Malicious Moscow Mission of Social-Political Sabotage

Palestinian Aziz Salha seen at a prison window showing off his blood-stained hands as a mob hanged and beat to death two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah, October 2000. (YouTube screenshot)

 

During the Second Intifada -- the Palestinian 'uprising' against Israeli 'oppression' and 'occupation' of land Palestinian Arabs originally from Egypt and Syria claimed as their own, rejecting that portion of ancestral Judaic territory that the United Nations in its great wisdom decided through a plan to partition the territory, offering one portion to Israel, the other to appease Arab anger over the presence of Jews on land Muslims insist was consecrated to Islam when Islam appeared millennia after the Jewish homeland and religion reigned, to colonize the Middle East and build their sacred mosque in the Roman-era ruins of the Second Temple of Solomon, refusing their share to build a state -- two Israeli soldiers were beaten to death by a hate-crazed Palestinian mob in Ramallah.

 

The blood-stained hands of one of the Palestinians raised in victory, caused the mob to applaud the gesture in a jubilant mood of conquest. A barbaric act of vicious hatred that remains to this day an icon of Palestinian 'defiance' against an Israeli military tasked by an Israeli government to protect the lives of Jews and non-Jewish Israelis from the murderous rage of hate-infested Palestinians, from their leaders to the ordinary citizens. Those blood-slathered hands are symbolic of the Palestinian hate-malice against Jews on land in the Middle East that Arab Muslims claim as their own. A symbol that has been resurrected to be used as a declaration of undying purpose; to kill Jews.  

"[Foreign interference was] indisputable [aimed to] stir up public opinion, exploit existing divisions and further fragment French society."

"Foreign interference aimed at dividing the French society but that does not in any manner alleviate individual responsibility."

Judges, Paris Criminal Court

 

"[It was] the very first trial in a series of legal cases that have been unfolding over the past two years, which authorities link to foreign interference operations."

"Intelligence reports included in the court file attribute the 'red hands' operation to the FSB's Fifth Service" [Russia's security service]."

French researcher Clément Renault 

Red hands graffitis are seen on the "Wall of the Righteous" (Mur des Justes) outside the Shoah memorial in Paris, on May 14, 2024, after the monument was vandalized overnight. ANTONIN UTZ / AFP

 

Four Bulgarians living in France have been found guilty of desecrating a Jewish memorial last year, stencilling red handprints on the memorial. Sentencing called for imprisonment between two and four years. The circumstances of the incident and perhaps others like this one, has aroused the suspicion of prosecutors inferring that foreign interference linked to Russia was involved. Two-year sentences were handed down at the Paris Criminal Court to Georgi Filipov and Kiril Milushev, considered to have been the perpetrators.

 

While Nikolay Ivanov and Mirechho Angelov, considered to have been the operation's 'masterminds' were given four and three years respectively. All are in custody with the exception of Angelov, who remains at large. Along with the prison sentences, all of those involved have been banned for life from entering French territories. A hard sentence for those involved whose families including their children live with them as landed immigrants in France.

 

The trial was one in a series of similar cases, all of them under suspicion of having been orchestrated by a foreign power, whose purpose was to destabilize French society. A society which is in actual fact quite destabilized without the interference of any foreign entity. But suspicion falls nonetheless on Russia, whose malignant moves from cyberattacks, to Russian warplanes and drones briefly flying into Moscow's European enemies' airspace as well as submarines suspected of entering on the verge of NATO members' oceanic territory. 

 

French politics is increasingly divided - a perfect opportunity for the Kremlin   AFP via Getty Images

 

The aggravating circumstances of acting on behalf of a foreign power did not enter into the prosecution of the four defendants since it only came into law in France's criminal code following the incident. France's position vis-a-vis its relations with Israel at war in Gaza with the criminal terrorist Palestinian group Hamas following the October 7, 2023 mass incursion of thousands of Palestinian terrorists from Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad -- all led by Hamas -- and Palestinian civilians who embarked on a barbaric mass atrocity of murder, mutilation and rape and hostage-taking. France's government has taken the position that despite the sadistic savagery imposed on Israel, it would 'recognize' a Palestinian state.

 

The memorial wall that was the site of the desecration was painted with red handprints. The function of the wall is to memorialize the 3,900 individuals whose selfless courage protected Jews during the Nazi occupation of Vichy France during the Second World War. Other areas of central Paris located nearby the memorial were also found to have been imprinted with the red handprints. 

 

According to the office of the prosecutor, a security agent had seen two people placing stencils on the memorial, whom security footage identified. Three of the malefactors had taken a bus to Belgium, then a flight to Bulgaria the morning following their desecration of the memorial. Lawyers for the men involved contend that their clients had no idea of the meaning behind the memorial, nor were they aware that they were being manipulated by Russia.

 

The red handprints, ventured the Paris prosecutor's office, were possibly "orchestrated by Russian intelligence services", and that the particular event which the four men were involved with, were only one of nine similar suspected acts where foreign interference was likely involved. Elsewhere, since 7 October, 2023, Stars of David were stencilled in the Paris region. Pig's heads were left outside mosques in the Paris region in September, and coffins with "French soldiers of Ukraine" were left at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

 

The group was found guilty of conspiring last year to tag the Paris Holocaust memorial with red hands in what was undoubtedly foreign "interference," the judge said in the Paris court crowded with journalists and Russia watchers. | Magali Cohen/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

 

France's Betrayal of Its Jewish Citizens - Holocaust

"We will continue to teach against ignorance. We will continue to cry out against indifference. And we will fight, I promise you, at every dawn, because France's story is written by a combat of resistance and justice that will never be extinguished."

"We are not finished with antisemitism, and we must lucidly face that fact."

"It is showing itself on the walls of our cities [when they are vandalized with swastikas]. It is infiltrating social networks ... it inserts itself into debates on some TV shows."

"It showed itself in the complacency of certain political forces. It is prospering also through a new form of historic revisionism, even negationism."

"Let us repeat here with force, whether self-styled revisionist commentators like it or not."

French President Emmanuel Macron

"The policy, from 1942 onward, was to organize the murder of the Jews of Europe and therefore to organize the deportation of the Jews of France."

"Most of the time, the decisions were made by the Nazis ... but the management was French."

Jacques Fredj, director, Paris Shoah Memorial

Entrance to the Vel’ d’Hiv (the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d'Hiver), where Jews were detained en-masse in preparation for their deportation to concentration camps in France.

 

Other French citizens ended up in concentration camps; committed French socialists who defied the Vichy government and their Nazi masters. In the camps they were in separate barracks from the majority camp occupants who were Jews. The French socialists bore difficult times, most of them managed to survive their ordeal. They empathized and pitied the Jews crammed into their barracks, the plight of the women and children, knowing well what that all-pervading odour both of fear and resignation and the stench of the smoke billowing out of the giant chimney signified.

 

Vivarais-Lignon, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in France in Feb. 2016.  Alamy Stock Photo

 

And there was a haven, in the mountains of southern France where Le Chambon residents harboured Jewish children, cared for them, hid them, nurtured them and brought them life and eventually even reunion with surviving family members. All at great risk to themselves, but determined to defy orders from the Nazis and from their own fascist Vichy government. Because of their activities, thousands of French Jewish children and Jewish children from other parts of Europe survived the war. They were Protestant French, surrounded by French Roman Catholics.

Jews living at a children's home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, with their director, Juliette Usach, 1941. The people of Le Chambon and surrounding villages hid nearly 5,000 people fleeing Nazi occupation.

French police were entirely complicit with their Nazi overmasters; what the Nazis decreed, the French police carried out under the collaborationist Vichy government. In July 1942, French police went  house to house rounding up French Jews. It took two days where 13,000 men, women and children, all French citizens, were assembled to be dispatched to Nazi death camps. The Vel d'Hiv raids will forever be a black mark against France in the Second World War.

Police herded 13,142 French citizens of Jewish extraction, among them, 4,115 children into the Winter Velodrome of Paris (Vel d'Hiv). Western Europe had no rival to this large roundup where children were separated from their families, very few of whom survived the terrifying episode whose purpose was genocidal intent. There is a monument now, erected at a garden where once the velodrome stood. It holds the names of those thousands of children inscribed for posterity, so they will not be forgotten. Only six of those thousands of children survived.

A memorial is pictured near a train car symbolizing the Drancy camp, at the Shoah memorial, July 12, 2022 in Drancy, outside Paris (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

 

Renowned Nazi Hunter Serge Klarsfeld spoke in the garden on Saturday, an "earth shaking testimony to the horrors lived by Jewish families", he said of the garden and its memorial, stressing the urgency of passing on memories in the wake of the last of the survivors passing away. The following day the French president visited a site south of Paris where police sent families following the Vel d'Hiv roundup until they were sent on further to the Nazi camps.

There, in Pithiviers, a new memorial site honouring those French Jews was inaugurated, with a plaque reading: "Let us never forget". The Shoah Memorial in the Paris suburb of Drancy hosted another ceremony. Drancy was home to a transit centre central to the deadly journey to Nazi camps for French Jews. Of the 76,000 Jews deported from France under the collaborators of Nazi Germany in France, most transited the Drancy camp.

And now, in present-day Europe, Jewish communities are concerned with rising antisemitism throughout Europe; in France and in Germany in particular over recent years. The nation's Interior Ministry reports a rise in antisemitic acts, adding that racist and anti-religious acts are on the increase overall, while Jews are disproportionately targeted. 

Following the Second World War, fifty years passed before French leadership officially acknowledged state involvement in the Holocaust. Then-President Jacques Chirac apologized for the role of French authorities in the Vel d'Hiv raids. As President Macron said on Sunday, none of France's Vichy wartime leaders "wanted to save Jews".

French policemen register foreign Jews in Pithiviers for their subsequent deportation, in May 1941.- (AFP)