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France admits soldiers have deserted to ISIS, including ex-elite special forces and French foreign legionnaires

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French soldiers take a break in a gymnasium at the Command Center of France's national security alert system Vigipirate on Jan. 21. in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris. AFP PHOTO/KENZO TRIBOUILLARD

French soldiers take a break in a gymnasium at the Command Center of France’s national security alert system Vigipirate on Jan. 21. in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris. AFP PHOTO/KENZO TRIBOUILLARD

by Henry Samuel, The Telegraph

Several French former soldiers have joined the ranks of jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq, the country’s government confirmed on Wednesday, as it outlined a series of new anti-terrorism measures following the Islamist attacks in Paris.

Most of the ex-soldiers, reportedly numbering around 10 and including former paratroopers and French foreign legionnaires, are said to be fighting on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Most worrying is the reported presence of an ex-member of France’s elite First Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment, considered one of Europe’s most experienced special forces units and which shares the “Who Dares Wins” motto of the SAS.

The unnamed individual, of North African origin, had received commando training in combat, shooting and survival techniques. He served for five years before joining a private security company for which he worked in the Arabian peninsula, where he was radicalised before heading for Syria, according to L’Opinion, a news website.

One of the defectors had become the leader of a group of a dozen or so French-born Islamists operating in the Syrian region of Deir Ezzor who had all received combat training, reported Radio France International, or RFI.

Others, apparently in their twenties, were explosive experts. Some were Muslim converts while others were radicalised French from an “Arab-Muslim” background, said RFI.

Jean-Yves Drian, the French defence minister, confirmed the existence of a handful of ex-French military personnel among jihadist fighters in the Middle East, but tried to play down their presence, saying the phenomenon was “extremely rare”.

However, they will raise fears over the risk of a French version of the 2009 gun rampage at Fort Hood, the U.S. military base in Texas, where Nadal Hasan, a U.S. army major who turned to radical Islam, killed 13 servicemen scheduled to leave for Afghanistan.

Drian said that the French armed forces’ internal security and protection unit, DPSD, would “reinforce its vigilance and see its means increased.”

News of the defections came as Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, unveiled anti-terrorism measures worth over $600 million after France’s worst Islamist attack in which 17 people were killed earlier this month.

It coincided with a government pledge to cut 7,500 fewer defence jobs in the next five years than previously planned.

Valls said 2,680 new jobs would be created to fight terrorism by 2018 – around half in intelligence.

France now has to monitor almost 3,000 people involved in “terrorist networks” following a 130 per cent jump in those linked to jihadists in Iraq and Syria in the past year, he said.

An extra 60 Muslim clerics would be recruited to work with potential militants in France’s overcrowded prisons, while five units would be created to isolate radicalized inmates.

Valls said the idea of stripping offenders of certain civic rights – a measure mirroring a post-war law barring Nazi collaborators from voting, holding office or working for the state – would be debated.

Other moves included the creation of “cyberpatrols” to track jihadists and recruitment online and the launch of a website dedicated to countering Islamist indoctrination.

The decision to boost web surveillance came after a group of hackers loyal to Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, broke into the Twitter account of Le Monde.

The attack by the Syrian Electronic Army forced Le Monde to suspend temporarily its Twitter account, which has 3.3 million followers, but the paper later said it had regained control of its computers, adding: “We apologize for any fraudulent posts on our behalf.”

Before that, the hackers managed to post messages including: “Je ne suis pas Charlie” (I am not Charlie). This was reference to the now famous “Je suis Charlie” message brandished by millions in tribute to the 12 people killed at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly, earlier this month.

They were shot dead by Cherif and Said Koachi, two French brothers of Algerian origin with links to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The same week, Amedy Coulibaly, a home-grown Islamist, killed a police officer and four hostages at a Jewish supermarket east of Paris. Four men aged 22 to 28 were placed under formal investigation yesterday over the Coulibaly killings.

France grants French citizenship to Muslim man who saved lives at kosher grocery in Paris

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French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, left, and French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, center, award citizenship to Lassana Bathily during a ceremony in Paris, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015. Bathily, a Muslim employee born in Mali, has been granted French citizenship and honored as a hero by France’s authorities for saving lives during the attack of a kosher supermarket in Paris. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena) (The Associated Press)

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, left, and French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, center, award citizenship to Lassana Bathily during a ceremony in Paris, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015. Bathily, a Muslim employee born in Mali, has been granted French citizenship and honored as a hero by France’s authorities for saving lives during the attack of a kosher supermarket in Paris. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena) (The Associated Press)

by AP

Paris: French authorities have honored a Mali-born employee who saved lives at the kosher supermarket attacked by terrorists as a hero and granted him French citizenship.

Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve praised Muslim, 24, for his “courage” and “heroism” during a ceremony Tuesday in the presence of Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Cazeneuve said Bathily’s “act of humanity has become a symbol of an Islam of peace and tolerance.”

Bathily was in the store’s underground stockroom when gunman Amedy Coulibaly burst in upstairs on January 9 and killed four people. He turned off the stockroom’s freezer and hid a group of shoppers inside before sneaking out through a fire escape to speak to police and help them with their operation to free the 15 hostages and kill the attacker.

Noam Chomsky: Paris attacks show hypocrisy of west's outrage

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Philosopher Noam Chomsky is professor of the MIT Institute of Linguistics (Emeritus). (Photo: teleSUR/file)

Philosopher Noam Chomsky is professor of the MIT Institute of Linguistics (Emeritus). (Photo: teleSUR/file)

by Noam Chomsky

After the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, which killed 12 people including the editor and four other cartoonists, and the murder of four Jews at a kosher supermarket shortly after, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared “a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.”

Millions of people demonstrated in condemnation of the atrocities, amplified by a chorus of horror under the banner “I am Charlie.” There were eloquent pronouncements of outrage, captured well by the head of Israel’s Labor Party and the main challenger for the upcoming elections, Isaac Herzog, who declared that “Terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it,” and that “All the nations that seek peace and freedom [face] an enormous challenge” from brutal violence.

The crimes also elicited a flood of commentary, inquiring into the roots of these shocking assaults in Islamic culture and exploring ways to counter the murderous wave of Islamic terrorism without sacrificing our values. The New York Times described the assault as a “clash of civilizations,” but was corrected by Times columnist Anand Giridharadas, who tweeted that it was “Not & never a war of civilizations or between them. But a war FOR civilization against groups on the other side of that line. #CharlieHebdo.”

The scene in Paris was described vividly in the New York Times by veteran Europe correspondent Steven Erlanger: “a day of sirens, helicopters in the air, frantic news bulletins; of police cordons and anxious crowds; of young children led away from schools to safety. It was a day, like the previous two, of blood and horror in and around Paris.”

Erlanger also quoted a surviving journalist who said that “Everything crashed. There was no way out. There was smoke everywhere. It was terrible. People were screaming. It was like a nightmare.” Another reported a “huge detonation, and everything went completely dark.” The scene, Erlanger reported, “was an increasingly familiar one of smashed glass, broken walls, twisted timbers, scorched paint and emotional devastation.”

These last quotes, however — as independent journalist David Peterson reminds us — are not from January 2015. Rather, they are from a report by Erlanger on April 24 1999, which received far less attention. Erlanger was reporting on the NATO “missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters” that “knocked Radio Television Serbia off the air,” killing 16 journalists.

“NATO and American officials defended the attack,” Erlanger reported, “as an effort to undermine the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is,” hence a legitimate target of attack.

There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of “We are RTV,” no inquiries into the roots of the attack in Christian culture and history. On the contrary, the attack on the press was lauded. The highly regarded U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then envoy to Yugoslavia, described the successful attack on RTV as “an enormously important and, I think, positive development,” a sentiment echoed by others.

There are many other events that call for no inquiry into western culture and history — for example, the worst single terrorist atrocity in Europe in recent years, in July 2011, when Anders Breivik, a Christian ultra-Zionist extremist and Islamophobe, slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers.

Also ignored in the “war against terrorism” is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times — Barack Obama’s global assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the 50 civilians reportedly killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, which was barely reported.

One person was indeed punished in connection with the NATO attack on RTV — Dragoljub Milanović, the general manager of the station, who was sentenced by the European Court of Human Rights to 10 years in prison for failing to evacuate the building, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia considered the NATO attack, concluding that it was not a crime, and although civilian casualties were “unfortunately high, they do not appear to be clearly disproportionate.”

The comparison between these cases helps us understand the condemnation of the New York Times by civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, famous for his forceful defense of freedom of expression. “There are times for self-restraint,”Abrams wrote, “but in the immediate wake of the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory, [the Times editors] would have served the cause of free expression best by engaging in it” by publishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons ridiculing Mohammed that elicited the assault.

Abrams is right in describing the Charlie Hebdo attack as “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory.” The reason has to do with the concept “living memory,” a category carefully constructed to include Theircrimes against us while scrupulously excluding Our crimes against them — the latter not crimes but noble defense of the highest values, sometimes inadvertently flawed.

This is not the place to inquire into just what was being “defended” when RTV was attacked, but such an inquiry is quite informative (see my A New Generation Draws the Line).

There are many other illustrations of the interesting category “living memory.” One is provided by the Marine assault against Fallujah in November 2004, one of the worst crimes of the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq.

The assault opened with occupation of Fallujah General Hospital, a major war crime quite apart from how it was carried out. The crime was reported prominently on the front page of the New York Times, accompanied with a photograph depicting how “Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.” The occupation of the hospital was considered meritorious and justified: it “shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.”

Evidently, this is no assault on free expression, and does not qualify for entry into “living memory.”

There are other questions. One would naturally ask how France upholds freedom of expression and the sacred principles of “fraternity, freedom, solidarity.” For example, is it through the Gayssot Law, repeatedly implemented, which effectively grants the state the right to determine Historical Truth and punish deviation from its edicts? By expelling miserable descendants of Holocaust survivors (Roma) to bitter persecution in Eastern Europe? By the deplorable treatment of North African immigrants in the banlieues of Paris where the Charlie Hebdo terrorists became jihadis? When the courageous journal Charlie Hebdo fired the cartoonist Siné on grounds that a comment of his was deemed to have anti-Semitic connotations? Many more questions quickly arise.

Anyone with eyes open will quickly notice other rather striking omissions. Thus, prominent among those who face an “enormous challenge” from brutal violence are Palestinians, once again during Israel’s vicious assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which many journalists were murdered, sometimes in well-marked press cars, along with thousands of others, while the Israeli-run outdoor prison was again reduced to rubble on pretexts that collapse instantly on examination.

Also ignored was the assassination of three more journalists in Latin America in December, bringing the number for the year to 31. There have been more than a dozen journalists killed in Honduras alone since the military coup of 2009 that was effectively recognized by the U.S. (but few others), probably according post-coup Honduras the per capita championship for murder of journalists. But again, not an assault on freedom of press within living memory.

It is not difficult to elaborate. These few examples illustrate a very general principle that is observed with impressive dedication and consistency: The more we can blame some crimes on enemies, the greater the outrage; the greater our responsibility for crimes — and hence the more we can do to end them — the less the concern, tending to oblivion or even denial.

Contrary to the eloquent pronouncements, it is not the case that “Terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it.” There definitely are two ways about it: theirs versus ours. And not just terrorism.

France arrests a comedian for his Facebook comments, showing the sham of the west’s “free speech” celebration

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Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images

Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images

by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

Forty-eight hours after hosting a massive march under the banner of free expression, France opened a criminal investigation of a controversial French comedian for a Facebook post he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo attack, and then this morning, arrested him for that post on charges of “defending terrorism.” The comedian, Dieudonné (above), previously sought elective office in France on what he called an “anti-Zionist” platform, has had his show banned by numerous government officials in cities throughout France, and has been criminally prosecuted several times before for expressing ideas banned in that country.

The apparently criminal viewpoint he posted on Facebook declared: “Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly.” Investigators concluded that this was intended to mock the “Je Suis Charlie” slogan and express support for the perpetrator of the Paris supermarket killings (whose last name was “Coulibaly”). Expressing that opinion is evidently a crime in the Republic of Liberté, which prides itself on a line of 20th Century intellectuals – from Sartre and Genet to Foucault and Derrida – whose hallmark was leaving no orthodoxy or convention unmolested, no matter how sacred.

Since that glorious “free speech” march, France has reportedly opened 54 criminal cases for “condoning terrorism.” AP reported this morning that “France ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism.”

As pernicious as this arrest and related “crackdown” on some speech obviously is, it provides a critical value: namely, it underscores the utter scam that was this week’s celebration of free speech in the west. The day before the Charlie Hebdo attack, I coincidentally documented the multiple cases in the west – including in the U.S. – where Muslims have been prosecuted and even imprisoned for their political speech. Vanishingly few of this week’s bold free expression mavens have ever uttered a peep of protest about any of those cases – either before the Charlie Hebdo attack or since. That’s because “free speech,” in the hands of many westerners, actually means: it is vital that the ideas I like be protected, and the right to offend groups I dislike be cherished; anything else is fair game.

It is certainly true that many of Dieudonné’s views and statements are noxious, although he and his supporters insist that they are “satire” and all in good humor. In that regard, the controversy they provoke is similar to the now-much-beloved Charlie Hebdo cartoons (one French leftist insists the cartoonists were mocking rather than adopting racism and bigotry, but Olivier Cyran, a former writer at the magazine who resigned in 2001, wrote a powerful 2013 letter with ample documentation condemning Charlie Hebdo for descending in the post-9/11 era into full-scale, obsessive anti-Muslim bigotry).

Despite the obvious threat to free speech posed by this arrest, it is inconceivable that any mainstream western media figures would start tweeting “#JeSuisDieudonné” or would upload photographs of themselves performing his ugly Nazi-evoking arm gesture in “solidarity” with his free speech rights. That’s true even if he were murdered for his ideas rather than “merely” arrested and prosecuted for them. That’s because last week’s celebration of the Hebdo cartoonists (well beyond mourning their horrifically unjust murders) was at least as much about approval for their anti-Muslim messages as it was about the free speech rights that were invoked in their support – at least as much.

The vast bulk of the stirring “free speech” tributes over the last week have been little more than an attempt to protect and venerate speech that degrades disfavored groups while rendering off-limits speech that does the same to favored groups, all deceitfully masquerading as lofty principles of liberty. In response to my article containing anti-Jewish cartoons on Monday – which I posted to demonstrate the utter selectivity and inauthenticity of this newfound adoration of offensive speech – I was subjected to endless contortions justifying why anti-Muslim speech is perfectly great and noble while anti-Jewish speech is hideously offensive and evil (the most frequently invoked distinction – “Jews are a race/ethnicity while Muslims aren’t” – would come as a huge surprise to the world’s Asian, black, Latino and white Jews, as well as to those who identify as “Muslim” as part of their cultural identity even though they don’t pray five times a day). As always: it’s free speech if it involves ideas I like or attacks groups I dislike, but it’s something different when I’m the one who is offended.

Think about the “defending terrorism” criminal offense for which Dieudonné has been arrested. Should it really be a criminal offense – causing someone to be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned – to say something along these lines: western countries like France have been bringing violence for so long to Muslims in their countries that I now believe it’s justifiable to bring violence to France as a means of making them stop? If you want “terrorism defenses” like that to be criminally prosecuted (as opposed to societally shunned), how about those who justify, cheer for and glorify the invasion and destruction of Iraq, with its “Shock and Awe” slogan signifying an intent to terrorize the civilian population into submission and its monstrous tactics in Fallujah? Or how about the psychotic calls from a Fox News host, when discussing Muslims radicals, to “kill them ALL.” Why is one view permissible and the other criminally barred – other than because the force of law is being used to control political discourse and one form of terrorism (violence in the Muslim world) is done by, rather than to, the west?

For those interested, my comprehensive argument against all “hate speech” laws and other attempts to exploit the law to police political discourse is here. That essay, notably, was written to denounce a proposal by a French minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, to force Twitter to work with the French government to delete tweets which officials like this minister (and future unknown ministers) deem “hateful.” France is about as legitimate a symbol of free expression as Charlie Hebdo, which fired one of its writers in 2009 for a single supposedly anti-Semitic sentence in the midst of publishing an orgy of anti-Muslim (not just anti-Islam) content. This week’s celebration of France – and the gaggle of tyrannical leaders who joined it – had little to do with free speech and much to do with suppressing ideas they dislike while venerating ideas they prefer.

Perhaps the most intellectually corrupted figure in this regard is, unsurprisingly, France’s most celebrated (and easily the world’s most overrated) public intellectual, the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. He demands criminal suppression of anything smacking of anti-Jewish views (he called for Dieudonné’s shows to be banned (“I don’t understand why anyone even sees the need for debate”) and supported the 2009 firing of the Charlie Hebdo writer for a speech offense against Jews), while shamelessly parading around all last week as the Churchillian champion of free expression when it comes to anti-Muslim cartoons.

But that, inevitably, is precisely the goal, and the effect, of laws that criminalize certain ideas and those who support such laws: to codify a system where the views they like are sanctified and the groups to which they belong protected. The views and groups they most dislike – and only them – are fair game for oppression and degradation.

The arrest of this French comedian so soon after the epic Paris free speech march underscores this point more powerfully than anything I could have written about the selectivity and fraud of this week’s “free speech” parade. It also shows – yet again – why those who want to criminalize the ideas they most dislike are at least as dangerous and tyrannical as the ideas they target: at least.

Critics decry 'hypocrisy' of world leaders' photo op in Paris

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Many of those who marched for free speech are leaders of oppressive governments, say journalists

Many of the world leaders who attended Sunday's march for free press have poor records on the issue in their own countries, critics say. (Photo: EPA)

Many of the world leaders who attended Sunday’s march for free press have poor records on the issue in their own countries, critics say. (Photo: EPA)

by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams

On Sunday, an estimated 3.7 million people marched throughout France in the wake of last Wednesday’s shooting at the offices of satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The march, which called for unity and free speech, drew a crowd of one million in Paris—the largest in that city’s history.

However, as investigative journalist and The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill said in an interview Monday with Democracy Now!, the event lost some of its power given the presence of several world leaders who run oppressive governments in their own countries. “[T]his is sort of a circus of hypocrisy when it comes to all of those world leaders who were marching at the front of it,” Scahill said. “[E]very single one of those heads of state or representatives of governments there have waged their own wars against journalists.”

Among them, Scahill noted, was UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who ordered The Guardian to destroy the hard drives that held the files leaked in 2013 by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And Cameron was joined by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, whose regime has “kidnapped, abducted, jailed journalists” reporting on Palestine, Scahill said.

“[T]hen you have… General [Abdel Fattal al] Sisi, the dictator of Egypt, who apparently is showing his solidarity for press freedom by continuing to preside over the imprisonment of multiple Al Jazeera journalists whose only crime was doing actual journalism and scores of other Egyptian journalists that never get mentioned in the news media,” Scahill continued.

Scahill’s criticisms followed similar remarks made Sunday by Daniel Wickham, a British journalist and activist. In a series of messages posted to Twitter on Sunday, Wickham laid out those leaders’ own poor records against journalists in their home countries, even as other news sources praised them as “staunch defenders” of free press.

The Independent also noted that the image of those 40-odd heads of state linking arms and marching through the streets of Paris in what the New York Times called a show of “unity in outrage” was actually a coordinated photo op, taken on an empty street away from the million-strong crowd.

“[T]he front line of leaders was followed by just over a dozen rows other dignitaries and officials – after which there was a large security presence maintaining a significant gap with the throngs of other marchers,” theIndependent reported. “The measure was presumably taken for security reasons – but political commentators have suggested that it raises doubts as to whether the leaders were really part of the march at all.”

Reporters Without Borders also condemned the presence of those leaders at the march.

“On what grounds are representatives of regimes that are predators of press freedom coming to Paris to pay tribute to Charlie Hebdo, a publication that has always defended the most radical concept of freedom of expression?” the organization said in a statement on Sunday.

RWB added, “Reporters Without Borders is appalled by the presence of leaders from countries where journalists and bloggers are systematically persecuted such as Egypt (which is ranked 159th out of 180 countries in RWB’s press freedom index), Russia (148th), Turkey (154th) and United Arab Emirates (118th).”

Charlie Hebdo founder says slain editor 'dragged' team to their deaths

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A founding member of Charlie Hebdo says slain editor Stéphane Charbonnier “dragged” team to their deaths by “overdoing” provocative cartoons

charlie-hebdo

by Henry Samuel, The Telegraph

One of the founding members of Charlie Hebdo has accused its slain editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, or Charb, of “dragging the team” to their deaths by releasing increasingly provocative cartoons, as five million copies of the “survivors’ edition” went on sale.

Henri Roussel, 80, who contributed to the first issue of the satirical weekly in 1970, wrote to the murdered editor, saying: “I really hold it against you.”

In this week’s Left-leaning magazine Nouvel Obs, Mr Roussel, who publishes under the pen name Delfeil de Ton, wrote: “I know it’s not done”, but proceeds to criticise the former “boss” of the magazine.

Calling Charb an “amazing lad”, he said he was also a stubborn “block head”.

“What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it,” he said, referring to Charb’s decision to post a Prophet Mohammed character on the magazine’s front page in 2011. Soon afterwards, the magazine’s offices were burned down by unknown arsonists.

Delfeil adds: “He shouldn’t have done it, but Charb did it again a year later, in September 2012.”

The accusation sparked a furious reaction from Richard Malka, Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer for the past 22 years, who sent an angry message to Mathieu Pigasse, one of the owners of Nouvel Obs and Le Monde.

“Charb has not yet even been buried and Obs finds nothing better to do that to publish a polemical and venomous piece on him.

“The other day, the editor of Nouvel Obs, Matthieu Croissandeau, couldn’t shed enough tears to say he would continue the fight. I didn’t know he meant it this way. I refuse to allow myself to be invaded by bad thoughts, but my disappointment is immense.”

Matthieu Croissandeau, Nouvel Obs’ editor, said: “We received this text and after a debate I decided to publish it in an edition on freedom of expression, it would have seemed to me worrisome to have censored his voice, even if it is discordant. Particularly as this is the voice of one of the pioneers of the gang.”

This is not the first time Delfeil has disagreed with the modern Charlie, accusing Charb’s predecessor of turning it into a Zionist and Islamophobic organ.

That was after Philippe Val, the previous editor, fired one of its historic figures, Maurice Sine, for publishing a cartoon on the marriage of Nicolas Sarkozy’s son, Jean, to a Jewish retailing heiress, which he considered anti-Semitic.

Delfeil said he would not say anymore on recent events. “I have refused to speak to the TV and radio, to everyone. I kept my message for Obs, and I am not prepared to open this subject again,” he said.

Islamophobia rears its ugly head following Paris shootings

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A Police officer stands guard outside a Mosque and Islamic centre as people arrive for Friday prayers in Marseille on January 9, 2015, in the wake of the attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo which left 12 dead and the the shooting of a police officer in a separate incident. AFP/Boris Horvat.

A Police officer stands guard outside a Mosque and Islamic centre as people arrive for Friday prayers in Marseille on January 9, 2015, in the wake of the attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo which left 12 dead and the the shooting of a police officer in a separate incident. AFP/Boris Horvat.

by Rana Harbi, Al-Akhbar

The attacks in France by Said and Chérif Kouachi, French brothers of Algerian descent, and Amedy Coulibaly, a French citizen with Malian roots, in the past week have further increased anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments in a country already rife with both. From grenade attacks on mosques and proposed mosque sites, to gunfire aimed at a Muslim family in a car and an explosion in a kebab shop next to a mosque, Islamophobia in France has now reached new heights.

On January 7, the Kouachi brothers targeted the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine known for its controversial depictions of the Prophet Mohammad. They killed 12, including a police officer.

Two days later, Coulibaly, who is believed to have also killed a police officer, held people hostage in a kosher supermarket, where he killed four people before being killed himself by security forces.

A total of 20 people, including the three gunmen, were killed over three days from Wednesday to Friday.

Despite condemnation by Muslims in France and across the world, the Central Council of Muslims in France said there have been more than 50 anti-Muslim attacks since the attack on Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

The incidents included 21 reports of shooting at sites frequented by Muslims and the throwing of some form of grenades, and 33 threats.

A series of attacks

On January 7, shots were fired at a Muslim prayer room in Port-La-Nouvelle about an hour after prayers; a mosque in Poitiers was daubed with racist graffiti reading, “Morts aux Arabes” (“Death to Arabs) and a Muslim family came briefly under fire in their car in Vaucluse.

On January 8, three grenades were thrown at a mosque in Sablons; and in Villefranche-sur-Saône, an explosion blew out the windows of a kebab shop next door to the town mosque. In the town of Saint-Juéry, four gunshots were fired at the entrance of a mosque, and an arson attack was reported on a mosque in Aix-les-Bains.

On January 9, graffiti was found outside a mosque in Bayonne reading, “Charlie freedom,” “Assassins,” and “Dirty Arabs. In Rennes, a private Islamic center was vandalized with the slogan “Get out” written in both French and the regional dialect, Breton.

On the same day, a 17-year-old of North African descent was assaulted by a gang after suffering “racist abuse.” In Macon, unidentified individuals sprayed “Islam will f*ck you” on street walls.

On January 10, a pig’s head and entrails were placed outside a prayer room in Corte, on the island of Corsica, with a note threatening “next time it will be one of your heads.” And in northern France, two mosque construction sites in Liévin and Béthune, were vandalized with anti-Muslim graffiti.

Over the weekend, five additional acts of anti-Muslim vandalism were reported.

The Committee against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) said that anti-Muslim attacks and insults have risen steadily in France in recent years “as some politicians and media increasingly present Islam as a problem for French society.”

Extremists and Islamophobes

With extremists trying to exacerbate existing tensions, ostensibly tolerant France braces itself for a rising tide of xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Many voices have urged media outlets to choose the terms they use with care, and politicians to be more prudent, cautioning them against further stigmatizing the Muslim community.

“I believe that the attacks today will only increase the racism against Muslims,” Abdallah Zekri, president of the National Observatory Against Islamophobia in Paris, told the Washington Post. “I hear many politicians saying that this is an Islamist terrorist attack and not just a terrorist attack.”

Growing anti-Muslim sentiment has reinforced fears that France, home to an estimated six million Muslims, and other EU countries, will witness an increase in the popularity of the already prominent far right and its Islamophobia.

Commenting on the Paris shootings, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told US news channel MSNBC that “Muslims need to marginalize the extremists on their side and also people of other faiths need to marginalize the growing Islamophobic movement in the West.”

Hooper also said that recent anti-Islam marches in Europe send “a very negative message” and “create a sense of alienation.”

Due to a spike in immigration and a moribund economy, far-right parties have been gaining ground in European countries as anti-immigrant policies seem to become progressively accepted in mainstream discourse.

These parties include the United Kingdom’s National Front and Independence Party; the Sweden Democrats party, which received 15 percent support in recent opinion polls; Germany’s so-called Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (PEGIDA), which assembled a record 25,000 anti-Islam marchers in Dresden on Monday in its 12th rally since October; and France’s National Front (FN), which has become one of the most prominent political players in the country since its then-leader Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of presidential elections in 2002.

In reference to simmering anti-Muslim sentiment, Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), warned in a statement against “inflaming the situation.”

Similarly, Camille Grand, director of the French Foundation for Strategic Research, described the shootings as “double honey for the National Front.”

“[Current FN leader Marine] Le Pen says everywhere that Islam is a massive threat, and that France should not support attacks in Iraq and instead defend the homeland and not create threats by going abroad, so they can naturally take advantage of it,” Grand stated.

Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London told The New York Times, “this is a dangerous moment for European societies.”

“Large parts of the European public are latently anti-Muslim, and increasing mobilization of these forces is now reaching into the center of society,” Neumann said. “If we see more of these incidents, and I think we will, we will see a further polarization of these European societies in the years to come.”

Those who will suffer the most from such a backlash, he said, are the Muslim populations of Europe, “the ordinary normal Muslims who are trying to live their lives in Europe.”

During the hostage crisis at the Paris supermarket on Friday, Lassana Bathily, a Muslim assistant at the shop attacked by Coulibaly, saved a group of shoppers, including a baby, by hiding them in a basement storage room of the store.

Bathily, who managed to escape through the goods lift, told French TV that police kept him in handcuffs for an hour and a half thinking he was a conspirator despite denying any involvement in the attack.

While some say radical Islamists are the fruit of France’s foreign policies, many argue that extremism has fed upon the French government’s inability to enact structural, social and economic reforms that ensure the participation of citizens from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in society.

Kery James, a politically active French rapper, reacted to the Charlie Hebdo attacks by calling for long-term efforts to counter France’s Islamophobia.

“I feel compelled to remind that coexistence is built on the long term and not only in short-lived bouts under the influence of emotion. Coexistence cannot just be a symbol that is done and undone to the rhythm of news stories, no matter how abject they may be. It is not even enough to want to live together to succeed in doing so, one must be determined to succeed in it,” he wrote in an open letter on his Facebook page. “The vast majority of Muslims to which I belong is also a victim and hostage of extremists from all sides. And it is them who are constantly asked to give proofs of citizenship and patriotism that never seem sufficient. It is of them that is required, with an almost menacing tone, that they take to the streets to prove their attachment to France. It is as if it were them who had financed and armed the terrorists. The times ahead will be difficult for us and our patience will be put to the test.”

This sentiment is echoed by many of France’s Muslim population who continue to fear radicalism regardless of its source.

Rana Harbi is a staff writer for Al-Akhbar English. Follow her on Twitter: @ranaharbi

Yemen’s Al-Qaeda claims responsibility for Paris attacks

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This still image grab taken off a propaganda video posted online on January 14, 2015, by al-Malahem Media, the media arm of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), purportedly shows one of the group's leaders, Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi delivering a video message from an undisclosed location and claiming responsibility for the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's offices in Paris. AFP/HO/al-Malahem Media

This still image grab taken off a propaganda video posted online on January 14, 2015, by al-Malahem Media, the media arm of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), purportedly shows one of the group’s leaders, Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi delivering a video message from an undisclosed location and claiming responsibility for the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris. AFP/HO/al-Malahem Media

by Al-Akhbar

Al-Qaeda in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo, saying it was retribution for insulting the Prophet Mohammad, according to a video posted on YouTube.

“As for the blessed battle of Paris, we, the organization of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), claim responsibility for this operation as vengeance for the Messenger of God,” one of the group’s leaders, Nasser al-Ansi, said in the video titled “A message regarding the blessed battle of Paris.”

Ansi said the attack was ordered by Ayman Zawahiri, the network’s global commander.

“The leadership was the party that chose the target and plotted and financed the plan… It was following orders by our general chief Ayman al-Zawahiri,” he said.

“The heroes were chosen and they answered the call,” Ansi added.

Speaking over footage of the attack that killed 12 people, Ansi said: “Today, the mujahideen avenge their revered prophet, and send the clearest message to everyone who would dare to attack Islamic sanctities.”

On January 7, Cherif and Said Kouachi targeted the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine known for its controversial depictions of the Prophet Mohammad. They killed 12, including a police officer. The two French brothers were killed two days later by French security forces after an extended manhunt.

On January 9, Amedy Coulibaly, a French citizen linked to the Kouachi brothers who is believed to have also killed a police officer on January 7, held people hostage in a kosher supermarket, where he killed four people before being killed himself by security forces.

Despite condemnation of the attacks by Muslims in France and across the world, the Central Council of Muslims in France said there have been more than 50 anti-Muslim assaults since the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

The incidents included 21 reports of shooting at sites frequented by Muslims and the throwing of some form of grenades, and 33 threats.

AQAP in Yemen

AQAP, which is reported to have trained at least one of the two brothers, is seen by Washington as the al-Qaeda network’s most dangerous branch.

The first known attack of al-Qaeda in Yemen dates back to 1992, when bombers hit a hotel that formerly housed US Marines in the southern city of Aden, in which two non-American citizens were killed.

AQAP was formed in January 2009 as a merger of the Yemeni and Saudi branches of al-Qaeda and is led by Nasser al-Wuhayshi.

Since then, AQAP has regularly carried out deadly attacks against Yemeni security forces and, more recently, has claimed a series of bombings against Houthi militants and civilians in the capital Sanaa and central provinces.

The group recently called for its supporters to carry out attacks in France, which is part of a US-led coalition conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Islamist group.

In December, AQAP’s English-language propaganda magazine “Inspire” urged jihadists to carry out “lone wolf” attacks abroad. In 2013, it named Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and editor-in-chief Stephane Charbonnier among its list of targets.

Charbonnier, better known as Charb, was one of 12 people killed in Paris on Wednesday when the two gunmen stormed the magazine’s offices.

Drone strikes

AQAP took advantage of the weakness of Yemen’s central government during an uprising in 2011 against now-ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh to seize large swathes of territory across the south.

But after a month-long offensive launched in May 2012 by Yemeni troops, most militants fled to the more lawless desert regions of the east towards the Hadramawt province.

Yemen is a key US ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, allowing Washington to conduct a longstanding drone war against the group on its territory. However, US drone attacks in the impoverished Gulf country have also killed many civilians unaffiliated with al-Qaeda.

(AFP, Reuters, Al-Akhbar)

Noam Chomsky on Charlie Hebdo: We Are All – Fill in the Blank

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Terrorism is not terrorism when a much more severe terrorist attack is carried out by those who are Righteous by virtue of their power

On April 23, 1999, NATO air strikes blasted Serbian state television off the air, just hours after Belgrade offered a peace proposal to allow an "international presence" in war-torn Kosovo under U.N. auspices.

On April 23, 1999, NATO air strikes blasted Serbian state television off the air, just hours after Belgrade offered a peace proposal to allow an “international presence” in war-torn Kosovo under U.N. auspices.

by Noam Chomsky

The world reacted with horror to the murderous attack on the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo. In the New York Times, veteran Europe correspondent Steven Erlanger graphically described the immediate aftermath, what many call France’s 9/11, as “a day of sirens, helicopters in the air, frantic news bulletins; of police cordons and anxious crowds; of young children led away from schools to safety. It was a day, like the previous two, of blood and horror in and around Paris.” The enormous outcry worldwide was accompanied by reflection about the deeper roots of the atrocity. “Many Perceive a Clash of Civilizations,” a New York Times headline read.

The reaction of horror and revulsion about the crime is justified, as is the search for deeper roots, as long as we keep some principles firmly in mind. The reaction should be completely independent of what thinks about this journal and what it produces. The passionate and ubiquitous chants “I am Charlie,” and the like, should not be meant to indicate, even hint at, any association with the journal, at least in the context of defense of freedom of speech. Rather, they should express defense of the right of free expression whatever one thinks of the contents, even if they are regarded as hateful and depraved.

And the chants should also express condemnation for violence and terror. The head of Israel’s Labor Party and the main challenger for the upcoming elections in Israel, Isaac Herzog, is quite right when he says that “Terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it.” He is also right to say that “All the nations that seek peace and freedom [face] an enormous challenge” from murderous terrorism – putting aside his predictably selective interpretation of the challenge.

Erlanger vividly describes the scene of horror. He quotes one surviving journalist as saying that “Everything crashed. There was no way out. There was smoke everywhere. It was terrible. People were screaming. It was like a nightmare.” Another surviving journalist reported a “huge detonation, and everything went completely dark.” The scene, Erlanger reported, “was an increasingly familiar one of smashed glass, broken walls, twisted timbers, scorched paint and emotional devastation.” At least 10 people were reported at once to have died in the explosion, with 20 missing, “presumably buried in the rubble.”

These quotes, as the indefatigable David Peterson reminds us, are not, however, from January 2015. Rather, they are from a story of Erlanger’s on April 24 1999, which made it only to page 6 of the New York Times, not reaching the significance of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Erlanger was reporting on the NATO (meaning US) “missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters” that “knocked Radio Television Serbia off the air.”

There was an official justification. “NATO and American officials defended the attack,” Erlanger reports, “as an effort to undermine the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is,” hence a legitimate target of attack.

The Yugoslavian government said that “The entire nation is with our President, Slobodan Milosevic,” Erlanger reports, adding that “How the Government knows that with such precision was not clear.”

No such sardonic comments are in order when we read that France mourns the dead and the world is outraged by the atrocity. There need also be no inquiry into the deeper roots, no profound questions about who stands for civilization, and who for barbarism.

Isaac Herzog, then, is mistaken when he says that “Terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it.” There are quite definitely two ways about it: terrorism is not terrorism when a much more severe terrorist attack is carried out by those who are Righteous by virtue of their power. Similarly, there is no assault against freedom of speech when the Righteous destroy a TV channel supportive of a government that they are attacking.

By the same token, we can readily comprehend the comment in the New York Times of civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, noted for his forceful defense of freedom of expression, that the Charlie Hebdo attack is “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory.” He is quite correct about “living memory,” which carefully assigns assaults on journalism and acts of terror to their proper categories: Theirs, which are horrendous; and Ours, which are virtuous and easily dismissed from living memory.

We might recall as well that this is only one of many assaults by the Righteous on free expression. To mention only one example that is easily erased from “living memory,” the assault on Fallujah by US forces in November 2004, one of the worst crimes of the invasion of Iraq, opened with occupation of Fallujah General Hospital. Military occupation of a hospital is, of course, a serious war crime in itself, even apart from the manner in which it was carried out, blandly reported in a front-page story in the New York Times, accompanied with a photograph depicting the crime. The story reported that “Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.” The crimes were reported as highly meritorious, and justified: “The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.”

Evidently such a propaganda agency cannot be permitted to spew forth its vulgar obscenities.

Charlie Hebdo: Paris attack brothers' campaign of terror can be traced back to Algeria in 1954

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Algeria is the post-colonial wound that still bleeds in France

Cherif Said Kouachi

by Robert Fisk, The Independent

Algeria. Long before the identity of the murder suspects was revealed by the French police – even before I heard the names of Cherif and Said Kouachi – I muttered the word “Algeria” to myself. As soon as I heard the names and saw the faces, I said the word “Algeria” again. And then the French police said the two men were of “Algerian origin”.

For Algeria remains the most painful wound within the body politic of the Republic – save, perhaps, for its continuing self-examination of Nazi occupation – and provides a fearful context for every act of Arab violence against France. The six-year Algerian war for independence, in which perhaps a million and a half Arab Muslims and many thousands of French men and women died, remains an unending and unresolved agony for both peoples. Just over half a century ago, it almost started a French civil war.

Maybe all newspaper and television reports should carry a “history corner”, a little reminder that nothing – absolutely zilch – happens without a past. Massacres, bloodletting, fury, sorrow, police hunts (“widening” or “narrowing” as sub-editors wish) take the headlines. Always it’s the “who” and the “how” – but rarely the “why”. Take the crime against humanity in Paris this week – the words “atrocity” and “barbarity” somehow diminish the savagery of this act – and its immediate aftermath.

We know the victims: journalists, cartoonists, cops. And how they were killed. Masked gunmen, Kalashnikov automatic rifles, ruthless, almost professional nonchalance. And the answer to “why” was helpfully supplied by the murderers. They wanted to avenge “the Prophet” for Charlie Hebdo’s irreverent and (for Muslims) highly offensive cartoons. And of course, we must all repeat the rubric: nothing – nothing ever – could justify these cruel acts of mass murder. And no, the killers cannot call on history to justify their crimes.

But there’s an important context that somehow got left out of the story this week, the “history corner” that many Frenchmen as well as Algerians prefer to ignore: the bloody 1954-62 struggle of an entire people for freedom against a brutal imperial regime, a prolonged war which remains the foundational quarrel of Arabs and French to this day.

The desperate and permanent crisis in Algerian-French relations, like the refusal of a divorced couple to accept an agreed narrative of their sorrow, poisons the cohabitation of these two peoples in France. However Cherif and Said Kouachi excused their actions, they were born at a time when Algeria had been invisibly mutilated by 132 years of occupation. Perhaps five million of France’s six and a half million Muslims are Algerian. Most are poor, many regard themselves as second-class citizens in the land of equality.

Like all tragedies, Algeria’s eludes the one-paragraph explanation of news agency dispatches, even the shorter histories written by both sides after the French abandoned Algeria in 1962.

For unlike other important French dependencies or colonies, Algeria was regarded as an integral part of metropolitan France, sending representatives to the French parliament in Paris, even providing Charles de Gaulle and the Allies with a French “capital” from which to invade Nazi-occupied north Africa and Sicily.

More than 100 years earlier, France had invaded Algeria itself, subjugating its native Muslim population, building small French towns and chateaux across the countryside, even – in an early 19th-century Catholic renaissance which was supposed to “re-Christianise” northern Africa – converting mosques into churches.

The Algerian response to what today appears to be a monstrous historical anachronism varied over the decades between lassitude, collaboration and insurrection. A demonstration for independence in the Muslim-majority and nationalist town of Sétif on VE Day – when the Allies had liberated the captive countries of Europe – resulted in the killing of 103 European civilians. French government revenge was ruthless; up to 700 Muslim civilians – perhaps far more – were killed by infuriated French “colons” and in bombardment of surrounding villages by French aircraft and a naval cruiser. The world paid little attention.

But when a full-scale insurrection broke out in 1954 – at first, of course, ambushes with few French lives lost and then attacks on the French army – the sombre war of Algerian liberation was almost preordained. Beaten in that classic post-war anti-colonial battle at Dien Bien Phu, the French army, after its debacle in 1940, seemed vulnerable to the more romantic Algerian nationalists who noted France’s further humiliation at Suez in 1956.

French military police drive through Algiers during the insurrection (Keystone/Getty Images)

What the historian Alistair Horne rightly described in his magnificent history of the Algerian struggle as “a savage war of peace” took the lives of hundreds of thousands. Bombs, booby traps, massacres by government forces and National Liberation Front guerrillas in the “bled” – the countryside south of the Mediterranean – led to the brutal suppression of Muslim sectors of Algiers, the assassination, torture and execution of guerrilla leaders by French paratroopers, soldiers, Foreign Legion operatives – including German ex-Nazis – and paramilitary police. Even white French sympathisers of the Algerians were “disappeared”. Albert Camus spoke out against torture and French civil servants were sickened by the brutality employed to keep Algeria French.

De Gaulle appeared to support the white population and said as much in Algiers – “Je vous ai compris,” he told them – and then proceeded to negotiate with FLN representatives in France. Algerians had long provided the majority of France’s Muslim population and in October 1961 up to 30,000 of them staged a banned independence rally in Paris – in fact, scarcely a mile from the scene of last week’s slaughter – which was attacked by French police units who murdered, it is now acknowledged, up to 600 of the protesters.

A crowd of Algerian demonstrators outside Government House, carrying Charles de Gaulle posters during the Algerian war of independence in 1985 (Getty Images)

Algerians were beaten to death in police barracks or thrown into the Seine. The police chief who supervised security operations and who apparently directed the 1961 massacre was none other than Maurice Papon – who was, almost 40 years later, convicted for crimes against humanity under Petain’s Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation.

The Algerian conflict finished in a bloodbath. White “pied noir” French colonists refused to accept France’s withdrawal, supported the secret OAS in attacking Algerian Muslims and encouraged French military units to mutiny. At one point, De Gaulle feared that French paratroopers would try to take over Paris.

When the end came, despite FLN promises to protect French citizens who chose to stay in Algeria, there were mass killings in Oran. Up to a million and a half white French men, women and children – faced with a choice of “the coffin or the suitcase” – left for France, along with thousands of loyal Algerian “harki” fighters who fought with the army but were then largely abandoned to their terrible fate by De Gaulle. Some were forced to swallow their own French military medals and thrown into mass graves.

Algerian rebels training to use weapons in 1958 (Getty Images)

But the former French colonists, who still regarded Algeria as French – along with an exhausted FLN dictatorship which took over the independent country – instituted a cold peace in which Algeria’s residual anger, in France as well as in the homeland, settled into long-standing resentment. In Algeria, the new nationalist elite embarked on a hopeless Soviet-style industrialisation of their country. Former French citizens demanded massive reparations; indeed, for decades, the French kept all the drainage maps of major Algerian cities so that the new owners of Algeria had to dig up square miles of city streets every time a water main burst.

And when the Algerian civil war of the 1980s commenced – after the Algerian army cancelled a second round of elections which Islamists were sure to win – the corrupt FLN “pouvoir” and the Muslim rebels embarked on a conflict every bit as gruesome as the Franco-Algerian war of the 1950s and 1960s. Torture, disappearances, village massacres all resumed. France discreetly supported a dictatorship whose military leaders salted away millions of dollars in Swiss banks.

Algerian Muslims returning from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan joined the Islamists in the mountains, killing some of the few remaining French citizens in Algeria. And many subsequently left to fight in the Islamist wars, in Iraq and later Syria.

Enter here the Kouachi brothers, especially Chérif, who was imprisoned for taking Frenchmen to fight against the Americans in Iraq. And the United States, with French support, now backs the FLN regime in its continuing battle against Islamists in Algeria’s deserts and mountain forests, arming a military which tortured and murdered thousands of men in the 1990s.

As an American diplomat said just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States “has much to learn” from the Algerian authorities. You can see why some Algerians went to fight for the Iraqi resistance. And found a new cause…

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