The French (Jihad) Connection

[PoliticalChic]

"The Perfect Storm"...meaning just the right combination of events, conditions, attitudes to bring a particular conclusion.

Perhaps that should be 'just the wrong combination...." ...if it is criminality and fanaticism.

Dalrymple writes of one jihadist....but this is a cautionary tale that suggests a need for the careful consideration of what can or should be done.




"Jihad is a concept perfectly suited to giving psychopaths the idea that their viciousness serves an ideal other than their own gratification."





1. "....Mehdi Nemmouche ... under lock and key awaiting extradition to Belgium. Nemmouche was on his way to his father’s native Algeria when French customs agents in Marseille searched the bus on which he had traveled from Amsterdam. They were looking for drugs.

2. .... in Nemmouche’s possession was a Kalashnikov rifle, a revolver, lots of ammunition, a gas mask, a short video of the weapons in his possession accompanied by a verbal commentary (probably in his voice) on the recent murder of four Jews at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, clothing similar to that worn by the perpetrator of that attack, .... the prosecuting authorities allowed themselves to say that the presumptive evidence against Nemmouche was very strong.

3. Nemmouche’s story ...brings to mind that of Mohamed Merah, another young man of Algerian parentage, who in 2012 shot dead three French paratroopers and four other people—three children and a teacher—at a Jewish school in Toulouse,...




4. At his own request, he went to live with his grandmother when he was 17.... tried but failed to become an electrician. Instead, he turned to crime and was convicted seven times for such offenses as driving without a license, auto theft, and robbery. His last sentence, from 2007–12, was for another violent robbery, among other crimes.Never having been religious, Nemmouche was converted to jihadi Islam in prison.

5. ... the authorities at Frankfurt airport, suspicious of the travels recorded in his passport, alerted their French counterparts. However, he again disappeared until, quite by chance, the customs officers found him in Marseille. ... Jihad is a concept perfectly suited to giving psychopaths the idea that their viciousness serves an ideal other than their own gratification.




6. The French president, François Hollande, with his talent for making himself look ridiculous or contemptible in the eyes of his compatriots, tried to reassure the population that the security situation was under control and that there was nothing to worry about. Nemmouche, he said, had been apprehended as soon as he set foot in France—overlooking the fact that it was quite by chance that he was apprehended, ...




7. Not long ago, the European Court of Human Rights displayed its unutterable incompetence and stupidity by ruling that imprisonment in perpetuity is against fundamental human rights.

The court thinks that a crime such as Nemmouche’s is forgivable, and moreover, that it is his human right to be given a chance of rehabilitation, presumably by some kind of moral physiotherapy."
The French (Jihad) Connection by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal 19 June 2014

 

[PoliticalChic]

1. After decades of lavish social spending, much of the Continent was teetering on the brink of fiscal and monetary disaster. Its debt was soaring, its treasuries were empty, and its pampered citizenry was aging and disillusioned. Austerity was the order of the day. In the current climate, no cow was considered too sacred; health care, university tuition, support for the arts, and even pension benefits were all undergoing drastic cuts.

2. Another article of faith lay in tatters that November—the belief that Europe could absorb an endless tide of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies while preserving its culture and basic way of life. What had started as a temporary program to relieve a postwar labor shortage had now permanently altered the face of an entire continent. Restive Muslim suburbs ringed nearly every city, and several countries appeared demographically fated to Muslim majorities before the end of the century. No one in a position of power had bothered to consult the native population of Europe before throwing open the doors, and now, after years of relative passivity, the natives were beginning to push back. Denmark had imposed draconian restrictions on immigrant marriages. France had banned the wearing of the full facial veil in public. And the Swiss, who barely tolerated one another, had decided they wanted to keep their tidy little cities and towns free of unsightly minarets. The leaders of Britain and Germany had declared multiculturalism, the virtual religion of post-Christian Europe, a dead letter. No longer would the majority bend to the will of the minority, they declared. Nor would it turn a blind eye to the extremism that flourished within its midst


3. On that morning in November, he left his apartment in darkness to purify himself at a mosque built with Saudi money and staffed by a Saudi-trained imam who spoke no French. ... It was never clearly established whether the act was preceded by the traditional scream of “Allahu Akbar.” Several survivors claimed to have heard it; several others swore the bomber detonated his device in silence. As for the sound of the explosion itself, those closest had no memory of it at all, for their eardrums were too badly damaged. To a person, all recalled seeing a blinding white flash of light. It was the light of death, said one. The light one sees at the moment he confronts God for the first time.


4. The bomb itself was a marvel of design and construction. It was not the kind of device built from Internet manuals or the how-to pamphlets floating around the Salafist mosques of Europe. It had been perfected under battle conditions in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Packed with nails soaked in rat poison—a practice borrowed from the suicide bombers of Hamas—it carved through the crowd like a circular saw. So powerful was the explosion that the Louvre Pyramid, located a mile and a half to the east, shivered with the blast wave. Those closest to the bomber were blown to pieces, sheared in half, or decapitated, the preferred punishment for unbelievers. Even at forty paces, limbs were lost. At the farthest edge of the kill zone, the dead appeared pristine. Spared outward trauma, they had been killed by the shock wave, which ravaged their internal organs like a tsunami. Providence had granted them the tender mercy of bleeding to death in private.


5. The first gendarmes to arrive were instantly sickened by what they saw. Extremities littered the paving stones, along with shoes, smashed wristwatches frozen at 11:46, and mobile phones that rang unanswered. In one final insult, the murderer’s remains were scattered among his victims—everything but the head, which came to rest on a delivery truck more than a hundred feet away, the bomber’s expression oddly serene.
From the novel "Portrait of a Spy," by Daniel Silva
Excerpt | Daniel Silva