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April 2017

French Presidential Campaign: Part 5 by Nidra Poller

10:44 AM: I feel like my country, the country I’ve lived in for over 44 years, is a patient in intensive care. Tubes and catheters, control panels, IT graphs, pulsing images, flashing lights. We’re waiting with sinking hearts for the specialist to come in and interpret the lab results. Something ineluctable is about to be revealed. But what?

I’m going to the outdoor market. When I get back, maybe I’ll run the vacuum cleaner. To keep my mind fresh. Plans for my visit to Israel in May are shaping up. Then 2 weeks in June in the US. A week in the South of France after that. Life goes on. I’ll walk around and take a look at the polling places. All the candidate posters have been defaced by anarchists and other heavy metal destroy protestors.

3 PM : The hawk is out, a merciless cold wind is slamming our hopes for springtime. The sun is hot and bright. It’s not enough. Anarchists and other looking-for-a-fight protesters at yesterday’s Social 1st Round left their filthy messages all up and down boulevard Beaumarchais. Last night they threw bottles and other hard edged objects at the police. Their graffiti looks like blood, talk about broad brush, they obscure whatever they touch. WAR ON THE RICH here POLICE ASSASSINS there. Can’t someone get them out of our face, out of our hair, out of the national conversation? Their causes are rotten. They grab at anything as an excuse for slopping signs and breaking windows, attacking the police and whatever else they get their hands on.

I’m on edge. Up to now, everything was possible, you grasped it with your rational mind. Now it is happening. People are voting. The verdict will soon fall.

I’m sharply impatient and here they come again with Marine Le Pen. A friend tells me about an article in the Jerusalem Post, CNN is in her stomping grounds at Bénin-Haumont and President Trump thinks she’s the best on frontiers and all that sovereignty, and the only one that’s dealing with that pesky problem. C’mon guys, either find out what’s really happening here or comment on another poker game. You want Marine le Pen for president? Help yourself. But leave us out of it

Oh they’re so sure she’ll get to the 2nd round. I just hope they’re wrong. I’m so tired of her misrepresentation.

Little Creep Against Chelsea Clinton By Kevin D. Williamson

Hasn’t Bill Clinton been fellated thoroughly enough?

Nina Burleigh spoke for a certain variety of 1990s-style feminist when she famously said that “American women should be lining up” — on their knees — in order to express their gratitude to Bill Clinton for “keeping theocracy off our backs.”

You all remember how close we were to theocracy back in the 1990s: California banned smoking in all bars, Chris Farley died of a cocaine-and-opiates overdose, Barry Switzer got canned . . . and . . . nothing like a theocracy was anywhere to be seen, heard of, or smelt. As much as the Democrats tried to cast Ken Starr as a modern-day Roger Chillingworth (if not a Torquemada), Bill Clinton wasn’t in trouble for making the White House interns strap on their presidential kneepads: He was in trouble for perjury, an offense for which he was later obliged to surrender his law license. Clinton was guilty of everything he was accused of, and more.

But he beat two Republicans when Democrats thought they were never going to win the presidency again, and he brought the Reagan era to an end. He did not actually do a hell of a lot as president — he just surfed the long wave of prosperity that had kicked off in the early 1980s — and much of what he did do was to enact Republican priorities: NAFTA (Republicans used to believe in free enterprise — look it up, kids!) and, grudgingly, welfare reform. He bitterly complained in private that he had come into office hoping to be Jack Kennedy but had been obliged to become Dwight Eisenhower.

But politics is not about policy. Clinton won, Clinton was slick, and Clinton made fools out of Republicans and high-profile right-wing critics. He provided American progressives with all they really want out of a politician: emotional validation. (Hey, Trump voters!) And so Democrats loved him — deeply, madly, and, in many cases, to the point of abasing themselves.

Miss Burleigh’s suggestion was not enough. Not nearly. Rather than send Bill Clinton into his dotage with a generous allowance of Viagra and interns, they gave his wife — his batty, corrupt, inept, corrupt, feckless, corrupt, preening, unbearable, corrupt, condescending, and corrupt wife — the Senate seat being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the last good Democrat. She was elected to represent the state of New York in the Senate when she did not even live there, leading Moynihan to wryly praise her “Illinois-Arkansas enthusiasm.”

She did not do very much in the Senate, though she did manage to acquire a nice real-estate portfolio, including a Chappaqua house with a pool big enough to dock Marco Rubio’s boat. The Senate is a perfectly nice place to be. They don’t expect much of you there — ask Patty Murray. You can make little speeches, and shunt great roaring streams of federal money into the service of your hobbies and the pockets of your friends.

There ain’t no cure for love, and Democrats just can’t quit the Big Creep.

ISIS all-female hacking group looks to recruit more women By Lisa Daftari

An all-female division of an ISIS-affiliated hacking group released a video online claiming to have hacked multiple social media accounts.

The “Al Khansaa Kateeba” (battalion), which claims to be a division of the notorious United Cyber Caliphate (UCC) released the video over the weekend glorifying the recent launch of its all-girl division, threatening anyone exposing information on individuals within the group.

“Shortly after the announcement of the creation of a brigade that consists of female cadres within the ranks of the team, the muwwahidat answered the call and formed a force that disturbs the kuffar and made them sleep deprived,” the video, posted to an encrypted Telegram channel as well as on YouTube, stated.

The women’s division, seemingly formed over the past month, already claims ‘success’ in the form of hacking ‘over 100 Twitter accounts during March.’

The Foreign Desk has not been able to verify the validity of these claims, but upon examination, several of the Twitter accounts listed in the video appear to be discarded accounts that have not been used for several months, sometimes years.

In a stark message addressing anyone trying to expose them, the women warn, “We say to him who claimed that he has our secrets, come forward and face us.”

The video concludes with a stark message “And it’s only the beginning,” listing an encrypted email for potential recruits to get in touch.

The emergence of an ISIS all-female hacking division appears to be a continued response to the Islamic State’s call for so-called ‘media jihad’ issued shortly after the Westminster attack in March.

While the majority of women joining ISIS have been limited to playing support roles such as being wives to ISIS jihadis and raising their children in the caliphate, some have assumed roles within core ISIS ranks, joining the notorious Al-Khansaafemale police brigades and in some cases reportedly being deployed in combat roles.

The Al-Khansaa Brigade is largely made up of foreign jihadist women from North Africa, Europe and other Persian Gulf countries, and 60 of them are believed to be from the United Kingdom.

Earlier this month, the United Cyber Caliphate group issued a video that included a threat against U.S. President Donald Trump as well as a ‘kill list’ that included 8,786 names, many of them individuals located in the U.S. along with a frequently repeated ISIS instruction: “Kill them wherever you find them.”

In March, the group conceded its leader Osed Agha had been killed in an apparent drone strike on the Islamic State’s de-facto capital Raqqa.

Under Agha, the group touted achievements including the hacking of hundreds of social media accounts and several DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, targeting numerous websites and taking them offline.

Following Agha’s death, UCC posted a message eulogizing Agha as a ‘Martyr’ and someone who “would leap with a sword in his hands to cut-off the heads of the kufar. He would attack the apostate’s Web Sites reaping their data and ruining their plans.”

Recently, the UCC published a video urging Muslims hackers in the West to join its ranks and fight a war against the kufar (non-believers) and also posted a video aiming a direct threat against a leading online counter extremism organization.

DAVID COLLIER: THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON…..SOAS SCHOOL OF ANTI-SEMITISM? SEE NOTE PLEASE

SOAS(The School of Oriental and African Studies)is a constituent school of the University of London….where bashing Israel is a major as David Collier has frequently exposed….rsk

03 Nov 2016. I was inside one of the hot spots of radical Islam in London – SOAS. We came to hear Tom Suarez promote his book, ‘State of Terror’. I had not heard of Suarez, and he is a musician, not a historian. The book is published by Karl Sabbagh, who provided one of the speeches at the House of Lords event that saw the Zionists blamed for the holocaust. The only endorsements on the book were from Jenny Tonge and Ilan Pappe. My expectations were low.

My expectations should have been much lower. Suarez is an example of how someone can make a new career out of hating Israel without academic training or even a basic historical knowledge of the conflict. His methodology was clear, ‘I hate Zionists/Jews’, but to write a book, I need to make some citations, and he went off to find some.

Suarez doesn’t come with a backstory or a bio. There is no introduction. From the moment Suarez opened his mouth, until his pillar of sand had been swept aside by several people in the room, Tom Suarez built a narrative that was dripping with hard-core antisemitic undertones.

The basic script was difficult to believe. He has no grounding in history, nor does he seem to have academic research skills. He is clearly not well read, nor does he use diverse source material. What he does is plunder a single archive. Seeking out anything that can seem sinister. This quote, this thought, this demand, then becomes the driving force for the entire Zionist movement.
Creating a Jew hating myth

Suarez needs only a partial record of a conversation. He requires no hard logic. The method of creation is important to understand. Suarez enters a single archive seeking breadcrumbs. It is a Goebbelsesque system of narrative creation that is supported by classic antisemitic tropes of scheming Jews, powerful Jews, bloodthirsty Jews and designed to propagate a myth of a satanic cult of ultimate power that brutally murdered a nation of farmers.

Suarez sidesteps entirely Arab violence. The only ‘terrorism’ of the 1920’s becomes legitimate Jewish land purchase. The only killers, Jewish. Another peculiarity was the insistence in referring only to Christian and Muslim Arabs in the British Mandate of the 1920’s as ‘The Palestinians’. Odd, racist and historically without any merit.

It is however a combination of factors that creates the truly sinister message. The insistence on cleansing the Arabs of violence pushes the outbreak of civil conflict into the late 1930’S. The belief in the global power of the Jewish Zionists. The adherence to the image of the demonic bloodthirsty Jew.

When these three elements are merged, we are left with a rampant demonic force with global control and sinister intent, doing its will between 1937 and 1948. This as six million Jews died. His entire narrative depends on the existence of ‘Elders of Zion’ style control at the very same time as the world shut its doors to Jews and a genocide was committed against them. It is frightening in its sickening inter-dependency.

Trump welcomes Syrian illegal aliens Australia doesn’t want By Ed Straker

It’s bad enough that President Trump violated his own campaign promise and continues the illegal, unconstitutional “DREAMer” amnesty created by President Obama. But now Trump is going out of his way to take the most dangerous illegal aliens that other countries don’t want!

The United States will honor an Obama-era agreement with Australia to help resettle Syrian refugees, despite the Trump administration not favoring the arrangement, Vice President Mike Pence announced Saturday.

“President Trump has made it clear that we’ll honor the agreement — that doesn’t mean we admire the agreement,” Pence said during a joint news conference….

He’s honoring it but not admiring it? That’s the kind of doubletalk we expect from politicians. Well, I honor President Trump but don’t admire him either.

Up to 1,250 refugees housed in Australian detention camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea would come to the U.S. under the agreement made with President Barack Obama.

Within the first 10 days as president, Trump had a tense phone call with Turnbull about the agreement. He followed up the phone call with a tweet several days later where he called the deal “dumb.”

Trump was right. But you see that was the view of the January 2017 Donald Trump, whose views are different from the February 2017 Donald Trump and the March and April version as well. This is what you get when you have a president unmoored by a coherent belief system.

Obama made this bad deal, but Trump was not obligated to comply with it. And these are not just any refugees, these are refugees (probably mostly Muslim) from war-torn Syria. There is absolutely no way to vet these refugees, because there is no central, reliable government we trust to get this information from.

Candidate Trump had said that not only would he not admit any more refugees from Syria, he would send the ones here home. President Trump, meanwhile, has been admitting refugees from Syria at a faster rate than Obama, and now is taking in problematic refugees who weren’t even trying to come to America.

How many “Trump refugees” will turn around and kill Americans? How many “Trump refugees” will walk around wearing burkas and demand special accommodations? How many “Trump refugees” will build mosques which blare the call to prayer, five times a day, over loudspeakers starting at 6 a.m.?

What’s next? Will we start accepting Muslim refugees bound for Germany and France? Is this what Trump supporters voted for?

Mecca march in DC lacks political perspective By Anthony J. Sadar

Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist and author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail (Stairway Press, 2016).

In case you missed it, yesterday was Earth Day, the high holy day of Earth-worshipers. So it was quite appropriate for Mother Earth’s true believers, acolytes, and clueless subservients to trek en masse to the holiest city on the planet, Washington, D.C., for obeisance, especially when the present administration is threatening to cut back on government tithing to insatiable Gaia groupies, particularly in the area of global warming hysteria.

The reason for this year’s pilgrimage is more than a bit hypocritical, however.

The pretense for self-righteous indignation this time is that somehow activist snowflakes just discovered that climate science is manipulated by politics. They already know that such science is influenced by money, thus a reason for stomping through the streets of Capital City.

But political influence? Big surprise.

After all, for at least the past eight years, atmospheric science in the form of “carbon pollution” is causing caustic chaos across the climate cosmos, has been practically front and center on the previous administration’s agenda. And the previous administration, like so many before it, was all about pure objectivity in science.

Except that it wasn’t. Nor were earlier administrations.

Politics influenced past scientific practice. Consider the roots of the global warming issue. Skipping the fact that the fear of the 1970s during the era of the first Earth Day – which began on April 22, 1970 – was the coming of the next ice age, the global warming frenzy began in earnest on June 23, 1988. On that day, Senator Timothy Wirth had organized congressional hearings on climate change, staging the event on one of the hottest days of the year. Senator Wirth and his staff left the windows of the hearing room open all the sweltering night before the meeting to ensure an uncomfortable event the next day.

Furthermore, as noted in a recent commentary for The Washington Times, the year 1988 “also saw the establishment of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s stated role is to assess the ‘risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation[.]” Typically, scientific investigation is not directed to find a preordained conclusion. There is a tendency, rather, to heed what Upton Sinclair cautioned: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

And the championing of the climate craze by political scientist Al Gore is legendary, as is his An Inconvenient Truth film and his anticipated to be equally mythical movie opening this summer, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.

Remembering Earth Day Founding Father and Girlfriend-Composter Ira Einhorn By Jack Cashill

With Earth Day come and gone, I could no evidence of public recognition for one of the holiday’s founding fathers, the only slightly atypical Ira Einhorn, the soi-disant “Unicorn.”

In the way of background, the first formal Earth Day did not take place on the vernal equinox, as originator John McConnell had hoped. Rather, it took place on April 22, 1970, a Wednesday. How this seemingly arbitrary date was picked has been lost to history. No one has taken public credit for choosing it. Still, one does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that the choice of date might have had something to do with the fact that April 22, 1970 was Vladimir Lenin’s one hundredth birthday.

Whoever chose the date chose wisely. The springtime pageantry gave students a pleasant reprieve from their strenuous anti-war activities and proved to be a huge success. It also gave Einhorn the chance to mark publicly the shift in his activism from antiwar to environmentalism.

Einhorn attributed his change in direction to the “the accelerating destruction of the planetary interconnecting web.” Not everyone was as tuned in as Einhorn – only the “few of us activists who took the trouble to read the then available ecological literature.” Or so Einhorn explained in his book Prelude to Intimacy.

“We intuitively sensed the need to open a new front in the ‘movement’ battle,” he continued, “for Chicago ’68 was already pointing towards Kent State and the violence of frustration that lead to the Weathermen and other similarly doomed and fragmented groups.”

Although Senator Gaylord Nelson usually gets the credit for organizing that first Earth Day in 1970, it was people like Einhorn who were putting the pieces together on the ground.

Einhorn’s terrain was Philadelphia. By his lights, environmental protection required a fundamental transformation of society or, as he phrased it, “a conscious restructuring of all we do.” To pull off so ambitious a program, Einhorn claimed to have enlisted a happy cabal of business, academic, and governmental factions. Together, they formed a broad popular front to deal with this unraveling of the planetary web, much as the Soviets organized popular fronts ostensibly to deal with the threat of fascism in the 1930s. And recall, this was back when “global cooling” was the reigning anxiety.

Whether or not Einhorn did as he claimed, there is no denying how well he had insinuated himself into the upper reaches of Philadelphia’s good deed-doer set. Ira had a “brilliant network,” a local oil executive would later tell Time magazine. “He knew enough corporate people to get our projects funded simply by strolling into people’s offices and asking for the money.”

These connections would come in handy just nine years after that first Earth Day, when police found the battered and “composted” body of Einhorn’s girlfriend, Holly Maddux, in a steamer trunk in Einhorn’s apartment. She had been stashed there for eighteen months.

At his bail hearing, one after another of the city’s liberal elite took the stand to sing the accused murderer’s praises. These included a minister, an economist, a corporate lawyer, a playwright, and many more – what Time called “an unlikely battalion of bluebloods, millionaires and corporate executives.”

Representing Einhorn was none other than future Democrat and Republican U.S. Senator Arlen Specter. The combined clout of these worthies swayed the judge to set bail at $40,000, only $4,000 of which was required to put Einhorn back on the streets.

Fronting the money was Barbara Bronfman, a Montreal socialite who had married into the conspicuously liberal Bronfman family, they of Seagram’s fame. After Einhorn jumped bail, Bronfman continued to funnel money to Einhorn for some seven years.

French police did not catch up with the self-dubbed “Unicorn” until 1997, sixteen years into his subsidized European exile. In protesting extradition, Einhorn claimed to have been persecuted because he had given his life to “the cause of nonviolent social change.” That boast did not overly impress the French, but in their eagerness to spite the United States on the human rights front, they kept Einhorn in country for another five years.

Justice finally felled the Unicorn twenty-five years after he killed would-be flower child Maddux. Einhorn’s best line of defense at his 2002 trial in Philadelphia was that somebody – the CIA, most likely – stuffed Maddux’s body into the trunk and secreted the trunk in his closet to frame him. Einhorn might have tried the “some other dude did it” defense, but cop-killer and fellow Philadelphian Mumia had already played that one out.

The Outrages of Sharia By Eileen F. Toplansky

As sharia continues to make inroads in America and Europe, we should take heed of Ralph Waldo Emerson who once wrote:
“[w]e began well. No inquisition here. No kings, no nobles. No dominant church here, heresy has lost its terror.”

If only that founding reality of the American experience were understood by those who foolishly claim tolerance and acceptance for sharia law in this country — sadly, it is not.

The fact is, sharia is well entrenched in the Middle East and creeping forward to the West. The charge of heresy is imposed on any who would counter its mandates. In the Muslim world, those who speak out for reformation have placed a bull’s-eye on their chests. Consequently,

Ayatollah Boroujerdi has spoken out against political Islam and [has] been [a] strong advocate of the separation of religion and state, for which Iran sentenced him to 11 years as an Iranian political prisoner.

On September 23, 2014, Mohammad Mohavadi, prosecutor of the Special Clerical Court visited Ayatollah Boroujerdi in Ward 325 of Evin prison. Mohavadi informed him that the contents of Boroujerdi’s book were ‘heresy’ against the leadership and insulted the Supreme Leader of Iran.

Mohavadi continued that the punishment for these crimes is execution, and stated that all those who had a hand in publishing the book will also be killed. When Ayatollah Boroujerdi suggested an open, public debate with the Special Court regarding his views, Mohavadi announced that his office did not participate in debates, just trials and punishment [execution].

Iranian Kurdish prisoner Zeinab Jalalian was arrested on March 16, 2008 by the Iranian secret police. An Iranian court charged Jalalian with being a member of the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), a banned Kurdish group, found her guilty and sentenced her to death. Based on her alleged membership of that Kurdistan political party, she was accused of fighting God (mohareb) and given the death penalty.

The arts are being crushed, too. Thus, “[a] Tehran Revolutionary Court has sentenced the poets Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Mehdi Moosavi to 9 years and 6 months and 99 lashes, and 11 years and 99 lashes, respectively, on charges of ‘insulting the sacred’ for the social criticism expressed in their poetry.” The flogging sentences were as a result “of their shaking hands with strangers (a person of the opposite sex who is not one’s immediate kin or spouse) [.]” Thus, “[t]hese sentences show that ‘repression in Iran is intensifying,’ said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. ‘Hardliners aren’t just going after political activists, they are determined to stamp out any social or cultural expression with which they disagree.'”

Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was “arrested in 2012 and sentenced to ten years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and 1,000 lashes for ‘insulting Islam through electronic channels.'” At the New Yorker, Robin Wright describes how the Saudi government “pulled a blogger named Raif Badawi from his jail cell in Jeddah, brought him to a square in front of a mosque, and administered the first phase—fifty lashes—of a public flogging.”

Islam in the Heart of England and France by Denis MacEoin

“There are plenty of private Muslim schools and madrasas in this city. They pretend that they all preach tolerance, love and peace, but that isn’t true. Behind their walls, they force-feed us with repetitive verses of the Qur’an, about hate and intolerance.” — Ali, an 18-year-old of French origin, whose father was radicalized.

“In England, they are free to speak. They speak only of prohibitions, they impose on one their rigid vision of Islam but, on the other hand, they listen to no-one, most of all those who disagree with them.” — Yasmina, speaking of extremist Muslims in the UK.

“Birmingham is worse than Molenbeek” — the Brussels borough that The Guardian described as “becoming known as Europe’s jihadi central.” — French commentator, republishing an article by Rachida Samouri.

The city of Birmingham in the West Midlands, the heart of England, the place where the Industrial Revolution began, the second city of the UK and the eighth-largest in Europe, today is Britain’s most dangerous city. With a large and growing Muslim population, five of its electoral wards have the highest levels of radicalization and terrorism in the country.

In February, French journalist Rachida Samouri published an article in the Parisian daily Le Figaro, in which she recounted her experiences during a visit there. In “Birmingham à l’heure islamiste” (“Birmingham in the Time of Islam”) she describes her unease with the growing dislocation between normative British values and those of the several Islamic enclaves. She mentions the Small Heath quarter, where nearly 95% of the population is Muslim, where little girls wear veils; most of the men wear beards, and women wear jilbabs and niqabs to cover their bodies and faces. Market stalls close for the hours of prayer; the shops display Islamic clothes and the bookshops are all religious. Women she interviewed condemned France as a dictatorship based on secularism (laïcité), which they said they regarded as “a pretext for attacking Muslims”. They also said that they approved of the UK because it allowed them to wear a full veil.

Another young woman, Yasmina, explained that, although she may go out to a club at night, during the day she is forced to wear a veil and an abaya [full body covering]. She then goes on to speak of the extremists:

“In England, they are free to speak. They speak only of prohibitions, they impose on one their rigid vision of Islam but, on the other hand, they listen to no-one, most of all those who disagree with them.”

Speaking of the state schools, Samouri describes “an Islamization of education unthinkable in our [French] secular republic”. Later, she interviews Ali, an 18-year-old of French origin, whose father has become radicalized. Ali talks about his experience of Islamic education:

“There are plenty of private Muslim schools and madrasas in this city. They pretend that they all preach tolerance, love and peace, but that isn’t true. Behind their walls, they force-feed us with repetitive verses of the Qur’an, about hate and intolerance.”

French Presidential Campaign: Part 4 by Nidra Poller

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/french-presidential-campaign-part-4#ixzz4f3wU3fZa Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Part 1 can be found here – click.

Part 2 can be found here – click.

Part 3 can be found here – click.

How are citizens supposed to detect fake news when the real news is so bizarre? How did Karim Cheurfi, born 31 December 1977 à Livry-Gargan (Seine-St. Denis outskirts of Paris) achieve his lifetime dream of killing a policeman despite the “vigilance” of the courts and law enforcement? How did he manage to do it on the Champs Elysées smack in the middle of the final all- candidate show of a problematical presidential campaign? How could this emblematic attack not influence the results of the first-round vote on April 23rd?

The final 11-candidate show

Because several of the leading candidates refused to participate in a last-minute debate, France 2 organized an 11-piece candidate show on the 21st of April. Expecting a routine replay of all that had gone before, bottom-heavy with the obligatory presence of all 11 candidates, I faced up to my self-imposed obligation to miss nothing, follow everything, dig everywhere, and think uninterruptedly.

In fact, it was more interesting than the “debates” that channel candidates into one-minute statements on contrived questions. In the close up 15-minute segments with each candidate in turn, hosts David Pujadas and Lea Salomé were less intrusive, the candidates were more expansive, and….one hour into the broadcast, Pujadas announced the “terrorist attack” on the Champs Elysées. Yes, from the first flash, authorities labeled the attack with the code word terrorist meaning jihad. From that point on, candidates integrated into their 15-minute slot a spontaneous reaction to the breaking news. I reported details as they emerged in updates to Part 3 of this series.

As the broadcast came to an end, all 11 candidates lined up in the studio and gave 2-minute closing statements. With the exception of Marine Le Pen and François Fillon, they were incapable of integrating the sudden intervention of harsh reality. After a brief expression of condolence for the family of the slain policeman and wishes for the prompt recovery of his wounded colleagues, they each delivered the vote-for- me speech they had prepared in advance. Le Pen, Fillon, and Macron announced cancelation of events scheduled for the following day, Friday, the last day of the campaign.

Special Edition (= Breaking News)

Midnight. Switch to the Champs Elysées, thick with police vans and flashing blue lights, reminding me of the scene on bd. Beaumarchais on the fateful night of November 13, 2015. As if the central nervous system of Paris were emitting an alert of immediate massive danger. Details emerged, some confirmed others corrected the following day. A policeman died instantly, shot in the head as he sat at the wheel of his van. Another critically wounded, a third less seriously hit. The assailant shot dead before he could kill anyone else. Already identified, his ID is in the Audi he drove up to his private little killing field. For the purposes of the investigation, his name would not yet be released. Daesh took claim for the attack but something doesn’t fit, they identify the soldier as Belgian. Is there another one on the way?

Morning after

The previous arrest of two jihad hopefuls ready to strike in Marseille did not get the attention it deserved. This studied avoidance is a familiar practice of French media. We know the reasoning: uh-oh terrorist attack, might be to the advantage of Le Pen and Fillon and disadvantage peace & love Macron, so let’s not talk about it. Karim Cheurfi’s exploit could not be ignored. Especially as details of the determined cop killer’s CV rolled out. He spent 14 of the past 16 years in jail. It started in 2001 when the stolen car he was driving collided with a vehicle driven by a rookie policeman and his brother. Cheurfi broke and ran, the two men chased him down and when they got close, he fired, wounding both of them seriously in the chest. While in detention for this crime he tricked a gendarme into entering his cell, grabbed his gun, and shot at him. All three of these victims survived. In 2008 he was charged with assaulting a prison guard and attacking a cellmate in 2009. Authorities recently received an alert from an acquaintance of Cheurfi: he said he wants to kill policemen because they ruined his life. Because they didn’t let him get away with the stolen car? Drawing him into a vicious circle?

Friday morning, Marine Le Pen and François Fillon made statements from their respective headquarters. Le Pen was as usual emotional, bombastic, long-winded and all over the place. She solemnly enjoined the government to take immediate measures to seal the frontiers, stop all immigration, deport bi-national terror risks, close radical mosques, a whole program of things it never did and can’t do now, two weeks before vacating the premises. She accused the government of doing nothing and claimed she could have done everything. Last night’s shooting, the Mohamed Merah massacre, and everything in between would never have happened if she were president. After spending most of her campaign touting ridiculous retrograde isolationist protectionism, she splattered her fire at Islam.