generalspeaking

A Tardy Realization

"They start with petty crime, move on to drug trafficking, sometimes prison, leading to conversion to radical Islam and hatred for the West."
"There are several dozen Merahs in France today. Not all of them take action, but we have to guard against it."
Manuel Valls, French interior minister in 2013, currently President

The guard, as in guarding against, appears to have lapsed. Mohammed Merah was the jihadist who killed four French Jews and three French soldiers in 2012 in Toulouse before he was shot as a mad dog by police. It was theorized that he had become a recruit to violent jihad through prison radicalization. In France, as elsewhere, the prison population is over-represented by Muslim men.

While statistics that identify religion of ethnic background are not maintained, researchers' reasoned estimates are that between one-third and half of prisoners in French jails are Muslim. And since France has the largest Muslim population in Europe with Muslims representing roughly 6 percent of the population, when a young male Muslim in France enters jail there are ample prospects for radicalization.

Experience led Manuel Valls when he was minister of the interior to speak of the "enemy within". And this week the enemy within entered the annals of history in a precision paramilitary attack on a French satirical magazine which al-Qaeda had placed a fatwa on, and French citizens chose to launch their attack on, to avenge the contempt they saw demonstrated by Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists on Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.

The killers, French brothers, Cherif and Said Kouachi, denied that they were murderers; they were simply proving their pious loyalty to Islam as the holy scriptures within Islam commanded of them through jihad leading to martyrdom. Their friend in jihad who chose his targets reflecting Islam's perpetual focus on the challenge that being a Jew anywhere in the world is deserving of death, also chose martyrdom for the cause; the former took a dozen lives, the latter four.

Amedy Coulibaly, like his friends Said and Cherif Kouachi, born in France of Muslim parents, found themselves a poor fit in the prevailing culture, and particularly in the work force. Should lack of integration be placed squarely on French society, or should it be partially explained by the fact that Islam cautions its faithful not to integrate into the prevailing culture, to preserve their Muslim identity?

These three, like so many others in Europe and France in particular, represent an aggrieved underclass who from time to time break into the kind of 'protest' that in any country represents chaotic violence perpetrated with a sense of entitlement to do so, a violence so endemic and engrained that French police hardly dare enter the banlieues where hatred and resentment of the French establishment and Jews in particular resonates.

The three men responsible for the carnage that took place in Paris last week, born in France, were yet foreign to France in their rejection of French values and those of the West in general that hadn't, throughout the course of their lives benefited them in the manner to which they felt entitled. All turned to crime, experienced prison sentences and were radicalized while imprisoned.


The tinderbox that the large Muslim populations residing as immigrants throughout Europe and North America represent is simmering with an low-grade incendiary threat, now and again erupting into high-grade violence targeting those whom the malcontents and Islamofascism-inspired jihadis hold responsible for their undesirable place in life. Mostly, the targets are Jews, and they are police, and they remain vulnerable within a country for whom equality and fraternity and liberty are sacred.

The trouble being that among those dissatisfied with their lot in life, and aggrieved at the manner in which they feel Islam is viewed, consider equality, fraternity and liberty in direct conflict with Islam, and as such to be discarded with disgust, and all symbols of that humanitarian triad obliterated in a hail of machine-gun fire, so much more useful than the original tool of conquest, the scimitar.

Labels: Atrocities, France, Immigration, Islamism, Jihad

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, January 11, 2015