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Contents:
Paris Attack Represents Islamist Hate That Knows No Boundaries: Barbara Kay, National Post, Jan. 7, 2015— It is a black day in France for loss of human life and — more important historically — a black day for democracy’s greatest gift to the world: the principle of freedom of speech.
France and the New Charismatic Jihad: Reuel Marc Gerecht, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 7, 2015 — The terrorist attack in Paris on Wednesday—with 12 people killed by masked men yelling Islamist slogans—has been a long time coming.
Europe's Year of the Jihadist: Abigail R. Esman, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Dec. 29, 2015— Among the trends of 2014 – "Gone, Girl," Lena Dunham, and $55,000 potato salad – was another the list-makers seem to have missed: it was also a very good year for Islamic jihad.
Whitewashing Islamic Terrorism: Charles Bybelezer, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 3, 2015— Three days before Christmas, one unsuspecting holiday shopper was killed and nine others wounded when a van plowed through a crowded market in Nantes, located in western France.
The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders: George Packer, New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2015
Will We Ever Learn? Obama White House Can't Admit Paris Attacks 'Islamic Terrorism': Steven Emerson, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Jan. 7, 2015
Jewish Cartoonist Among Victims of Paris Terror Attack: Ynet, Jan. 8, 2015
Muslims Segregated from French Society in Growing Islamist Mini-States: Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times, Jan. 7, 2014
Political Correctness and Islam: Michael Freund, Jerusalem Post, Oct. 27, 2015
PARIS ATTACK REPRESENTS ISLAMIST
Barbara Kay
National Post, Jan. 7, 2014
It is a black day in France for loss of human life and — more important historically — a black day for democracy’s greatest gift to the world: the principle of freedom of speech. Three masked Islamic terrorists, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade, stormed the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing 12 and injuring about 20, four said to be in critical condition. There seems no doubt as to the motivation for the attack. According to a witness, the assailants cried out, “We will avenge the Prophet.” The gunmen shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) as shots rang out.
After a gun fight with police outside the building, in which two officers were killed, the gunmen fled in a car (stolen after they abandoned their projected getaway car). A manhunt is under way. Security levels, already amongst the highest in the world, are being raised, the French government affirmed. Authorities said several other threats having been averted in the last few weeks. A police representative said there was a good possibility of more to come. Emergency government meetings are underway. Foreign governments expressed their horror at the attack and their solidarity with France. President Obama condemned the attack in “the strongest possible terms.” Britain’s David Cameron said: “the murders are sickening. We stand with the French people in the fight against terror and defending the freedom of the press.” Fine words, small comfort.
Charlie Hebdo is a satiric magazine known for its bravado on touchy subjects, especially Islam, which it has frequently – and scathingly – satirized. One of the few publications with the courage to publish the infamous Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed, which sparked threats of violence in 2005, it is hardly surprising that it should find itself in the crosshairs of Islamists. But an attack of this magnitude has staggered the imagination even of those accustomed to threats and hatred directed at iconoclasts. Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Gerard Biard told France Inter: “I don’t understand how people can attack a newspaper with heavy weapons. A newspaper is not a weapon of war.” He is wrong. All totalitarian systems loathe mockery and punish those who ridicule their sacred monsters. Stalin purged writers who showed the slightest disrespect. The utopian vision of Islamists does not tolerate mockery. Did Mr. Biard think Islamist rage would be content forever with merely beating up Jews, burning synagogues and marching through the streets screaming “To the gas, Jews”? Whatever starts with anti-Semitism moves on to bigger fish. That is a lesson Europeans are learning, but too slowly.
On Charlie Hebdo’s Twitter account, the last tweet mocked Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the brutal, brutish self-declared Islamic State. Perhaps it was one poke at the hornet’s nest too many. The days of mere fatwas seem to be over. We’re dealing with grand-scale terrorism now: towers downed, kidnapping, rape, murder en masse. Whether or not these particular massacrists are devotees of al Qaeda or ISIS or are merely a cluster of self-organized lone wolves is irrelevant. They have taken their inspiration from a form of Islamism that knows no boundaries of geography or cruelty. Can we finally concede that the recent Islamist attacks make it clear they do not have the kind of “root causes” liberals brood over with such empathetic anguish. They aren’t fighting for a Palestinian state, or to protest the wealth gap. This particular group had planned ahead. They knew that on most days few of the writers and cartoonists actually came to the Charlie Hebdo offices. They struck on the day when it was customary to hold a group editorial meeting. They were able to obtain a grenade launcher. They had a car waiting, and appear to have been prepared for police.
What will happen now? The government will tighten its security, but who can now trust that it will be effective? Many knowledgable scholars of Islam and other careful observers have warned that this day was coming; the bien-pensants rolled their eyes at them and called them conspiracy theorists, alarmists, Islamophobes. But they were right and the bien-pensants were wrong. So now people will turn to the “alarmists” for their solutions: people like Dutch politician Geert Wilders, Nigel Farrage (leader of the UK Independence Party) and Martine Le Pen of France (president of the National Front). The mainstream politicians will make promises, but it will be too little too late. Paris is burning, but all of Europe is breathing the carbon monoxide of Islamism. Anyone who thinks it can’t happen here is a fool.
Barbara Kay is a CIJR Academic Fellow
FRANCE AND THE NEW CHARISMATIC JIHAD
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Wall Street Journal, Jan. 7, 2015
The terrorist attack in Paris on Wednesday—with 12 people killed by masked men yelling Islamist slogans—has been a long time coming. After the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., Western counterterrorist experts probably feared European radical Muslims more than they did Islamic militants in the Middle East. Since the early 1990s, when Algeria’s savage war between the military junta and Islamists began to spill over into France, the French internal-security service, now known as the Direction Central du Renseignement Intérieur, or DCRI, began to ramp up its capacity to monitor Muslim militants. On Nov. 27, 2001, France’s premier counterterrorist magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguière, was pessimistic about “autonomous” jihadist cells in Europe and North America that “don’t need to receive orders to pass into action.” The Iraq War added to this widespread anxiety. Many believed that the Anglo-American invasion would provoke a maelstrom of holy warriors against the West. It didn’t happen then. But it may be happening now.
The lethal attack in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo —which has made a specialty of mocking both sides of the too-much-Islam-in-Europe debate, and in 2012 famously published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad —probably isn’t a lone-wolf affair. But it may represent what Mr. Bruguière feared: native jihadist cells that can act independently of foreign terrorist organizations, like al Qaeda or Islamic State, but may act in concert, and certainly in sympathy, with these groups. The DCRI, easily the most effective domestic-intelligence organization in Western Europe, has been sounding the alarm for over a year, warning that the Syrian insurrection against the Bashar Assad regime was becoming too bloody and too irresistibly magnetic for French Sunni Muslims. Several hundred of them have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight under the banner of Islamic State and other radical groups. Hundreds of other European Muslims appear to have joined them. The French bastion against domestic terror appears to be cracking. This isn’t good news, because America’s dependence on the French service and Great Britain’s domestic-intelligence outfit, MI5, cannot be overstated. They are part of America’s front line in the war against Islamic holy warriors. Take away communications intercepts, an American forte, and Washington has effectively no unilateral capacity to monitor Islamic militants on European soil. Other Western European services are quick to confess that the British and French are their models and have been indispensable in their own efforts to understand and check Islamic radicalism in a continent that is now effectively without borders.
If the French, who have more policemen and security officers per capita than any other Western country, cannot monitor and check Muslim extremists at home, Islamic radicals in Europe and elsewhere will surely take note. The ability of Western European citizens to travel without visas offers enormous opportunities for jihadists whose dream target remains the U.S. There are now so many European Muslims it is impossible for American officials to identify suspect radicals without European assistance. Even random, targeted selections and entry denials, based on best guesses, could cause serious diplomatic problems with America’s European allies, who must protect the travel rights of their citizens. The Europeans carry the heavy load of American security in addition to their own. The rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq—the first time jihadism has successfully conquered and occupied any large territory—has introduced a historically evocative charisma into Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic charismatics are always bad news for Westerners, even if their primary targets are Shiites, Kurds and Yazidis. The spillover is unavoidable, given the anti-Western core of modern Islamic militancy.
Part of the problem for Europe is undeniably home-brewed. The alarming, so far unchecked rise of anti-Semitism and violence against European Jews that is practiced by both Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans isn’t coincidental to the increase of Islamic terrorism in Europe. Contrary to the bizarre contention of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry , Israel and the travails of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had nothing to do with the rise of Islamic State and the birth of a new jihadism that is far more appealing than the less territorially successful jihadism of al Qaeda. Anti-Semitism has become inseparable from the gospel of a charged Islamic identity. (Western anti-Semitism, traditional Islamic suspicion of Jews, and anti-Zionism have congealed.) Anti-Semitism goes up in Europe as the appeal of a European identity to Muslims goes down. Anti-Semitism nourishes the radical Islamic vision of a humbled Europe, once the motherland of imperialism. It encourages the idea that Muslims can dictate the terms of European expression about Islam. Not that long ago, Muslims couldn’t have cared less what Europeans thought about them or their prophet. Christians and Jews were infidels, after all, benighted souls not worth bothering with. That has changed as Europe’s Muslim population has grown and radicalized, and as traditional Islamic injunctions from the homelands were imported into an ultra-tolerant, increasingly politically correct Europe.
The French identity, more open than most European identities, has appealed to millions of Muslim immigrants. Thoughtful French intellectuals just a decade ago hoped that “French Islam” might work. A decade of troubles, including large riots in predominantly Muslim suburbs, increasingly lethal anti-Semitism, and now terrorism have stirred serious doubts even among the most optimistic. Americans ought to hope that the French can get all of this right. If they can, then this horrible moment, too, shall pass. If they can’t—and it isn’t clear that the French can solve their worst counterterrorist problems unless Islamic State is demagnetized (pre-eminently an American military problem)—then the grim analysis in 2001 by Judge Bruguière may prove prescient.
Abigail R. Esman
Investigative Project on Terrorism, Dec. 29, 2014
Among the trends of 2014 – "Gone, Girl," Lena Dunham, and $55,000 potato salad – was another the list-makers seem to have missed: it was also a very good year for Islamic jihad. And while this was true on the battlefields of Syria and the cities and villages of Pakistan, it was true, too, in more subtle ways throughout the West – and especially in Europe. It was, for instance, the year of Mehdi Nemmouche's slaughter of four Jews at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. It was the year that Belgium itself was named a "terrorist recruiting hub" by the Wall Street Journal. And in Germany, France, England, and the Netherlands, pro-Islamic State demonstrations laid bare the growing support of terrorism and Islamic jihad among Europe's expanding Muslim population – all while politicians either stood back or even contributed to the praise.
Amsterdam, London and The Hague, and the establishment of "sharia zones" in London, Wupperthal, and elsewhere. True, such zones do not necessarily delineate areas in which sharia law, rather than state law, applies. But the term helps them define those largely-Muslim neighborhoods whose residents tend to be radical and who often support jihadist movements both at home and abroad. Combined, these events signal the increasing success of Islamists who are working to change Europe from within – sometimes through violence, but more often through strategies known as "stealth jihad" – a way of applying social and political pressures to transform the current culture. Take, for instance, the response of Josias van Aartsen, mayor of The Hague, to radical Muslims who called for the death of Dutch non-Muslims and Jews during pro-IS rallies in August: then on holiday, Van Aartsen declined to return home, ignoring even the throwing of stones at non-Muslims and the police. Only when a counter demonstration against IS was planned in the same, Muslim-majority neighborhood did Van Aartsen take action: he forbade it. "Too provocative," he said.
Or there are the recently-leaked intelligence briefs in France, as reported by the Gatestone Institute, that "Muslim students are effectively establishing an Islamic parallel society completely cut off from non-Muslim students," while "more than 1000 French supermarkets, including major chains such as Carrefour, have been selling Islamic books that openly call for jihad and the killing of non-Muslims." In England, an "Operation Trojan Horse" outlined plans to Islamize schools in Muslim neighborhoods. According to the Guardian, a government investigation of the program last summer found a "'sustained, coordinated agenda to impose segregationist attitudes and practices of a hardline, politicised strain of Sunni Islam' on children in a number of Birmingham schools." Among those responsible for the "Operation" were the Association of Muslim Schools – UK and the Muslim Council of Britain – the same organization that, in 2011, declared that women who do not veil their faces "could be guilty of rejecting Islam." Ironically, it seems to have been England's own culture that allowed the rise of Islamist teachings in its schools to begin with. Even Britain's education secretary Nicky Morgan admitted to the New York Times that much of the operation's success could be attributed to public "fear of being accused of racism and anti-Islamic views." Not for nothing did former Obama advisor Lawrence Krauss declare the British "too polite" and "scared of offending 'vocal and aggressive Muslims.'"
The government's discovery of "Operation Trojan Horse" and immediate efforts to dismantle it are commendable, but it is difficult to assess the damage already done to Muslim children in the British schools. By some accounts, as many as 2,000 Britons have joined the (Sunni-led) jihad in Syria and Iraq. That includes the man known as "Jihadi John," who beheaded U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. And, experts warn, the number of so-called "junior jihadis" – children under 10 who have become radicalized – is on the rise. Not that such warnings are likely to do much good: The UK has, until recently, spent tremendous resources on programs aimed at preventing Muslim youth from joining militant groups, which have for the most part failed. "Having undertaken the 'most significant domestic program by any Western country to foster a moderate version of Islam and prevent radicalization, the UK has effectively given up trying to stop jihadists from being created," James Brandon, the former research director at one such program, told Reuters.
Despite such developments, European lawmakers have had a hard time figuring out how to deal with Muslim radicals, especially with returnees from Syria and Iraq. England is hardly the only place where politicians fear "offending" the sensibilities of Muslim groups. Although an estimated 450 Germans have joined the jihad in Syria, German Green Party domestic policy expert Irene Mihalic told the magazine Der Spiegel in September that tougher counterterrorism laws were unnecessary because "there are already 'sufficient levers available to impose bans and limitations' on terrorists and their supporters." Majority parties apparently disagreed. Later that month, Germany became the first country to fully outlaw IS, along with all expressions of support for the terrorist group, from banners and graffiti to public demonstrations and endorsements by local mosques…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
WHITEWASHING ISLAMIC TERRORISM
Charles Bybelezer
Jerusalem Post, Jan. 3, 2015
Three days before Christmas, one unsuspecting holiday shopper was killed and nine others wounded when a van plowed through a crowded market in Nantes, located in western France. The attack came a day after a man, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” rammed his car into crowds in the eastern city of Dijon, wounding 13 people; this, some 24 hours after an assailant stabbed and wounded three police officers in Joueles- Tours, central France, likewise while yelling “God is the greatest” in Arabic. A day after the Dijon attack, which the perpetrator dedicated to the children of “Palestine,” France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, called on the public “to not draw hasty conclusions since… [the driver’s] motives have not been established.” Nevertheless, and despite the fact that “the investigation had barely begun,” Dijon’s public prosecutor, Marie-Christine Tarrare, made clear that the incident was “not a terrorist act at all.” It took the third attack before French Prime Minister Manuel Valls came closest to accepting reality, conceding that, “there is, as you know, a terrorist threat to France.”
Leaving aside the virtually unreported incidents that same week of the drive-by-shootings in Paris targeting the David Ben Ichay Synagogue, the Al Haeche kosher restaurant and a Jewish-owned publishing house, only a Kafkaesque willful blindness could suggest that citizens being run down on the streets constituted a mere threat of terrorism rather than a terrorist problem of the first order. The icing on the cake was an official French pronouncement that no link had been found between any of these events. For starters, how about Islam? Across the globe, residents of Sydney were still reeling from the surreal siege on a café, which left two civilians dead. During the 16-hour standoff, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott addressed the nation, asserting, “we don’t yet know the motivation of the [hostage-taker].” At that point, however, it was evident that the individual who would later be named as Man Haron Monis, an Iranian refugee and self-styled sheikh, was acting out of religious conviction; a black flag with clearly legible white Arabic writing had been forcibly held up by hostages against the restaurant’s front window.
Following the ordeal, once the extent of Monis’ extremism became public, Abbott had this to say: “These events do demonstrate that even a country as free, as open, as generous and as safe as ours is vulnerable to acts of politically motivated violence.” Politically motivated? How about religiously inspired?! How could it be, Australian officialdom pondered, that someone with such a long and checkered history was not under surveillance? The answer is that “sick and disturbed individual[s],” as Abbott described Monis, do not generally find their way onto terrorist watch lists, whereas radical Islamists might. Monis fell through the cracks because the threat he posed was incorrectly characterized. While authorities (and much of the media) were quick to describe him as a “lone wolf,” the fact of the matter is that there have been multiple events throughout Australia over the past few months pointing to an extensive network of terrorist collaborators…
While the denial of Islamic terrorism has long roots, it reached a post-9/11 turning point on November 5, 2009. On that day, 13 people were massacred by Nidal Malik Hasan at a military base in Ford Hood, Texas. A self-proclaimed “Soldier of Allah,” Hasan had been contacting al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki. He too shouted “Allahu Akbar” while gunning down dozens of people. Nevertheless, the White House worked overtime to ensure the mass killing was classified as “workplace violence.” In his initial response to the nation, US President Barack Obama stated, “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” Certainly not Islam! Half a decade later, the families of Hasan’s victims are still fighting for combat-related benefits they would otherwise receive if their loved ones had been killed in a classified “terrorist attack.” By contrast, Hasan remained on the army’s payroll until his conviction in mid-2013, earning some $300,000 in the interim.
Under Obama, references to Islamic terrorism have been purged from law enforcement documents and lexicon. He is, after all, the man who embraced the Muslim Brotherhood, whose American front groups, mind you, were recently designated as terrorist organizations by Gulf States and Egypt. Obama is the Christian who played golf on December 25 with the Islamist leader of Malaysia, and who shares a special bond of trust with the Islamist dictator-in-progress of Turkey, a state-sponsor of Hamas. His outreach to the mullahs in Tehran confirms he is an equal opportunity (Sunni and Shi’ite) embracer of radical Muslims. Obama’s actions have set the tone for the current whitewashing of Islamic terrorism in most of the West; thankfully, though, north of the border in Canada there is a clear-eyed leader to offer a counter- example, one that needs to be followed. On October 20, Martin Couture- Rouleau, a Muslim convert and supporter of IS, rammed his car into two Canadian soldiers, killing one, just north of Montreal. Immediately thereafter, Prime Minister Stephen Harper defined the incident as a terrorist attack.
Two days later, another soldier was killed when Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a convert to Islam who openly professed his admiration for jihadists, attacked parliament in Ottawa. “I have been saying for a long time, we live in dangerous world,” Harper affirmed to lawmakers the next morning. “Terrorism has been here with us for a while…. [I draw] attention back to incidents such as the Toronto 18 [terror plot in 2006], the Via Rail conspiracy in 2013, and I could point to a number of others that most will never know about.” Harper not only labeled the two October attacks as terrorism, but also properly contextualized them as the latest in a long series of Islamic plots. Only by correctly defining a problem can one begin to effectively combat it: A Muslim who runs over a dozen people while shouting “Allahu Akbar” is not simply “mentally unstable, ” he is a terrorist. The delusional refusal in the West to accept this fact has contributed to the transformation of large swathes of Paris, Sydney and other urban centers into little Baghdads. And unless the confusion over “confused” Muslims killing people ceases, many Western countries can expect more dead bodies lining their streets in the future.
Charles Bybelezer is a Former CIJR Publications Chairman
The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders: George Packer, New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2015—The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies.
Will We Ever Learn? Obama White House Can't Admit Paris Attacks 'Islamic Terrorism': Steven Emerson, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Jan. 7, 2015—They shouted in Arabic "Allahu Akbar" (Allah is Greatest) and "We are avenging the Prophet Mohammed" as they sprayed their victims with hundreds of bullets from their semi-automatic weapons.
Jewish Cartoonist Among Victims of Paris Terror Attack: Ynet, Jan. 8, 2014—Georges Wolinski, who was born in Tunisia to Jewish parents, discovered comic books from US soldiers stationed in his country; Israeli cartoonist Kichka: 'They were pioneers, had no restrictions or taboos'.
Muslims Segregated from French Society in Growing Islamist Mini-States: Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times, Jan. 7, 2014—A backdrop to the massacre in Paris on Wednesday by self-professed al Qaeda terrorists is that city officials have increasingly ceded control of heavily Muslim neighborhoods to Islamists, block by block.
Political Correctness and Islam: Michael Freund, Jerusalem Post, Oct. 27, 2015 —For much of the past 13 years, ever since al-Qaida attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the West has found itself confronting an increasingly dangerous foe in the form of jihadist terror.
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