Why did the French fail to monitor the Charlie Hebdo terrorists?
There are an awful lot of French citizens who sympathize with the Muslim terrorist cause, and many of them are known to authorities, like the three terrorists in the Charlie Hebdo and kosher market killings. Some pundits are offering the excuse that there are just too many such people for intelligence to effectively track them and prevent the attacks.
If that’s true, then the situation is incredibly dire, because it would indicate that our resources have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of terrorists already in the West.
But I don’t buy it. We certainly could allocate more resources to the task. What’s more, those three terrorists weren’t just sympathizers; two of them had previously been in the prison system for terrorist activities, and had received sentences that were a mere slap on the wrist. Why is the French justice system so lenient on terrorists? Why weren’t they still in prison?
It’s not as though this leniency was unknown, either. Here’s a 2002 article by Theordore Dalrymple that talks about (among other things) the breakdown of the French criminal justice system and its almost complete lack of punishment, deterrence, accountability for out-of-control youths from the Muslim enclaves of France. And the perpetrators, both petit and grand, are well aware of it:
Several things struck me about the incident [of trying to steal from parking meters]: the youths’ sense of invulnerability in broad daylight; the indifference to their behavior of large numbers of people who would never dream of behaving in the same way; that only the elderly tried to do anything about the situation, though physically least suited to do so. Could it be that only they had a view of right and wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? That everyone younger than they thought something like: “Refugees . . . hard life . . . very poor . . . too young to know right from wrong and anyway never taught . . . no choice for them . . . punishment cruel and useless”? The real criminals, indeed, were the drivers whose coins filled the parking meters: were they not polluting the world with their cars?
Another motive for inaction was that, had the youths been arrested, nothing would have happened to them. They would have been back on the streets within the hour. Who would risk a screwdriver in the liver to safeguard the parking meters of Paris for an hour?
The laxisme of the French criminal justice system is now notorious. Judges often make remarks indicating their sympathy for the criminals they are trying (based upon the usual generalizations about how society, not the criminal, is to blame); and the day before I witnessed the scene on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, 8,000 police had marched to protest the release from prison on bail of an infamous career armed robber and suspected murderer before his trial for yet another armed robbery, in the course of which he shot someone in the head. Out on bail before this trial, he then burgled a house. Surprised by the police, he and his accomplices shot two of them dead and seriously wounded a third. He was also under strong suspicion of having committed a quadruple murder a few days previously, in which a couple who owned a restaurant, and two of their employees, were shot dead in front of the owners’ nine-year-old daughter.
The left-leaning Libération, one of the two daily newspapers the French intelligentsia reads, dismissed the marchers, referring with disdainful sarcaé¨m to la fié¨vre flicardiaire””cop fever. The paper would no doubt have regarded the murder of a single journalist””that is to say, of a full human being””differently, let alone the murder of two journalists or six; and of course no one in the newspaper acknowledged that an effective police force is as vital a guarantee of personal freedom as a free press, and that the thin blue line that separates man from brutality is exactly that: thin. This is not a decent thing for an intellectual to say, however true it might be.
Remember, the article was written back in 2002. More:
A kind of anti-society has grown up in [the low-income immigrant Muslim communities]””a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust””greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years””is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.
Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti””BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme.
And Dalrymple issued the following warning:
Whether France was wise to have permitted the mass immigration of people culturally very different from its own population to solve a temporary labor shortage and to assuage its own abstract liberal conscience is disputable: there are now an estimated 8 or 9 million people of North and West African origin in France, twice the number in 1975””and at least 5 million of them are Muslims. Demographic projections (though projections are not predictions) suggest that their descendants will number 35 million before this century is out, more than a third of the likely total population of France.
Indisputably, however, France has handled the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless it assimilates these millions successfully, its future will be grim. But it has separated and isolated immigrants and their descendants geographically into dehumanizing ghettos; it has pursued economic policies to promote unemployment and create dependence among them, with all the inevitable psychological consequences; it has flattered the repellent and worthless culture that they have developed; and it has withdrawn the protection of the law from them, allowing them to create their own lawless order.
No one should underestimate the danger that this failure poses, not only for France but also for the world. The inhabitants of the cités are exceptionally well armed. When the professional robbers among them raid a bank or an armored car delivering cash, they do so with bazookas and rocket launchers, and dress in paramilitary uniforms. From time to time, the police discover whole arsenals of Kalashnikovs in the cités.
So, rocket launchers and the rest were already common back in 2002. In the intervening years we’ve seen the growth of groups like ISIS, with their internet presence. They have a great deal of outreach in France, and it is obviously effective. The Charlie Hebdo terrorists were radicalized in that way, along with countless others. You can’t that say we—and France—weren’t warned.
It’s surprising that the French penal system has morphed into a sort of revolving door of non-punishment. Based on the Napoleonic Code, the system used to be absolutely horrific. Under the Napoleonic Code you were deemed guilty until proven innocent – just the opposite of our system. Also, once you were confined, the state was not responsible for your health or comfort. If someone outside didn’t pay for your food, too bad – no food for you. Those with money could bribe the guards for better conditions, but those without money were out of luck. A prison sentence of more than five years was a possible death sentence. Don’t know when they went soft, but it’s obvious from Dalrymple’s descriptions they have. C’est la vie.
ISIS?
One simple question to you
Why Youtub, Other internet sources keep the material belong to terrorist been there in first place?
And well over a hundred years before Dalrymple, a Frenchman:
“Je demande, au nom de l’humanité, é ce qu’on broie la Pierre-Noire, pour en jeter les cendres au vent, é ce qu’on détruise La Mecque, et que l’on souille la tombe de Mahomet. Ce serait le moyen de démoraliser le Fanatisme.”
(Gustave Flaubert / 1821-1880 / Lettre é Madame Roger des Genettes / 12 ou 19 janvier 1878)
Not exactly ??? but:
“I ask, on behalf of humanity, the Black Stone be crushed, the ashes thrown to the wind, Mecca be destroyed, and the tomb of Mohammed defiled. It would be a way of demoralizing fanaticism.”
Qu’est-ce, en enfer, arrivé é la frané§aise?
And speaking of fanaticism:
Of fanaticism – ”the only form of willpower to which the weak and irresolute can rise”
— F. Nietzsche
And speaking of Nietzsche:
”I call an animal, a species, an individual, corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it prefers what is injurious to it.”
– F. Nietzsche, The Antichrist
And speaking of corrupt (French criminal justice system) :
”Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less occasion or need to educate one’s feelings in severity and sternness; and now every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offense and awakens mistrust, “the lamb,” even more “the sheep,” is held in higher and higher respect. There comes a point of morbid mellowing and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal, and does so honestly and wholeheartedly.”
– F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil
Six degrees of separation indeed.
Sacré bleu!
It all boils down to a willful refusal to embrace the truth that Western Civilization is the only bright light in the course of human history and must not be diluted but instead defended.
Unless a society is proud of the heritage of Western Civilization, and willing to deal harshly with ‘extremists’ and those who enable them; it can not protect itself from a barbaric, ruthless enemy. Erect spinal columns and true grit are in short supply in the West. Darkness comparable to 1939 approaches, sharpen blades and kill the slouching beast.
Slightly off-topic, but worth reading:
https://ricochet.com/paris-update-believe-lying-eyes/
The French government most likely invited the invasion in intentionally, in order to get rid of local French people that were still nationalistic.
No one should underestimate the danger that this failure poses, not only for France but also for the world.
This reminds me of one way to look at Hussein Obola’s policies, that they are failing to get the good result intended vs they are succeeding in getting the disaster they intended. Now the disaster may be more than they expected and hard to damage control, but that’s a different issue.
The problem itself, depending on how you look at it, requires different ways to deal with it. If it’s a failure of policy, that’s one thing. If it is policy that succeeded at creating this situation… that’s a different issue.
Dalrymple has been a voice crying in the wilderness with regards to the underclass for years. It isn’t just terrorism that presents dire consequences for the western world when it comes to this issue.
According to a senior French security and intelligence expert, the failure in Paris was at least partly structural:
Daniel in Brookline,
Thanks for that link to the Claire Belinski post. Important facts to be reminded of.
They started talking about a “Patriot Act é la frané§aise”, although nobody can tell what is that supposed to include, whether it would be at all effective against this sort of enemy from within, and at what cost.
parker Says:
“It all boils down to a willful refusal to embrace the truth that Western Civilization is the only bright light in the course of human history and must not be diluted but instead defended.”
Michel Foucault was a leading light in the attack on Western Civilization. Besides his philosophical books (which ought primarily be viewed as careerist moves to leap-frog Sartre) it’s interesting that he wrote a lot of journalism glorifying Ayatollah Khomeini in the ’70s before the Iranian Revolution which toppled the Shah in 1979.
Much of this hasn’t been translated yet because in retrospect it looks so stupid — but then, given his proclivity for S&M, maybe he just had an out and out mad crush on Khomeini, who was one very charismatic dungeonmaster. If Foucault foresaw any of what would happen to women in Iran it may be safe he didn’t give one flying fuck.
The French that I knew through my wife sought out and took great pleasure in violent indignation at the evils of America — way out of proportion to anything these alleged sins had to do with their actual petit supine lives.
I would also throw in that it’s worth checking out the novels of Michel Houellebecq and the highly accessible philosophy of Luc Ferry. The latter’s MAN MADE GOD tells a lot about our current situation under the reign of secular humanism. In the case of Houellebecq, one might start with THE ELEMENTARY PARTICLES. Don’t forget that an article about his new novel, SUBMISSION, which imagines France a few years in the future, with an Islamic president, was on the cover of the last issue of Charlie Hebdo. His novels are painfully, painfully funny. Don’t just look at reviews.
We have many friends in France, older people who remember the nzi occupation as young children, and all from areas outside Paris. Places like La Rochelle, the countryside around Agen, and the foothills of the Pyrenees. They, for as long as we have known them, have felt estranged from the supposedly elite of French intellectual class that they hold in contempt. There are many in France, as in the USA, who realize they have been marginalized and have no representatives in the national government, much like here at home.
It ain’t over until its over. Do not sell short these people in France, the rest of Europe, or in the new world. History can turn on the drop of a euro that hits the ground as a franc
Great piece by former senator Joe Lieberman in the WSJ — excerpt:
Wow, Joe Lieberman is spot on. This is the way a world class leader thinks and talks.
I read that surveillance of the known islamic radicals who attacked Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish deli was dropped 6 months ago. This decision is all on Francois Hollande and his administration.
Algeria was reported to have warned France about an impending attack involving these very men the very day before it happened.
We are living in dark times, at the mercy of our effete and traitorous leaders and the institutions that they have gutted.
Some time ago, I was going around with some history teachers on the question of why, if the accepted ratio of one-third of the American colonists were for independence, one-third loyalists, and one-third just kept their heads down, so many more showed up for independence.
There were a bunch of dumb answers from the teachers; the loyalists were older (???), the loyalists were high church (???), and so forth.
Finally, they figured it out. I must be a (spit) patriot. That’s why I’m asking questions they can’t answer.
Point is, to be in with the Right Sort of People, you have be oppose the national values such as patriotism and asking history teachers tough questions.
“But, how about slavery?” Slavery is bad but the Right Sort of People don’t mind, say, the Holodomor. What are you, better dead than red?
It is hard to estimate how many people who barely got through a general studies degree think themselves intellectual giants because the oppose the values of democratic societies. But it’s a hell of a lot.
AFAICT, whatever the rednecks like, the RSP find it necessary to oppose.
They can be led around by the left using a worn-out kite string. No problem at all.
The Chattering Classes and the RSP are one thing.
But. Three towns in Holland have renamed streets after my Dad’s division (Timberwolfstraat). A relative traveled to Carentan to see where an uncle was killed. Turns out a lot of other guys were killed there as well, around the first week in June, 1944. The locals have a monument and each spring, the school kids come out and they mayor reads off the names of the dead Americans. After each, the kids reply “mort pour la France”. And the town has a road named after the 101st Airborne Division.
Sure, there was an excess of enthusiasm–the RSP may insist–in the joy of liberation but…the streets haven’t been renamed by the locals.
There are reports that a large number of Europeans favor the death penalty, but the ‘crats and the RSP are going to see it doesn’t happen. Eventually, somebody or something is going to shift the ‘crats and the RSP.
The point is, trying to defend the country here, or there, is going to get you shamed and scorned–see Jon Stewart–or prosecuted for “hate speech” of a kind which, if it were directed at, say, Jews by Muslims would be ignored.
As Wretchard says, though, finding out there’s a preference cascade–finding out almost everybody thinks as you do despite the efforts of the ‘crats and the RSP–is The End for a regime like that.
Thanks for your post Richard.
http://i.imgur.com/ePwowre.jpg
Nice post Richard. My dad was also a member of the 104th (Timberwolf) infantry division. Did not know about the streets named after them in Holland.
JimBob.
Surprised you’re not named Terry Allen. My Dad’s first platoon sergeant lost an arm in Holland and was home in time to name his first son. My mom didn’t agree and he wasn’t home.
There’s a name on the Ionia, MI VN memorial, Terry Allen Towne.
You wonder.
See Timberwolf Tracks on Amazon. Worth it.
And another town named a street Generaal Allen weg.
Before my Dad passed, we were able to google earth travel those streets. He was pleased.
The 104th wrote the book on night fighting. When I got to Benning, they started out our block on night fighting with a long lessons-learned from the 104th. During a break I told the instructor I didn’t need to be sold;, I’d learned it at my father’s knee. “There’s always one,” he said.
My father was Richard Aubrey H Co 2/415.
Richard, you inspired me to dig out dad’s 104th memorabilia which consists of a mimeographed letter from Terry Allen addressed “To All Timberwolves” describing the six months of combat they had just been through and a division map that located their major operations.
My father was Donald Skelding C Co 2/414.
Interesting that you mention Ionia MI. His side of the family is from that general area of the state and one of my uncles lived there for many years.
JimBob
My father had “Timberwolf Tracks” around as long as I can remember.
It’s a division history consisting of official reports, correspondents’ columns and personal recollections. Puts you right there. There are technical tables in the back such as organization and equipment, names of the dead, etc.
Still available at Amazon, as is the biography of Terry Allen (Terrible Terry Allen)–reviewed by me–who is the only two-star divisional commander ever biographied, as far as I know. The Marines may have one or two, but the jarheads are big on publicity.
You know the TO&E of the old Marine rifle squad included two guys to carry the extra flashbulbs?
Ionia is a nice town. I used to pass through there frequently, although a teacher I know said that some of the local prisoners’ families relocate there and something about apples and trees.
When we were in France, back in 1971, my wife and I toured Normandy and Brittany. There was quite a difference between the attitudes of people there and the Parisians about Americans.
Of course, my dad told me that the Parisians that he met complained about how the German soldiers behaved “more correctly” than the American GIs.