Mohamed Merah, the suspected murderer of seven people in France, including four at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday, is dead.
“In the end, he jumped from the window with his gun in his hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground,” French Interior Minister Claude Guean told reporters at the scene. For more than 24 hours, Merah had barricaded himself inside the building, under siege by approximately 300 police officers.
Gueant also confirmed that Merah had confessed to police negotiators to killing three French soldiers as well as three Jewish children and a rabbi at a school. He allegedly wanted to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and French army involvement in Afghanistan.
Merah, a French citizen of Muslim (Algerian) origin, had been under intelligence surveillance for years, after escaping from a prison in Afghanistan in 2007. He claims to have acted on behalf of Al Qaeda. He said his only regret was not having been able to carry out more killings.
COMPARING THE TOULOUSE KILLER TO ISRAEL
P. David Hornik
FrontPage, March 22, 2012
On Thursday, French police in Toulouse managed to [kill] a serial-killer/terrorist who had murdered seven people over the past two weeks and wounded others, some gravely. The seven dead included three off-duty French soldiers and four French Jewish civilians—including three young children—at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
The killer is Mohammed Merah, a 24-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin who claims to be an Al-Qaeda member. Merah had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan in 2007 he was arrested for bomb making, but escaped months later in a large-scale Taliban jailbreak. As for his recent attacks, he told police negotiators they were motivated by the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan and by a desire to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children.
In that regard Merah’s words were remarkably similar to those of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Monday, the day of the school massacre. Speaking to a conference in Brussels called “Engaging Youth—Palestinian Refugees”…she said: “When we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and in different parts of the world—we remember young people and children who lose their lives.”
These words—clearly connoting that children in Gaza are brutally murdered by Israeli forces—sparked enraged responses in Israel, including from the prime minister, foreign minister, and opposition leader. On Tuesday, Ashton’s office issued a purported “clarification.” It stated that she had “referred to tragedies taking the lives of children around the world and drew no parallel whatsoever between the circumstances of the Toulouse attack and the situation in Gaza.”
The problem, though, is that Ashton’s statement did draw that parallel, and her “clarification” is a weak and unconvincing denial rather than a genuine retraction. Israeli officials reportedly—with justice—see it that way and remain “unwilling to forgive” her remarks [a number have demanded her resignation—Ed.]. As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu put it, “What gets me especially incensed is the comparison between the targeted slaughter of children and the surgical, defensive activities of the Israel Defense Forces that are meant to hit terrorists who use children for human shields.”
Now that it turns out the Toulouse killer shares Ashton’s perception that Palestinian children are wantonly murdered by Israel, her words emerge in an even grimmer light. Indeed, in her statement on Monday, it was not enough for Ashton to evade and dilute what had happened in Toulouse by sweeping it into a larger category. (Merah chased after one of the victims, eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego, grabbed her by the hair, and shot her point-blank in the head.) By mentioning Gaza along with the Norwegian and Syrian atrocities, Ashton made sure that—even in this grisly instance—Jews would not be allowed just to be victims.
Ashton thereby expressed a sentiment—especially pronounced in Europe—that Jewish victimhood is a thing of the past, associated particularly with the Holocaust, while today Jews are perpetrators whose victims are the Palestinians. That notion of Palestinians as the victims, and Jews as the “new Nazis” as they are commonly regarded in much of Europe, still carries such powerful resonance that even an incident like Monday’s drew an amorally perverse response from a top EU diplomat.
The French police have acted swiftly and laudably in tracking down Merah. But the Arab and Muslim ethos that produces all too many like him, centering on perceived victimhood along with anti-Semitic and anti-Western hatred, remains. A situation made even worse when Westerners not only are too cowardly to counter that ethos but confirm and encourage it.
THE ENABLERS OF THE ANTISEMITIC ATTACKS
IN TOULOUSE AND THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Barry Rubin
Pajamas Media, March 21, 2012
What a tragic, evil joke. A drive-by shooter in the beautiful, almost magical, city of Toulouse, France, murders three Jewish children and a teacher in front of their school. Various VIPs issue statements about how terrible is this deed, how unspeakable.
And yet at that very moment, the next round of murders, the next slanderous and inciting antisemitic lies, are being perpetrated by respectable people and institutions. There is no real soul-searching, no true effort to do better, no serious examination about how the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hysteria is paving the way for murder and fueling dreams of genocide. The street thugs, fanatics drunk on the interpretations of Islam they are being fed, and the mentally twisted may be pulling the trigger but the distinguished, the powerful, and the honored are providing the ammunition.
Here are three examples of such deeds in nominally democratic countries—not Iran, not Syria, not Pakistan, where such things are even more intense—but in supposedly rational places.
1. The Turkish Editor
Meet Mahir Zeynalov, an editor at Today’s Zaman, a Turkish Islamic newspaper that is supposedly moderate. Meet the modern art of tweeting. Here is Zeynalov’s response to the murders: “Gunmen attack Jewish school in France, vandals attack Jewish cemetery in Poland, Jews burn mosques and Quran in Tunisia. What’s wrong?”
There are two ways to read this tweet. The more outrageous is this: How can it be wrong for gunmen to murder Jewish children or vandals to attack a Jewish cemetery in Poland if Jews are burning mosques and Qurans in Tunisia? One act balances the other. The other interpretation is this: What a world in which there is so much hatred! Gunmen murder Jewish children, vandals attack a Jewish cemetery, and Jews desecrate mosques and Muslim holy books.
Yet the second interpretation is almost as inciting to violence as the first. We know from many experiences—including Afghanistan right now—that anyone who burns or does anything to a Koran would set off massive riots and bloody killings. And as for burning a mosque, such a deed might well result in the massacre of every Jew living in Tunisia.
Tunisian Jews today are a couple of thousand terrified people who would run in the other direction if they saw a Koran in front of them lest they be accused of looking at it funny. What Zeyanlov has done is called a “blood libel,” a lie that might lead to the murder of Jews. A Muslim taking Zeyanlov’s tweet to heart would feel justified in murdering Jews, say children standing in front of their school.
2. The Dutch Cartoonist
De Volkskrant is one of Holland’s leading newspapers, favored by the intellectual elite. [It has just published a] cartoon showing Geert Wilders, leader of the conservative party that is very critical of Islam, getting loads of cash from a hidden hand that is clearly referring to Jews or Israel. The cartoon was written with a Hebrew text balloon, helpfully translated into Dutch as Wilders saying, “Thank you very much.”
So we have here the stereotype of the Jewish money behind the scenes conspiring, in this case against Islam and against Holland. And of course it is also designed to discredit Wilders. As with the Turkish editor’s tweet above, this is based on a total falsehood. There is hardly any Jewish support for Wilders’ party, which is, by the way, a legitimate political force, and there has never been the slightest evidence—even rumor—of Jewish financing for him, or Israeli financing.
Holland is a country where two political leaders have been assassinated and Wilders needs round-the-clock protection against potential threats.
What is the message here? That Jews and Israel are trying to destroy Islam—as in the Turkish tweet—and are nefarious plotters attacking innocent people. Isn’t it just, therefore, to murder Jews and Israelis in self-defense?
3. Europe’s Foreign Minister
Exhibit three is Catherine Ashton, whose career was originally built on running the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which favored unilateral Western disarmament in the face of Soviet tyranny. She is now the EU’s foreign minister. In response to the Toulouse shooting, she issued a statement that spends more time reciting the sufferings of children in the Gaza Strip than about antisemitism and the demonization of Jews and Israel.
Left out is the fact that Gaza is ruled by an organization, Hamas, that is openly antisemitic, openly preaches genocide, frequently has carried out terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews, and then glorifies those who did the murders. Remember that the only reason Hamas can rule Gaza is that Israel voluntarily withdrew from the territory in a gesture intended to promote peace, something Ashton and much of the Western media and governmental elites usually don’t mention.
When Hamas maintains a war with Israel, firing rockets, missiles, and mortars, Israel defends itself. Hamas also deliberately sites military arsenals and weapons in residential areas. Thus, civilians and even children are accidentally killed by Israel in the fighting. This is precisely what happens in other wars, including those being waged now by EU countries.
Yet Ashton does not defend Israel or its right to defend itself. She does not take sides against the terrorists. At best we get spurious neutrality that is actually anti-Israel propaganda. She even refers to Palestine as a currently existing country even though the EU recognizes no such country. So much for diplomatic responsibility. Her “clarification” came after criticism but she meant exactly what she said and will do the same thing next time as she and other EU officials have done many times before.…
What is needed…is a real change in the behavior of the mass media that pours out lies, the academics who slander and distort, and the governments that refuse to stand by a democratic country and people beset by terrorism and the world’s oldest hatred. Oh, and one more thing is needed: the admission that the greatest threat of hatred, “racism,” dehumanization of the “other,” and threat of persecution today—as the statistics for Europe and North America show—is not “Islamophobia” but antisemitism.
And none of those things are going to happen because the liars, haters, apologists, and enablers will not acknowledge their own behavior while those who are supposed to supervise them will not act. Hating and lying about Israel and the Jewish people is too useful politically and too entwined with the version of left-wing ideology, not to mention Islamism and the dominant interpretation of Islam, currently so powerful in the world.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Europe is no longer a safe place for Jews to live. Yet it is accurate to say that it is becoming an unsafe place for Jews to live, and certainly for those who wish to express mainstream Jewish views and to practice their religion openly. Meanwhile, the EU and various governments dare not admit that the principal cause of antisemitic activity is radical Islam, and the principal inspiration for popular antisemitism is trendy leftist ideas that now dominate much of that continent and are spreading in North America.
Thus, Jewish children are deliberately murdered by a terrorist in the midst of France. In response, come get the formal statements and the crocodile tears. Yet at the exact same time as the bullets are entering the children’s bodies, as the victims fall to the ground, as the ambulance sirens sound, the incitement and the lies and the slanders continue, laying the groundwork for more hatred and more murder.
THE NEW THREAT
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield Blog, March 21, 2012
There was a time when Jewish children were hunted down and killed in France. Their killers believed themselves to be members of a superior group that was destined to rule the world and enslave or exterminate members of inferior groups.…
What was then is now again. The occupying army doesn’t wear uniforms, it wears keffiyahs. It doesn’t speak German, it speaks Arabic. It doesn’t believe that it is superior for reasons of race as much as for reasons of religion. It does not view all others as Untermenschen, but as infidels. It looks forward not to a thousand year Reich, but to a thousand year Caliphate.
Mohammed Merah did not chase down a French-Jewish seven year old girl, put a gun to her head and pull the trigger because he came from an economically depressed area or any of the other media spin. He was only doing what Muslims had been doing to non-Muslims for over a thousand years.… When your ideology believes that it is in a zero-sum struggle with the rest of the world and that membership means that you are a superior breed of human being because you worship the Fuhrer or Allah, then it won’t stop. It won’t ever stop.…
Between all the non-stop coverage, the expressions of grief, the political pandering, no one is stating the obvious. France has been occupied all over again. Once again the occupation has been carried out with the consent of the authorities who have decided that cowardice is the only way…where blatant appeasement is disguised as honor.…
It’s not Neo-Nazis that are the threat to Jews today. It’s the new Nazis and the old Nazis who were rounding up Jews into ghettos and murdering their children long before, a thousand years before Hitler. The Neos are pathetically longing for the return of a genocidal state that isn’t coming back, while the Muslims are actually working to bring back their genocidal state. They are doing it in Egypt, in Libya, in Pakistan and in England, France and Spain.…
Does it really matter whether the men murdering children in the name of their Fuhrer call him Adolf or Mohammed?… Does it matter whether their fantasies of superiority are based on bad science or bad religion? What matters is the end result.…
The Tolouse Massacre did not come out of the blue, it follows decades of Muslim violence in France—a Kristalnacht that has been going on year after year. It will not stop here. Not while there are five million Muslim in France, some of whom are bound to pick up the Koran and take it seriously.…
“O Muslims, O Servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” That is what Muslims look forward to in their end times. Rocks and trees that tell them where the Jews are so that the faithful servants of Allah don’t have to spend too much time and energy searching for their victims.…
The following is a response to the terror attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse written and posted to his blog by former Canadian Member of Parliament Stockwell Day on March 20, 2012:
“My dear Jewish friends and friends of Jews everywhere,
At the moment I heard the awful news of the cold blooded murders at Toulouse I was actually at the Oberoi Hotel, one of the ghastly scenes of the terrorist rampage of 2008 in Mumbai. Remember, innocent Jews at their Chabad in Mumbai were also slaughtered that day. Even in the face of the horrific death rate of that event there were voices at that time in the media suggesting the Chabad killings were ‘random’.
I have visited that holy place. It was difficult to find, embedded down the never ending side streets of Mumbai’s twisting urban sprawl. It is not even close to the Oberoi or Taj Hotels, where so many innocents of many creeds and cultures were exterminated en masse by the cowardly but planned attacks that day.
Whatever we discover about these recent Toulouse assassinations, let nobody even hint they were not planned, or that they were random. This was not a case of momentary road rage or the crossfire of an inter gang drug feud. That would have been heartbreaking enough.
As with almost all such attacks on Jewish people, this was planned, premeditated and methodically perpetrated. A wonderful rabbi and beautiful children were massacred for one reason and one reason only—they were Jews.
Every one of us who is not Jewish must link arms in a virtual and virtuous circle of protection of the Jewish people around the globe, wherever they live. Those who allow toxic anti-Semitic thoughts to brew chillingly deep within their depraved hearts and minds must know beyond all doubt that we will not allow Jews to stand, and sometimes perish, alone.… We must be visibly unintimidated, unexcusing, utterly unaccepting of any such action.
Potential and existential murderers must hear the cry of our hearts, the non-Jews of the planet, that we will never accept their perverted machinations. An attack on a Jewish grandchild is an attack on my grandchild. The murder of a Jewish parent is the murder of my parents. When Jews are targeted for destruction, we are all targeted. Let us lift and link our arms together, in plain view, and not just to comfort and console.…
Only then may ‘Never Again’ become a reality. Shalom."
