RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.d-intl.com/articles/international/2012-10-25/french-jihad-cell-dismantled

It has nothing to do with Islam, say the government, the experts and the media

PARIS. The day after the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Serge Haroche, a French Jew born in Casablanca, material to make IEDs were found in a garage rented by Jérémie Bailly, alleged ringleader of the jihad cell dismantled on October 6th. The Naouri grocery store in Sarcelles, hit by a grenade attack on September 19th, is at the top of the list of a dozen Jewish targets found in Bailly’s apartment. One suspect, Jérémie Louis-Sydney, was killed in a shootout with the police and twelve suspects were arrested in a coordinated operation in Cannes, Strasbourg, and Torcy, a banlieue of Paris. Five have been released and seven charged with terrorist associations, attempted assassination aggravated by anti-Semitic motivations and/or recruiting jihadis to fight in Syria. The story dominated the French news stream for several days, triggering belated recognition of twelve years of anti-Semitic violence at a level unknown since the Shoah. The lid has finally been lifted on a seething cauldron whose explosive powers are slightly dampened by the breakup of one cell among how many?

The torrent of news report, commentary, and official declarations gave a false impression of ample information. Looking back, it seems that we know next to nothing about the suspects and their projects. Only three have been named—the Antillais Jérémie Louis-Sydney, the failed soccer player of Congolese origin Yann Nkusa, and Jérémie Bailly. Not a word, not a detail, not a leak about the others except that they are all born in France, delinquents and, save one, converts to Islam. Because Louis-Sydney had served a brief prison term, it was assumed the others, too, must have been “radicalized” in jail. Hours of discussion were devoted to the problem of criminals converting to Islam or getting radicalized in jail. Now it turns out only one or two of them had been in prison. So how did they get to be Muslim?

The attack on a kosher grocery store in Sarcelles with a bizarre kind of “low-level” grenade seemed minor on the scale of physical violence perpetrated on Jews over the past twelve years—bashed, stabbed, stomped and, in the worst cases, tortured, murdered, mutilated. The grocery store didn’t burn or explode, the window was smashed with a brick, one person was slightly injured. The story dropped out of sight.

And reappeared with the dawn raid on the 6th of October. The investigation had been transferred from local police to the anti-terrorist unit when the DNA of Louis-Sydney, who had attracted the attention of internal security (DCRI) last spring, was found on the grenade. Officials did not want to repeat the error of passive surveillance that had left Mohamed Merah free to commit heinous murders before he was finally cornered and killed. Investigators, convinced that the jihadis were preparing an imminent major attack, moved in on them swiftly.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/the_real_reality_check.html

The real reality check is lurking in the wings, hanging over our heads, creeping up behind us. It didn’t really appear in Monday night’s presidential debate. Why? Was it, in fact, a debate? Or more like two gentleman on the riverbanks, fishing and chatting about the state of this troubled world. BBC World’s mid-morning newscast today went from “Obama more or less won the debate” to “the Emir of Qatar visits Gaza.” There’s reality for you. Qatar greasing palms up front and fueling jihad in the background. Does the commander in chief have a plan for that contingency? Never mind. It doesn’t matter to the majority of citizens, commentators, and media hacks. All he had to do to score points was repeat his job title — commander in chief — at regular intervals during the 90-minute session and tally up his foreign policy achievements. The majority of post-debate commentators didn’t question his figures, they chatted about his attitude. Did he look calm, cool, and collected? What does the undecided voter think?

The undecided voter who has not chosen Mitt Romney after the September 11th anniversary jihad attack in Benghazi will not be deciding on the basis of foreign policy, period. Maybe that’s why Romney took every opportunity to link the sorry state of the U.S. economy to our loss of power on the international scene. I suppose his strategy was aimed at winning the election, not winning the debate about the debate… a hopeless cause. Not only because of the stubborn subjectivity of mainstream media commentators but because that heads or tails contest is even more superficial than the debate itself.

Important foreign policy issues were indeed raised yet became weightless as they were tossed from Bob to Mitt to Barack and then dropped. The conversation bobbed on the surface of grave and urgent questions.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/crowley_obamas_teleprompter_substitue.html

We can now fairly assume that both Democrat and Republican analysts concluded that President Obama’s weak performance in the first presidential debate could be attributed to the absence of a teleprompter. The president’s reputation — earned or unearned — as a golden orator cannot be upheld without this prop. So, to level the playing field — as he is fond of saying — he was provided with a flesh and blood teleprompter in the shape of Candy Crowley for the second debate.

It was a Catch 22. If Mitt Romney had pointedly objected to this glaring intervention he would have been seen as the bad sport who shouts at the referee. The same goes for post-debate commentators. You’re not supposed to grumble about the conditions, it makes it look like your guy didn’t hold his own.

From my observation point here in Paris in the middle of the night, the whole setup was skewed. Forgive me if I don’t know the inner workings of the election committee that supposedly ensures a fair fight but I am wondering how in the world they could organize a Town Hall debate composed of 80 undecided voters. Does anyone know how the voters proved they were undecided? Was there a competition to eliminate the less undecided in favor of the truly sincerely undecided? Did they have some kind of test to root out the secretly decided? And how about intelligence? Are the undecided automatically inarticulate or was there another filter that excluded citizens capable of pronouncing a sentence of more than five words containing more than one idea? Why did they all look like props?

I have witnessed dozens of town hall style debates on French television and, trust me, they are never reduced to such first-grade level. When a person intervenes in this kind of discussion, one can perceive something behind the words — call it substance or context or a foundation — that indicates a thought process and life experience that crystalized in a given statement or question. Not so last night. It sounded like a first grade teacher had handed out the questions, matching them up to Johnny, Mary, Alvin, Chris and Rosina on the basis of some silly notion of identity.

Where is this election committee coming from? What is this kindergarten concept of objectivity? Put together eighty people who say they are undecided and all the questions will be equally fair and advantageous to each candidate. Close your eyes and take one moderator from any TV channel — oh my goodness, it’s Candy Crowley from CNN and she’s a woman — and, because she is called the moderator she will moderate.

As if that weren’t enough, Candy Crowley intervened from the very first exchange, like a mother prompting her little boy who forgot his spiel or maybe doesn’t want to brag about his accomplishments. The pattern was set: each candidate would give his answer to the (elementary) question, Candy would call on Barack and throw him some talking points, he would take the cue and do a little performance, and when Mitt Romney tried to do his rebuttal Candy would say that’s enough, let’s go to the next question.

This is a moderator? Why is there only one? If the reality principle had prevailed over the objectivity fallacy there would be two partisan moderators, as well-behaved as the candidates, capable of keeping tabs on each other without getting into a fistfight. A second moderator would have pinned President Obama down on, for example, Fast and Furious. Ms. Crowley let him slip out of it with a homily on good schools and equal opportunity.

Which brings us to Benghazi. First, the question was pathetic. The questioner made a point of saying that it came from a brain trust. How long had these big brains powwowed before coming up with the little bitty question: Is it true that requests for additional security at the Benghazi consulate had been ignored? That’s all the brainies wanted to know? What followed was to democracy what the Benghazi fiasco was to sovereignty. The teleprompter-moderator — who knew the questions in advance — and had apparently reviewed and memorized President Obama’s September 12th Rose Garden talk, intervened to swat down Governor Romney as he looked the president in the eyes and said “You called it an act of terror?”

She grabbed the ball from Obama’s hands and slam dunked it! And the audience applauded. Why in the world did they applaud? I thought they were undecided ergo objective. Why didn’t they emit a collective gasp in horror at Crowley’s totally unacceptable intervention in the debate? Had they too memorized the speech? And forgotten everything said by the president and his men and women since then?

I viewed the video this morning. It prefigures the spin that followed. The incident is called a tragedy not a terror attack. The president criticizes those who denigrate a religion, not those who murder an American ambassador. He pretends that Libyan forces helped, tried to protect, brought the personnel to a safe house, and brought Ambassador Stevens’ body to the hospital where he died. He promises to find out who did it and bring them to justice. In other words, it was a crime not an act of terror. Later, referring to the 9/11 commemoration ceremonies, he claimed that no act of terror against the United States goes unpunished. This was a reference to the elimination of Osama bin Laden. When the president had said what would be his last word before flying off to the fundraiser, a journalist called out: “Was it an act of war?”

But the president wasn’t taking questions.

So it will be up to American voters to answer that one.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/crowley_obamas_teleprompter_substitue.html at October 17, 2012 – 07:54:02 AM CDT

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/graphic-images-of-the-war-in-france

As Islamic outrages multiply, PC France remains adamant: This has nothing to do with Islam.

PARIS. Islam, où est le problème? [literally, Islam, where is the problem?]. In the wake of the latest spate of Islamic rage operations, Yves Calvi, one of our most decent journalists, made an honest effort to squarely face the question. Though he tried as usual to include a broad range of guests, the September 24th broadcast of his political discussion program “Mots Croisés” was a mismatch, with philosopher Alain Finkielkraut fending off a barrage of accusations from all sides. Accusations, of course, against us, not against Islam.

The very possibility that Islam might be a problem was evacuated early on. The majority of Muslims in France are law-abiding well-integrated members of society. The proof? French Muslims did not react violently to Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures of Muhamed. Consequently, the problem is not Islam and Islam is not a problem. The problem is the failure of French society to integrate immigrants and make them feel at home. The problem is the stigmatization of Muslim immigrants down to the third and fourth generation, relegated to ghettoes, victims of discrimination in the job market, subjected to humiliating ID controls, constantly suspected of criminality.

Clémentine Autain of the Front de Gauche [The Left Front, ed.] extended the humiliation argument to its outer limits. Those immigrants had to put up with the debate on national identity, the burqa ban, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the festering Israel-Palestinian crisis. Finkielkraut and Socialist politician Julian Dray managed to squeeze in a few words about anti-Semitism without really linking it to Islam or stemming the tide of criticism of French society.

Finkielkraut gave a subtle explanation for this studied reluctance to entertain the notion that Islam in and of itself might be a problem by citing the case of his colleague Robert Redeker, a philosophy professor who has been in hiding and under police protection since he published an unvarnished reflection on Islam in the Figaro daily in September 2006.

http://dispatch-international.com/content/fran%C3%A7ois-hollande-warpath

French President still clamors for “change” but nothing moves

PARIS. True to his branding as “the normal president,” President François Hollande moved—slowly – up to the front lines this week in an effort to rescue his government from tumbling approval ratings (40 percent satisfied). His Sunday night appearance on the TF1 channel was the same as usual: soporific delivery of a common ordinary discourse punctuated with occasional gesticulations to give an impression of determination. During the 25-minute interview with star newscaster Claire Chazal, Hollande kept reiterating his campaign refrain: I set the course, I set the pace. The pace is slow, the course is foggy, the reaction is embarrassed in his camp and, of course, harsh everywhere else. Le Monde, headlined its web article: “Hollande is personally committed to the combat.” If that is big news four months into his presidential term, then it might explain why so many of those who voted for him are already disappointed. Le Monde columnist Françoise Fressoz explains the discrepancy between the campaign slogan “le changement c’est maintenant” (change is right now) and today’s sluggish pace: “Change”, she says, meant turning the “Sarkozysme” page.

But has François Hollande changed radically since last spring? Has the global economic situation suddenly worsened? Was the flat delivery in the TF1 interview much different from his campaign speeches and television appearances? The answer is no. What has changed is that the Sarkozy veil—not the former president but a magical image of him—has been removed, revealing realities that should have been exposed and analyzed during the campaign. If voters had clearly seen a choice between the Socialist platform and Sarkozy’s program, the outcome may have been different. Since very few citizens are active in political parties, attend campaign rallies or have direct access to candidates, we must conclude that they get their information from the media. Print media in France have notoriously low circulation; most voters get their information from radio and television, where they were enflamed with enthusiasm and persuaded that the election of a Socialist president after all these years was imperative.

http://dispatch-international.com/content/jihad-work-muslims-spontaneously-rampage

Jihad at work: Muslims “spontaneously” on the rampage The concept of “Islamophobia” gains new ground

PARIS. The 9/11 anniversary jihad operation was quite successful in France as in the rest of the world. An act of war–the attack against the American Consulate in Benghazi – was marketed as a spontaneous popular demonstration against an Islamophobe film that inadvertently led to the demise of three Americans including the ambassador to Libya.

Primary responsibility for the cover up lies of course with the Obama administration but French media willingly obliged. While gruesome photos of Ambassador Chris Stevens, still alive, dragged through the streets like a bagged animal, manhandled, photographed like a trophy, and probably subjected to the ultimate outrage were circulating on the Net, UN Ambassador Susan Rice engaged in grotesque damage control and French reporters in Benghazi peddled the same version, which they called the “real story” based on inside information from Libyan authorities.

The story eventually collapsed but it had served its purpose: The good people of our beleaguered free world, who heard virtually nothing about an act of war (most probably don’t know there is such a thing), are now steeped in the concept of Islamophobia. The couplet is engraved in press agency stone, repeated from morning to night: “The attack against the American embassy in reaction to an Islamophobe film. …” The ambassador and his countrymen “lost their lives” the way someone loses an umbrella. Muslims are on the rampage, burning flags and embassies, and it is all about an Islamophobe film.

Israel Affairs Volume 18, Issue 3, 2012

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537121.2012.689517

Attacking Israel with genocidal intentions

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2012.689517Nidra Poller*pages 363-371

De-legitimization of the State of Israel is the current episode in a persistent genocidal project aimed at the Jews and, more profoundly, at the values inherent in Judaism and shared by civilized societies. Skirting the shame attached to anti-Semitism after the horrors of the Holocaust, contemporary advocates of the genocidal plot are given free rein to attack Jews by a combination of severe criticism of the State of Israel and well-meaning plans for its geopolitical future, i.e. the peace process. Ugly lies – the Jews stole the land from the Palestinians, Israel is an apartheid state – function like the age-old charges that justified persecution of the Jews as Christ killers. Beautiful lies – the two state solution that everyone knows – echo the proto-legalistic measures that gradually deprived European Jews of their rights, their strength, their resources and capacity to resist deportation and extermination. Americans, misinterpreting as a repetition of the 1930s the rise of violent anti-Semitism in Europe at the dawn of the twenty-first century, are unprepared to deal with a parallel rise in Muslim Brotherhood forces within the US. As brutal Islamic Jew hatred boils in an Arab-Muslim world revolting, reforming, and submitting to sharia law, the Obama administration conducts a policy of the outstretched hand and blindfolded eyes that leaves Iran free to develop the ultimate genocidal weapon. Israel is the bulwark, not only for Jews but for the free world. Clear thinking, uncompromising discourse, and resolute action – at the risk of being labelled extremist – can stop the genocidal project and, working backward, disarm the lies.

Keywords Israel, Jews, anti-Semitism, Holocaust, de-legitimization, apartheid, genocide

From the first stirrings of Judaism to the present day the war against the Jews has been pursued with variations in methods, scope, and intensity. It would be foolish to sum up in a few sentences the brilliant work of a host of thinkers who have analysed this process and examined its underlying causes. We can no more ignore their thought than rest on their conclusions. We have to integrate their wisdom into fresh thinking based on the contemporary situation. What stands in the way of an early twenty-first century genocide of the Jews? Compared to the previous genocide, Jews today are healthier, wealthier, and wiser. Honest human beings the world over are sincerely horrified by the Shoah and more or less aware of the dangers of a repetition. The democratic nations in which the Diaspora lives in relative peace and prosperity are well-armed to defend themselves against attack and the Jews against potential exterminators. But all of these safeguards would crumble if not for the State of Israel.

Therefore, one could say with near scientific precision that the State of Israel stands between the Jews and a twenty-first century genocidal plot. How clever, then, to labour away at destroying Israel while denying the slightest anti-Semitic intentions. The range of weapons is limitless. The combinations are devilish. A peace process seasoned with Intifadas, martyrdom operations coupled with invocations of international law, humanitarian flotillas armed to the teeth, rocket attacks in tandem with UN recognition bids, and of course the construction of a tight-knit international network of sympathizers extending from the grassroots to the halls of power. While Israel’s neighbours pound away at its existence, Muslims in Europe and the Americas blithely attack Jews to ‘avenge’ their Palestinian ‘brothers’. Again, freedom to harm Jews has been granted along with immunity from the anti-Semite label. Domestic and foreign enemies of the Jews collaborate to conduct attacks that terrorize large populations into granting whatever is demanded in the name of Islam, Palestine, peace, and adulterated civil rights. The leavening agent of this recipe is a compound of the good obtained by a reverse chemistry that transforms the moral lessons of the Holocaust into the amoral values by which Jews can once more be pursued and exterminated.

In the name of the good, Jews can be harassed on university campuses, elbowed out of professional and commercial activities, vilified in lowbrow and highbrow media, abandoned to thugs and murderers and, conversely, glorified if they outspokenly reject Israel. Cartoonists win prizes with Nazi style caricatures where Jews are recycled as Israelis. Arab-Muslim intellectuals are invited to speak in high places and given tenure in prestigious universities for justifying the persecution of Jews identified as Israelis. Outreach operations promote the narrative that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are mutually guilty of/victims of prejudice. Idealists wave the co-exist banner.1 People of all colours and creeds can live together harmoniously as long as the Jews turn their backs on the outlaw state of Israel – under its present government, of course. The genocidal plot aims to divide and conquer: divide Diaspora Jews from Israel, Israeli Jews from their government, Israelis living inside the green line from ‘colonists’, and so on.

Here and there, the ‘evils of Zionism’ give permission to break the post-Auschwitz taboo and stir up old-fashioned anti-Semitic stereotypes. The hue and cry against Wall Street speculators and billionaires are emblematic targets of Jew hatred that would be unleashed if the bulwark of Israel were ever to collapse.

François will bring the Croissants*

* “croissants” = flaky, buttery, crescent-shaped pastry… “croissance” = growth

Well, that’s settled! Angela will provide the meat and potatoes and François will bring the croissants. From each according to his means, to each according to his needs. Now you understand why Nicolas Sarkozy lost the election. He never thought of that quick fix while running back and forth between Paris and Berlin last winter, even when his wife Carla was in labor. The upshot was Giulia, cooing and growing far from the camera’s eye—we’ve never seen the tiniest image of the former president’s daughter—and French media pissing on Sarkozy for letting Brunhilde Merkel dictate the terms of what has come to be known as the infamous austerity pact. Now the victorious François is transforming France, Europe, and the world. He promised he would go to Berlin, to Washington, to the G8, and let them know “French voters have spoken.” They don’t want austerity. The Greeks don’t want austerity. The Spanish are sick to death of it, the Italians are fed up, the Portuguese are feverish, and those who haven’t caught it yet are terrified of contagion. They want croissance!

French media love François. They hated Nicolas with a vengeance. They made fun of him for being short. Now that President Hollande is the same height it’s not an issue. Le Monde[i] looks on with tender indulgence as the new president, jumping from his provincial sinecure to the highest office, bumbles awkwardly into international meetings like a mistaken identity comic: “… he’s still a bit out of step in the midst of the world leaders. If he hasn’t acquired Barack Obama’s relaxed casual look or the snobbish ease of David Cameron at least he’s not stiff like the austere Angela Merkel.” So what if Hollande misses cues, arrives late for his own press conferences, missed Obama’s opening remarks at the NATO Conference, and the only thing he wants to do ahead of schedule is pull French troops out of Afghanistan? With a flip of the wrist he turned the eurozone from austerity to croissants.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/115995/sec_id/115995

Guiltless in Guantánamo by Nidra Poller (June 2012)

It’s been years since I last bought a copy of the International Herald Tribune (New York Times abroad) and I don’t bother commenting anymore on its stylized bias, but I got a free copy the other day and, not being wasteful, tried to read it. Now here I am dissecting an article. Not just any article: a template “guiltless in Guantánamo” piece, featured four-columns wide on page two of the print edition. You can read it online here.

The innocence of the liberated Guantánamo prisoner is established in the first paragraph:

“IT was James, a thickset American interrogator nicknamed ‘the Elephant,’ who first told Lakhdar Boumediene that investigators were certain of his innocence, that two years of questioning had shown he was no terrorist, but that it did not matter, Mr. Boumediene says.”

The extent of the injustice is tallied in the second paragraph:

“The interrogations would continue through what ended up being seven years, three months, three weeks and four days at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

The cause of the injustice is the subject of the third paragraph: Mr. Boumediene, who was running an aid program for orphans in Sarajevo, was “swept up” in the post 9/11 panic.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/05/french_elections_virtue_the_debt_and_the_jewish_question.html

The French presidential elections, initially presented by pollsters and commentators as a pushover for the Socialist contender François Hollande, turns out to be a cliff-hanger.[i] The best comparison with the United States might well be the 1948 Dewey- Truman match. On the eve of the final round, pollsters admit that the gap between the two candidates is gradually narrowing. My prediction is a photo finish, with less than one point of difference. This is the most important presidential election in France since the end of World War 2. The outcome is not only crucial for France but for the free world. I think this is the most clear cut opportunity for a European nation to stand up and confront the wave of conquest unleashed in 1973. There has been some speculation about how this would happen: mass incarceration and deportation of Muslims, civil war, craven surrender… Now, in the European country with the largest Muslim population, the question is going to be treated democratically; not by revolution, not by tribal warfare, but by the exercise of hard won freedom through institutions created and developed over the centuries. French citizens, acutely aware of the high stakes, are riveted on a campaign that has become increasingly articulate and well-defined. It is impossible in the space of this brief article to give a detailed account of issues and events, particularly to an English-speaking readership that has received rather sketchy superficial information. (I will remedy that with an in-depth essay soon.)

The Left tried to focus the campaign on economic issues, which could only fall to the disadvantage of President Sarkozy who had been unable to fulfill his promise to implement extensive structural reforms that would release the untapped potential for growth and significantly reduce the unemployment that has plagued France for the past thirty years. But voters, fortunately, have had their say. While it would be false to claim that the score of Front National candidate Marine Le Pen, who came in third, has no economic component it is impossible to ignore the burning issue that sent so many votes her way: Islam. Nicolas Sarkozy cannot win the second and final round without attracting a significant percentage of the Front National vote. François Hollande, who counts on reaping the total far Left vote, will gladly take in the economically disgruntled who “mistakenly” went for FN but will grant them nothing in exchange. Now, on the eve of the final round, polls are still predicting victory for François Hollande. One issue could make the difference: