza whose blood Mohamed Merah claimed to be avenging.

The children of Gaza have been turned into archetypical victims.   

Let us then talk of the children of Gaza – with a sad and loving thought for the unhappy children killed in the war of 2009.   

I do not know how many they were. Nor does anybody in France know. The figures of Hamas – a thoroughly unreliable source of information – have systematically been accepted.   

But to allow people to believe that Israeli army soldiers deliberately targeted those children, as did Mohamed Merah and his countless terrorist predecessors, is dishonest. Those poor children were civilian victims of war, not the targets of that war.

Dare one ask how many Libyan children were unintentionally killed by NATO bombs during their intervention? Do we even know? Were we given civilian casualty figures for that war?   

The blood-drenched dictator Gaddafi caused a great many casualties in the course of his regime’s collapse.   

Propaganda was the answer and that was correct. It was explained that he used his civilians as human shields. Again, that was correct.
  

But then, what has Hamas done but use its civilian population, children first, as human shields? The difference is that the Hamas has achieved an extraordinary resonance in our media.   

To oversimplify an extremely complex conflict led to mythology replacing reality; assumptions instead of analyses; propaganda instead of objective information.
  

The devastating result is total confusion.   

If the French icon Stephane Hessel supports Hamas and gives it the title of resistance fighters, then is it not feasible to implement Hamas methods into France?
  

This is something that humanists should question. 

So now what? 

Jihadism has landed in France. Merah’s death is in no sense its epilogue. 

For us simple citizens, our concern is neither the jihadists, nor the instrumentalities of State intelligence nor security. Our concern is with the reaction of civil society. Is civil society up to this challenge? 

Why are we not able to do what the Moroccans did after the attacks? Articulate with a clear voice: NO TO TERRORISM. 

The will to defend French republican society should not lead us to self-censorship. On the contrary.   

During the march that took place on the evening of the massacre on Monday, March 19, everyone around me, my comrades in the struggle against racism as well as a prominent lawyer, were categorical: the murderer was a neo-Nazi. The notion that he might be an Islamist was im-po-ssible.  Responsibility might lie with the foul ideas of the National front, or even of the government.  

Why is our reaction not just as clear when the alternative view, the “impossible” theory, is confirmed?   

Why are we asked to avoid speaking of Islamic extremism,  so as not to stigmatize Islam?

This is not what democrats in North Africa and the Middle East expect from us, especially those in Tunisia courageously fighting the rise of the salafists tolerated by the Ennahda regime. 

Pointing to the responsibility of Islamism - political Islam - that oppresses and kills Muslims first of all, enables one to distinguish it from spiritual Islam and the right of worship guaranteed to all citizens.   

There is a dangerous confusion. To illustrate: We know that Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was invited to address a rally of the UOIF on April 6. Responding to the voices of protest after the Toulouse horror, Nicolas Sarkozy said Qaradawi was not welcome in France.   

The edifying reaction of a certain researcher associate of Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales was that he could not understand the ban. For him, Qaradawi is simply a moderate supporter of the Palestinian cause and of its right to resist, not in solidarity with jihadist movements. [Source]

The researcher should have investigated more carefully. Qaradawi, the so-called moderate, is the author of the hallmark treatise on Islamic law, “The licit and the illicit in Islam”, and a man who prominently glorified the assassins of Sadat.    

Yes, he condemned the London tube bombings; a necessity in order to acquire a position of authority in Europe!   

But he published a justification for suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians of all ages. He issued a fatwa allowing to "kill Jewish embryos in the womb of their mothers because once born and grown up, they become soldiers of the IDF". [Source]   

So are we really a «republic united against terrorism»?   

Far from it, unfortunately.

Either condemnation of terrorism is universal or it does not exist.  

Paris - March 27, 2012 (Translation: Bernice Dubois)

2-Apr-12: When you march for the rights of prisoners, what does it mean for the rights of their past and future victims?

Source: PMW

A friend has alerted us to the fact that political rallies are being organized in Europe (including Paris) and elsewhere this week in support of yet another UN-sponsored conference about the“plight” of the Palestinian Arabs being held in Israeli prisons.

We want those who march for them and against administrative detention and imprisonment to ask themselves and the organizers some tough and perhaps unpleasant questions - about these prisoners, about what brought them there - before they turn to good, liberal-minded people for support.

When they march, are they marching for the young cousins Amjad and Hakim Awad?

These boys are mere teenagers. And in the world in which most Europeans and Americans live, we know that boys in their teenage years are prone to getting into mischief. As an enlightened society, we treat them a little more gently so that we can encourage them to grow to mature manhood and become constructive members of our societies.

But this is not Europe or America. Yes, the Awad cousins are young. Amjad Mahmad Awad is 19, and was a student at Al-Quds Open University. Hakim Mazen Awad is 18. The Awad clan makes up about half of the population of Awarta, the village to which they fled after they carried out the crime for which they were convicted in an Israeli court. Last year, when they were arrested, Hakim Mazen Awad was a high school student whose father, Mazen, is active in the PFLP terrorist organization and had served a five-year prison sentence, imposed by the Palestinian National Authority, for murdering his female cousin and cremating her body.

It’s a family with some history. The boys had an uncle Jibril, also a PFLP terrorist. This Awad uncle participated in an earlier attack on the neighbouring community of Itamar back in 2002. A mother called Rachel Shabo and three of her children, Neria (16), Zvi (13), and Avishai (5) were shot to death inside their home, and the head of the neighborhood preparedness team, Yosef Twito (31), was also shot to death. Uncle Jibril’s career in terrorism came to a premature and fatal end in a 2003 clash with Israeli forces.

It is perhaps not surprising that the Awad clan had elaborate and quite complete arguments why their beautiful young sons had nothing to do with the horrible crime of which they were convicted last year. (Note also that several early media reports said the perpetrator might have been a Thai agricultural worker, though their services are generally not used in that part of Israel.) The crime was cold-blooded and horrifying even to observers who are hardened by the difficult acts of terror that happen in Israel with sickening frequency. Wikipedia’s report [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_attack] says:

After crossing the fence, Amjad and Hakim walked 400 meters into the settlement. The perpetrators first broke into a house of the Chai family who were on vacation, searching all the rooms. They stole an M-16 assault rifle, ammunition, a helmet, and a kevlar vest. They waited an hour and entered the Fogels' house at around 10:30 pm. According to the indictment, the two entered the children's room, told eleven year old Yoav, who had been awakened by their entry, not to be afraid, then took him to a nearby room, slashed his throat, and stabbed him in the chest. Hakim Awad then strangled four-year-old Elad with Amjad Awad stabbing him twice in the chest. The two next entered the parents' room, and turned on the light, waking them up. The parents then struggled with the attackers. Ehud Fogel was repeatedly stabbed in the neck, and Ruth Fogel was stabbed in the neck and back and then shot when the suspects saw that she was not dead. The suspects then left the house… The two then argued over whether to withdraw or carry out attacks in other homes, with Hakim insisting that they return immediately to Awarta, and Amjad arguing that they should return to the home and steal another weapon. Amjad then re-entered the Fogel home. When 3-month old Hadas began crying, Amjad stabbed her… According to several accounts, the infant was decapitated, though one source says that although her throat was deeply slit, she was only "nearly decapitated". The attackers did not notice two other children asleep in the house at the time. In their confessions they said that they would not have hesitated to kill them if they had noticed them.

Hakim Awad's mother, Nawef, claimed that her son was at home the night of the murder and never left the house, claiming that "five months ago Hakim underwent a surgery in his stomach and I'm sure he was tortured and forced into confessing."  Amjad's family also claimed that he was in the village at the time of the event. One relative said that Hakim and Amjad did not know each other, as "one went to university, the other is in high school". He also claimed that if they had been guilty, they would have been captured within days, as "the whole world knows about Israel's advanced investigation abilities and its use of sophisticated means". 

What the whole world knows is actually something else. The Awads, who confessed and recreated the killings for the police, are now being claimed as heroes in the perverted world of the Palestinian Arab media and its friends and supporters. They are praised on government-owned television which played a song containing this revealing line: “That is what the homeland asked of me”.

Click to view the English-sub-titled PMW video clip

Here is where the story becomes decidedly un-American and non-European. We Israelis are confronted with an enemy that believes its very highest values are served by encouraging its young men to become heroes in the very specific sense of slicing the throats of sleeping Jewish children because “that is what the homeland asked” of them.

One of the most notorious of the killers created by the terrorism-adoring Islamist Arab society is Ahlam Tamimi. She planned the 2001 massacre in which fifteen Israelis, most of them children, were blown apart in a pizza restaurant. She planted the bomb – who happens to have been a human being – and then fled for her own safety. Later that day, she personally, herself, read the evening news report on PA Television about the successful killings in central Jerusalem without so much as a cynical smile to acknowledge that this horrifying crime was in fact hers. (Is there a historical precedent for this? Could Hollywood invent a credible scenario that includes such a scene?)

Tamimi, explicitly unrepentant, was released in October 2011 as part of the Shalit Transaction and has become a genuine media star with her own weekly program on the Al-Quds satellite television channel that is broadcast throughout the Arabic speaking world. Her presence as a fiery religious speaker, finger pointing  heavenwards, encouraging copycat acts of terror against Jews, has become ubiquitous in Islamist rallies in Jordan, Tunisia and parts in between.

Tamimi, speaking to an Islamist rally in Amman a month ago [Arabic source here], revealed that hunger strikes by Palestinian Arabs in Israeli prisons are what she called a “tactical move” that will continue for at least the next two months. And on April 17th, which is termed "Palestinian Prisoners' Day," something is going to happen. As the most well-known spokesperson for the claims of the imprisoned Islamists, she – perhaps more than anyone else on earth – exemplifies the cynical manipulation by the Islamists of liberal sympathy for the victims of alleged human rights offences. And more than anyone else’s actions, hers exemplify where that manipulation leads.

To those planning to take to the streets tomorrow in Paris and elsewhere, we ask: Are you for Tamimi or against the lethal hatred and the pathological racism which she embodies. Are you for the teenage perpetrators of last year’s Itamar massacre, or do you insist that something even worse is done when we hold them behind bars.

It may seem to you that getting this right or wrong does not matter so much because the killers are far away and not threatening your children. But what if you are wrong about that?

It might be interesting to ask the people of Toulouse for their opinion.

25-Mar-12: Why are Jewish children killed? What does it tell us about Europe?

Toulouse, France: March 2012

On Friday, CNN ran an op ed under the title "Europe's blind spot on anti-Semitism". It is authored by Frida Ghitis, a Colombia-born journalist who has been published widely in the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune and dozens of publications in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Some extracts:

What would prompt a 23-year-old man, born and raised in France, to chase a small, terrified Jewish girl into a school courtyard, look her in the eye and shoot her in the head? ...I believe an honest examination will reveal a blind spot among those fighting prejudice that has allowed the ancient Jew hatred that infected Europe for centuries to survive. The blind spot is this: When the prejudice - and even the call for murder - is made in connection with the Palestinian cause, people look the other way and give it a pass... Often, when the Palestinian link is made, the prejudice comes from the left, couched as passion for human rights. At times, human rights activists seem to have no problem with anti-Semitism - even of the genocidal variety - condemning it forcefully only if it is accompanied by anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim sentiment. Just days before the Toulouse murders, on March 19, the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva hosted an event featuring a high official from Hamas. That is a group whose easily obtainable charter calls not just for the creation of a Palestinian state, which is something I, like many other people, wholeheartedly support. But Hamas' charter also declares: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it... The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews)..." If a white supremacist organization advocated genocide as this one does, polite society would keep its distance, at the very least. Instead, polite society contributes to a campaign to demonize Israel, fueling the hatred that is then unleashed against Jews in France and elsewhere. Last week, a U.N. official posted to Twitter a picture of a heartbreakingly injured Palestinian girl, tweeting "Another child killed by #Israel ..." Turns out it was a 2006 picture of a girl who died falling from a swing... Why would a man kill small Jewish children? The answer has intrigued historians and psychologists for many centuries. But the more urgent question is what we can do to stop it from happening again. And the answer is that the first requirement is telling the truth about anti-Jewish ideologies.

She mentions a UN official who posted a picture of a heartbreakingly-injured child last week. That woman is Khulood Badawi [2006 photo here].

No mere amateur in the battle for public opinion, Badawi is a seasoned political activist who serves today as the paid Information and Media Coordinator for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs here in Jerusalem. In tweeting the painfully-difficult-to-view photo [it's here], she added this malicious and factually upside-down caption:

“Palestine is bleeding. Another child killed by #Israel. Another father carrying his child to a grave in #Gaza.”

Badawi's dishonest message has been retweeted hundreds of times in the last few days. The reality, as opposed to Badawi's bogus narrative, is this:

The picture was taken in 2006, nearly six years ago. Reuters published it then, and like now its value was appreciated by those who want to paint Israel in demonic shades. The actual cause of the child's death (a tragic playground accident) was described this way in the Reuters caption:

“A Palestinian man carries the body of three year-old Raja Abu Shaban, in Gaza August 9, 2006. The three-year-old girl who had been reported killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on Wednesday actually died of an accident, Palestinian medical workers said on Thursday. Workers at Gaza’s Shifa hospital said on August 10, 2006 that the initial mistake over the cause of death appeared to have arisen because the girl’s corpse was brought in at the same time as the bodies of the gunmen. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES)”

The real reality is that the imagery of hatred, depicting an imagined Israel that seeks the deliberate deaths of the other side's children, will prevail because it's a narrative and a framework that plays to widely held prejudices.

Frida Ghitis expresses it well: the first requirement is telling the truth about anti-Jewish ideologies.