Paris
All posts tagged Paris
Have you heard of Samuel Paty? If not you are the fulfilment of the title to this article. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, CNN and other Leftist news outlets would have us believe that Islam is a peaceful religion and that those who holler ‘allahu akbar’ while wielding a sword are not really Muslim! Well, tell that to Samuel Paty’s family.
‘Samuel Paty, a teacher at a school in a sedate suburb of Paris, was beheaded in the street last Friday by an 18-year old Chechen former asylum-seeker. The reason for this act of savagery was that Paty had shown cartoons of the prophet Muhammad to a school class, to illuminate a discussion about civic freedoms and the boundaries of debate.
In order to avoid unnecessary offence, he had allowed anyone who wished to avoid viewing the cartoons to leave the classroom. Afterwards, one Muslim pupil is reported to have told her father. He complained to the school and then is alleged to have launched a sustained and inflammatory online campaign against Paty and the school, aided and abetted by at least one well-known Islamist preacher and, according to France’s interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, activist organisations like the Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (who deny their involvement).
The news took me back with a jolt to an evening in Riyadh in late May 2013, during my time as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I was dining with a group of Saudi friends when news appeared on my phone about a terror attack in Woolwich. It soon became clear that this was an attack on an unarmed, unsuspecting and off-duty British soldier by two violent British Islamists. Poor Lee Rigby had been savagely stabbed and almost decapitated. I felt sick, made my excuses and left.
We risk becoming desensitised to the sheer horror of all this. Equally importantly, we risk becoming confused about how we should react – indeed whether we should even do so. There are always those who argue that it’s all our fault. In the wake of the attack on Samuel Paty, there have been some extraordinary posts on social media which come close to justifying his murder because of the perceived insult to the prophet of Islam represented by the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
The editor of the online magazine, 5pillars, for example, wrote,
‘Charlie Hebdo must now be shut down. This racist, Islamophobic rag is causing community relations to completely break down with its repeated provocations. They are literally crying fire in a crowded theatre. Freedom of speech isn’t worth civil war.’
He added ‘Western civilisation is in crisis and in dire need of reform. It has completely lost its moral compass and now only exists to worship materialism and to oppress others.’ Dana Nawzar Jaf, a Kurdish writer who received a British government scholarship to study at Durham University and has written for the New Statesman, in a tweet that has now been deleted, thought the most important point was to condemn the ‘French police’s brutal senseless murder of the Muslim suspect last night’.
The advocacy group CAGE drew a forced contrast between the French government’s entirely understandable reaffirmation that free speech is not an excuse for murder and a small fine it imposed on a man for insulting the national flag. There is more of this sort of garbage if you have the patience and the stomach to search for it.
Reporting of the crime in France has, of course, been massive and commentary agonised. Yet coverage in the British press has been low key in contrast. Why should this be so? It may be that such events have simply been normalised, made banal – and that we have collectively become desensitised. Another reason may be that the press in this country at least has been successfully intimidated by those who constantly complain about the alleged media misrepresentation of Muslims. For example, there has been pressure on editors not to give prominence to claims that Islamists use the takbir – the phrase ‘Allahu akbar’ – before or during an attack (as Samuel Paty’s murderer seems to have done).
Those who want to bury their heads in the sand could always take comfort from Neil Basu, the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police with responsibility for Counter-Terrorism, who frequently warns about right-wing and white-supremacist extremism, even while admitting that the vast majority of terror threats in the UK continue to emanate from violent Islamists within and outside the country. He thinks journalists need to be more ‘responsible’ in their reporting. Some of his colleagues seem also to think that the use of terms like ‘Islamism’ or ‘Islamist’ in connection with terror attacks is provocative. But if we can’t name something, we can’t report it properly.
It is precisely this failure of nerve that President Macron was trying to get at in his recent speech about Islamism, Islamist separatism and the weaponization of Islamophobia in France. This was prefigured earlier this summer by an excellent report issued by the French Senate on Islamist radicalisation, separatism, the weaponisation of Islamophobia, and the struggle over education. That report in turn had been foreshadowed by the equally excellent and disturbing report on attacks on secularism in schools written in 2004 for the Minister of Education.
Macron promises new legislation. There are demands for harsh action against known Islamists who seek to undermine republican values by their words or actions. Already the police are raiding addresses and making arrests. But we’ve seen this before: a flurry of action, and then a gradual relapse into apathy and defeatism as politicians realise that moving the levers of government, especially on an issue as contested as this, requires iron resolve, the patience of a saint and the hide of an elephant.
It is also difficult because the real issue is not the expulsion of a bunch of hate-preachers or would-be jihadis. It is about how we define and stand up for what politicians are fond of describing as ‘western values’. That means knowing what they are and then communicating them with subtlety, empathy but also pride. And at the heart of this is the question of history. We have allowed a penitential version of our history to prevail in much public discourse which sees it as uniformly oppressive, racist and deeply damaging to the rest of humanity. This is ignorant nonsense. All history is light and shade. Yet this gets lost these days in the mass hysteria on social media, in our universities and other national institutions about race, gender and other bogus Foucauldian constructs of power and oppression beloved of the western academy.
Both here and in France – and across Europe and the US (where the New York Times’ bizarre 1619 Project has at least provoked a proper backlash) – we need to confront and challenge those who promote such hucksterism. That’s not a job simply for central government. Without reversing the capture of vice-chancellorships, headships of colleges, university departmental chairs or the boards of quangos, no government will have sufficient allies. Without constantly challenging the online provocations of Islamists and their allies and subjecting their substantial and often-concealed funding to tracing, scrutiny and control, they will continue to set the tone of the debate about community cohesion and the limits of religious tolerance. Without backing and protecting teachers who want to promote proper educational standards, we shall continue to encourage a culture of slovenly reasoning. And without fundamental reform of the machinery of government, civil servants will continue to tell ministers that it’s all too difficult.
I’d add one other thing. When I was asked by David Cameron to lead the so-called Muslim Brotherhood review in 2014, once I’d avoided being knocked over by my FCO colleagues in their rush for cover, I concluded that if you were going to talk about British values, you really needed to articulate what they were. We have new enemies now. It’s about time we recognised that.’https://spectator.com.au/2020/10/weve-become-desensitised-to-terror/
Unbelievable, or is it!?
‘Paris, April 4, 2017. Sarah Halimi, a 66-year-old Jewish woman, is thrown from her third-floor balcony or window. Her body lands in the building’s courtyard. Her murderer first had tortured her. Neighbors had heard screams and called the police. Nine officers came, but when they heard through the door a man shouting “Allahu Akbar”, they ran downstairs to wait for reinforcements. When Kobili Traoré finally surrendered, he said, “I killed the sheitan” (Arabic for “Satan”). While torturing his victim, he said, he had recited verses from the Qur’an, and the Qur’an had “ordered him to kill a Jew”. He said he had spent the previous day in a nearby mosque. He was placed in a mental institution, where he told the psychiatrist who examined him that he smoked marijuana.
The murder was not mentioned in the newspapers. A French Jewish organizations spoke of a “distressing anti-Semitic crime” and organized a silent demonstration in front of Halimi’s building. It was only then that a few articles were written. The French presidential election was about to take place, and journalists from the mainstream media apparently did not want to speak about an anti-Semitic murder committed by a Muslim.
The judge assigned to the case, Anne Ihuellou, at first refused to acknowledge that the murder had been a hate crime. It took the Halimi family’s lawyers more than six months to get her finally to concede, on February 27, 2018, that the motive for the murder had in fact been anti-Semitic.
The judge also refused to organize a review of the events of the case, and agreed to question Traoré only briefly. She called in a psychiatric expert, Daniel Zagury, who said that at the time of the act, the murderer had been in a state of “acute delirium” due to the consumption of cannabis, but fully “accessible to a penal sanction.” Seemingly dissatisfied with Dr. Zagury’s conclusions, Judge Ihuellou asked for two more opinions by experts — both of whom, contradicting Dr. Zagury’s conclusions, said that the Traoré was unfit to stand trial.
On July 12, 2019, the judge dismissed Dr. Zagury’s report, declared that there are “plausible reasons for concluding that the murderer is not criminally responsible” and stated that the attack had not been anti-Semitic.
Realizing that Traoré could soon be released without trial, the Halimi family’s lawyers requested that the case immediately be transferred to a court of appeals.
That court, issuing its decision on December 19, declared that Kobili Traoré had “voluntarily killed” Sarah Halimi and had thereby committed a murder. The court also acknowledged the “aggravating circumstance of anti-Semitism,” but added that due to a “temporary abolition of discernment,” the murderer was “criminally irresponsible,” could not be tried, and therefore had to be released.’ https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15448/france-jews-murder
Andrew Bolt isn’t afraid to say the truth.
“PROTESTERS around the West, horrified by the massacre in Paris, have held up pens and chanted “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie.
They lie. The Islamist terrorists are winning, and the coordinated attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and kosher shop will be just one more success. One more step to our gutless surrender.
Al-Qaeda in Yemen didn’t attack Charlie Hebdo because we are all Charlie Hebdo.
The opposite. It sent in the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi because Charlie Hebdo was almost alone.
Unlike most politicians, journalists, lawyers and other members of our ruling classes, this fearless magazine dared to mock Islam in the way the Left routinely mocks Christianity. Unlike much of our ruling class, it refused to sell out our freedom to speak.
Its greatest sin — to the Islamists — was to republish the infamous cartoons of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten which mocked Mohammed, and then to publish even more of its own, including one showing the Muslim prophet naked.
Are we really all Charlie? No, no and shamefully no.
No Australian newspaper dared published those pictures, too, bar one which did so in error.
The Obama administration three years ago even attacked Charlie Hebdo for publishing the naked Mohammed cartoon, saying it was “deeply offensive”.
President Barack Obama even told the United Nations “the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam” and damned a YouTube clip “Innocence of Muslims” which did just that. The filmmaker was thrown in jail.
We are all Charlie?
In Australia, Charlie Hebdo would almost certainly be sued into silence, to the cheers of some of the very protesters now claiming to be its great defenders.
Victoria now has absurd religious vilification laws, thanks to Labor, that were first used to punish two Christian preachers who at a seminar quoted the Koran’s teaching on jihad and — complained the judge — made their audience laugh.
Australia also has oppressive racial vilification laws which Prime Minister Tony Abbott had promised to relax but last year decided to keep, saying changing them would become a “complication” in making Muslim Australians side with the rest of us against jihadists.
One more surrender, and did you note how most “serious” journalists brayed for this muzzle? Celebrated when two of my own articles were banned?
But our journalists haven’t really needed a muzzle. They have been only too eager to shut themselves up rather than call out the growing threat of jihadism, brought to us by insanely stupid programs of mass immigration from the Third World.
When Dutch political leader Geert Wilders toured Australia to warn against the danger Islamism posed to our physical safety and our freedom, he was treated as a pariah and the protesters who pushed and heckled his audience were handed the microphone instead.
When jihadists screaming “Allahu Akbar” shot dead US soldiers at Fort Hood or coffee shop patrons in Sydney, ABC and Fairfax journalists pretended they had no idea what ideology could have motivated such slaughter.
When Boko Haram jihadists screaming “Allahu Akbar” kidnapped nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls, forcing them to convert to Islam and selling them to be raped, Islamist apologist and terrorism lecturer Waleed Aly refused even to acknowledge on Channel 10 that Boko Haram actually had an Islamist agenda, describing it merely as a group of vigilantes.
And when SBS filmed the then Mufti of Australia, Sheik Hilaly, praising suicide bombers as heroes in the Lakemba mosque just days before the September 11 attacks, it refused to air the footage for fear we might get the “wrong idea”.
This will go on. Be sure of it. Your ruling classes will not easily admit to having made an error that cannot now be fixed. It will prefer oppression to freedom, if that brings at least the illusion of peace — and many may even think they are right.
Hear already the lies.
You are told Muslim groups condemn the killings as unIslamic. Yet the Koran and Hadith preach death to unbelievers who mock Islam, and tell of Mohammed killing poets, singing girls and others who made fun of him.
No greater authority than the Ayatollah Khomeini, the then spiritual ruler of Iran, ordered the killing of writer Salman Rushdie for making mock of Islam in his The Satanic Verses.
We are also told the pen is mightier than the sword, but tell that to the people in the Charlie Hebdo office who found their fistfuls of pens no match for two Kalashnikovs.
Tell that now to even the brave leaders of Jyllands-Posten, who, after years of jihadist plots against their staff have had enough, refusing now to republish cartoons from Charlie Hebdo for fear of yet more attacks.
“It shows that violence works,” it admitted.
Everywhere you will find other papers making the same call.
We are all Charlie?
Bull. Absolute self-serving rubbish. The sell-outs are everywhere and will grow stronger.
The West’s political leaders have already told Muslim leaders they agree that mocking Islam is a sin, and have even passed laws — in France, too — making it unlawful.
They have attacked the very few journalists and politicians who dared warn against the Islamist threat.
Some now back Muslim demands for a boycott of Israel or at least greater recognition for the terrorists who run large parts of Palestinian territory.
Anything for peace, even if it means submission.
And for all the protests this past week, submission is what you must expect.”1
In Australia after the Martin Place siege the tweet “I’ll ride with you” went viral. This tweet was saying the murdering mad man at Martin Place was not a true Muslim. Now, we will hear that these men in Paris too are not true Muslims.
If the murderers of Fort Hood, Martin Place, Charlie Hebdo and the Paris Kosher store massacre are not true Muslims what are they? The cry “Allahu akbar!” is not a Mormon, Baptist, Catholic, or even an atheist cry. How in the world is a non-Muslim going to detect a true Muslim?
What will now happen? One thing is for sure, more of our freedoms such as speech, travel, etc will be slowly taken away because those who are not true Muslims, according to the media, politicians and imams, will continue killing non-Muslims for insulting the Islamic prophet through cartoons, films etc. Wake up and smell the coffee while you still have a head to smell!
whatyareckon 