Category: France

ISIS Claims Credit for Paris Slaughter; Death Toll 127 in Islamic Terror Attack

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ISIS released a video overnight claiming responsibility for the violence that brought bloodshed to the streets of Paris. The death toll in Friday’s terrorist attack is now reported at 127; earlier reports had said more than 150 were killed. The New York Post reports:

Islamic State claimed responsibility on Saturday for attacks that killed 127 people in Paris, saying it sent fighters strapped with suicide bombing belts and carrying machine guns to various locations in the heart of the capital. . . .
Islamic State earlier on Saturday distributed an undated video threatening to attack France if bombings of its fighters continued.
The group’s foreign media arm, Al-Hayat Media Centre, made threats through several militants who called on French Muslims to carry out attacks.
“As long as you keep bombing you will not live in peace. You will even fear traveling to the market,” said one of the militants, identified as Abu Maryam the Frenchman. . . .
The militants, who appeared to be French citizens, sat cross-legged in a group wearing fatigues and holding weapons in what appeared to be a wooded area.
The video showed the militants burning passports.
“Indeed you have been ordered to fight the infidel wherever you find him – what are you waiting for? There are weapons and cars available and targets ready to be hit,” said Abu Maryam.
Another militant, identified as Abu Salman the Frenchman, said: “Even poison is available, so poison the water and food of at least one of the enemies of Allah.”
“Terrorize them and do not allow them to sleep due to fear and horror,” he added.

UPDATE: CNN reports:

A Syrian passport was found near the body of an attacker outside the Stade de France, according to a police source, CNN affiliate France 2 said. Multiple local media are reporting the same.
Also on Saturday, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the state of emergency in France could mean restrictions on people’s movements, among other measures. Border controls were tightened as of Friday, and the gendarmerie paramilitary police are on heightened alert, he said. . . .
[An ISIS statement] said eight militants wearing explosive belts and armed with machine guns attacked precisely selected areas in the French capital.
In addition to the people killed, 180 others were injured, according to the Paris Police Prefecture. More than half of them are in critical condition. . . .
In the chaotic aftermath of the attacks, there was no clarity on the number of casualties.
Earlier, the Interior Ministry put the death toll at 153 people Friday, but a day later, the Paris police lowered it to 128 people. . . .
Most of the deaths were inside the Bataclan concert hall, where a witness said gunmen stormed in, firing rifles and shouting, “Allah akbar.” At least 80 people died in the attack there.

UPDATE II: The New York Times reports:

President François Hollande, addressing the nation from the Élysée Palace, said the attacks on Paris were an “act of war” and blamed the Islamic State.
“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” Mr. Hollande said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.
“It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish,” he added.
“It is an act of absolute barbarity,” he said. The toll, he said, was “at this time 127 dead and many wounded.”
He said that he had proclaimed three days of national mourning and that all necessary measures would be taken to protect French citizens and territory. “The army and the interior security forces are mobilized at the highest level of their possibilities,” he said. . . .
“France, because it was foully, disgracefully and violently attacked, will be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh,” he said. France, he said, will act within the law but with “all the necessary means, and on all terrains, inside and outside, in coordination with our allies, who are they themselves targeted by this terrorist threat.”

UPDATE III: Donald Douglas at American Power:

Angela Merkel’s Future in Doubt as She Faces Coup
After Her Own Party Criticises Asylum Policies

There can be no doubt that an open-borders policy toward “refugees,” which Merkel and some other European leaders had advocated, will become a political liability after the Paris attacks.

UPDATE IV: Nine hours before the terrorists struck in Paris, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, President Obama claimed ISIS has been “contained” and denied that the Islamic group was “gaining strength.”

UPDATE V:

PARIS ATTACK: Terrorist ‘Refugee’ Had
Syrian Passport; Death Toll Now 129

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PARIS JIHAD: Major Terrorist Attack UPDATE: French President Declares Emergency, Says ‘Several Dozen Dead’

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UPDATE 9:50 p.m. ET: Islamic terrorists struck the heart of France, murdering scores of civilians Friday in a bloody night of carefully coordinated violence. More than 150 people were reported killed, most of them at the Bataclan arts center where Muslim gunmen opened fired during a rock concert, then began systematically executing young people who could not escape. By the time police stormed the hall and ended the slaughter, 112 had been killed at the concert venue, according to the French interior ministry. Elsewhere, CNN reported, at least one suicide bomber struck the Stade de France, where a soccer game between France and Germany was being played.

UPDATE:

ISIS Claims Credit for Paris Slaughter;
Death Toll 127 in Islamic Terror Attack

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(5:35 p.m. ET) There has been a major Islamic terrorist attack tonight in Paris. An explosion was reported at a Germany-France soccer game, and gunmen have taken hostages in a concert hall.

The death toll is already estimated at 35-40.

UPDATE 5:52 p.m. ET: CNN reports:

— At least 60 people have died in the attacks, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported.
— Counterterrorism officials around the United States have convened secure conference calls to try to gather information and to assess whether there is any indication of threats in the U.S, according to two U.S. counterterrorism officials. There is nothing to indicate any threat to U.S. cities so far. Immediate suspicion for the events in Paris falls to so-called returnees — people who have traveled to Syria and Iraq and have returned, the officials said.
— At least six shootings took place in Paris and three explosions took place at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis late Friday, CNN affiliate BFMTV said. Two or three gunmen entered the Bataclan concert hall while opening fire on law enforcement, BFMTV reported. A source earlier told CNN there were six to eight hostage takers, citing a person they were talking to inside the venue.
— CNN’s Jim Bittermann, who is based in Paris, reports a producer who is at the Bataclan tells him that police are firing at a rooftop position near the venue.
— President Francois Hollande was evacuated at halftime of the France-Germany soccer match.
— Hollande, Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve are holding a crisis meeting at the Interior Ministry to address the attacks in Paris and the explosions in Saint-Denis, according to BFMTV.
— Paris police tell CNN there were three attacks. Attackers reportedly used AK-47 automatic weapons. There were one or two explosions at the Stade de France.

UPDATE 5:59 p.m. ET: In a brief statement at the White House, President Obama said, “France is our oldest ally,” and “Paris itself represents the timeless values of human progress.” In Paris, meanwhile, President Hollande declared a state of emergency, announcing that the French military was being deployed and that France is closing its borders.

UPDATE 6:14 p.m. ET: Associated Press:

Hollande, in a televised address to his nation, said the nation would stand firm and united against the attackers.
He said security forces are assaulting one of the sites hit by Friday’s attacks, without elaborating.
“It’s a horror,” he said.

UPDATE 6:25 p.m. ET: BBC reports:

France has declared a national state of emergency and has closed its borders after at least 40 people were killed in multiple shootings in Paris.
At least 15 people have been killed near the Bataclan arts centre, where up to 60 people are reportedly being held hostage, French media say.
Three people were killed in an attack at the Stade de France, with some reports suggesting a suicide blast.
Paris authorities have asked people to stay indoors.
Military personnel are being deployed across Paris.

(Via Memeorandum.) There are reports that gunmen at the concert hall are executing hostages one by one. Meanwhile, it has just been reported that five explosions were heard near the concert hall.

UPDATE 6:45 p.m. ET: Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch:

Islamic jihadis have long had France in their crosshairs. The Islamic State last year urged jihad attacks against the “spiteful and filthy French.” These attacks took place near the site of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. That massacre was an attempt to force the West to adopt Sharia blasphemy restrictions; there will be more of that.
Indeed, there will be much, much more of this bloodshed in the coming months and years. Meanwhile, watch for an avalanche of “This has nothing to do with Islam” statements from Western leaders and the mainstream media.

It is reported that French police are currently assaulting the Bataclan concert hall where gunmen were killing hostages.

UPDATE 6:56 p.m. ET: French police have just said their assault on the Bataclan concert hall has ended successfully. Police stormed the hall, killing two gunmen. The number of innocents killed and wounded remains unknown.

UPDATE 7:12 p.m. ET: New York Times:

French television and news services quoted the police as saying at least 60 people had been killed and many dozens wounded in apparently coordinated attacks, eclipsing the deaths and mayhem that roiled Paris in the Charlie Hebdo massacre and related assaults around the French capital less than a year ago.
One of the explosions, which French news services said may have been a suicide bombing, struck near the country’s main sports stadium where Germany and France were playing a soccer match, forcing a hasty evacuation of President François Hollande. As the scope of the assaults quickly became clear, he convened an emergency cabinet meeting and announced that France was closing its borders.
“As I speak, terrorist attacks of an unprecedented scale are taking place in the Paris region,” he said in a nationally televised address. “There are several dozen dead, lots more wounded, it’s horrific.”

UPDATE 7:48 p.m. ET: Fox News is citing reports that as many as 100 were killed inside the Bataclan concert hall. The total number of deaths from these attacks in Paris may exceed 140.

UPDATE 8:30 p.m. ET: The headline at Fox News:

Terrorists slaughter at least
118 in Paris music hall,
40 others in separate attacks





 

Yes, But It’s France

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Ace of Spades:

The French (socialist) government is peddling a study claiming one hundred effing percent of French women are harassed on public transportation.
One hundred percent! Every single female!
Now that’s how you do fake statistics, my friends: Go big or go home.

I’m not sure the numbers are fake. The French are a nation of degenerate swine. They are the nation that gave the world Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Monique Wittig. Do French men behave like animals on public transportation? Do they treat all women like whores? Sure. It’s part of French culture. You know, like wine, socialism, defeat, surrender, hating Jews and collaborating with Nazis.

France: An entire nation that’s worse than Massachusetts.

 

The New Exodus

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The four Jews killed in an attack on a kosher market in Paris will be buried in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced and, despite absurd leftist hysteria about “Islamophobia,” we need not doubt who is targeted by the real climate of hate in France:

A survey of French Muslims in 2014 found a community seething with anti-Semitism. Sixty-seven percent said “yes” when asked whether Jews had too much power over France’s economy. Sixty-one percent believed Jews had too much power in France’s media.

Jamie Kirchick recalls his trip to Paris last year:

The rabbi happened to be walking out of the synagogue with his wife. After dispensing with the facts of my Jewish background and American citizenship, I promptly asked, “What’s the situation?” Our shared patrimony obviated any need for further elaboration; as a European Jew addressing an American one, he knew exactly at what I was aiming. “There is no future for Jews in France,” he said.
If the Rabbi is right, and I fear he is, then it means that there is no future for Jews in Europe. For France is home to the continent’s largest Jewish community, numbered at over half a million. But it is declining rapidly. Emigration to Israel from France doubled in 2014 from 3,400 to 7,000 people. According to Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption, the number of Jews leaving Western Europe for the Jewish State increased 88 percent last year.

The Jew-haters are winning, in France as everywhere else, because the West’s intellectual elite are dishonest, decadent and cowardly.

(Hat-tip: Allahpundit at Hot Air.)

 

France and Terror

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Reacting to Ross Douthat’s New York Times column about the plight of France, I deployed my usual caustic sarcasm:

If the fate of the West is in any way dependent on the French, then our civilization is doomed beyond all hope of redemption.

This could create the impression of thoughtlessness, and I don’t wish to leave such an impression. Any wise person who has studied modern history knows that the French Revolution set loose upon the world a destructive spirit — presenting us alternately with the threat of anarchy and tyranny — that has since seldom permitted us to enjoy prosperity in peace. What is remarkable is the extent to which French intellectuals have caused this endless tide of human misery.

“We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.”
— Edmund Burke, 1790

Burke’s insight into the fundamental error of the French Revolution — its inspiration by such philosophes as Rousseau and Voltaire — could be extended to every “progressive” movement ever since.

The modern Cult of Progress, the characteristic “presumption” of the intelligentsia in their belief in their own superiority, has repeatedly afflicted humanity with enthusiastic schemes for political, social and economic change. Always these innovations require us first to destroy “hitherto existing society” (to quote the Communist Manifesto), and to entrust our future to the control of elites. Always the result is the same. From the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France to the Bolshevik Terror in revolutionary Russia, from Kristallnacht in Germany to the “Great Leap Forward” in China to the “Killing Fields” in Cambodia, the path of “progress” is a trail painted in blood, littered with the corpses of those murdered or starved to death for the sake of political theories.

Opponents and critics of these deadly theories — conservatives, as we have generally been called — are mocked and demonized by the intelligentsia, who lend their prestige to popularizing bad ideas, particularly inspiring naïve idealistic youth to imagine that they have found the formula for Progress and Reform that will lead them to that promised utopia, Equality. The young have no direct knowledge of the intelligentsia’s numerous previous failures, and what the young are taught in school about history does little or nothing to warn them against the dangers of such theoretical schemes.

For many decades now, America’s schools, colleges and universities have been less concerned about teaching facts than about teaching attitudes. The elites in academia and the bureaucratic mediocrities who operate the K-12 school system don’t teach young people that Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Hitler’s Nazis were both ideological heirs of the French Revolution. Indeed, it’s rare nowadays to meet anyone under 50 who knows a damned thing about the French Revolution. The history of the Soviet Union is largely neglected in our schools, while the history of Nazi Germany becomes a caricature — Hate is Bad Thing, in case you didn’t know — and the true lessons of that era are never taught. There was an excellent little book by A.L. Rowse, Appeasement, which should be required reading in our universities, but which is instead out of print, so that unless you search it out on Amazon you’ll never understand why Neville Chamberlain thought he could purchase “peace for our time” at Munich. Likewise, students must find for themselves William Shirer’s classic history of Hitler’s Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, because their teachers will never assign it.

We are confronted with the spectacle of an entire generation of young people who are at once “educated” (possessing college diplomas) and yet also vastly ignorant. For the past 20 years, our youth have been led to believe that as long as they know how to look up something on the Internet (if they were honest, they might footnote everything in their assigned writings to Wikipedia) then there is never any need to know anything. One sometimes finds young feminists blabbering on about this or that example of patriarchal oppression in such a way as to make it evident that they haven’t read any more feminist theory that could be found in an introductory Women’s Studies textbook. Likewise, we have become accustomed to encounter young progressives lecturing us on economics when it is plainly evident they know almost nothing about the subject. (Learn something: Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.)

As dismaying as is this vast ignorance among young liberals, many conservatives are not much better and, in some cases, much worse. Because it has become nearly impossible for any conservative to gain employment in academia — university faculty are nowadays as ideologically “diverse” as Stalin’s Politburo — there is no professional incentive for any conservative to study history in depth.

Sometimes it seems conservatives are trapped in current events, always arguing about whatever’s at the top of the Drudge Report, never bothering to trace our problems back to their historical roots which, as I say, can be found in the French Revolution.

From the day the mob stormed the Bastille in July 1789, events in France proceeded with a certain relentless logic. In October 1789, the revolutionaries exploited an economic crisis to incite the mob to march on Versailles. The economic policy of the revolutionaries, as Burke observed, could be summarized in a single word: “Assignats!”

Whatever the problems of the ancien regime, the revolutionary regime unleashed upon the citizenry of France new problems that became steadily worse, as Burke had presciently foreseen. Establishing a pattern for all such future regimes, revolutionary propagandists insisted that all problems of the regime could be blamed on the regime’s enemies — royalists and other counterrevolutionary elements of society, including Catholic clergy, to say nothing of hostile foreigners. More than 200 priests were killed during the September Massacres of 1792, the King and Queen were executed in January 1793, the Committee of Public Safety was established in April, Marat was assassinated in July and in September 1793 began the Terror. About 40,000 people were executed in a span of 10 months. In one of the last atrocities of the Terror, 16 Carmelite nuns were sent to the guillotine in Compiègne.

The acknowledged leader of the Terror regime, Robespierre, had been foremost among those who demanded the execution of the King: “Louis must die so that the nation may live.” Finally overthrown in July 1794, Robespierre himself was executed by the guillotine, to which his revolutionary fanaticism had sent so many others.

Does it not strike anyone as ironic that the French Republic, whose founding gave birth to the idea of revolutionary terror, should today be threatened by another species of terror? A nation that was baptized in blood for the sake of radical theories and slogans — “Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!” — now encounters fanatics whose ideas are less theoretical but whose slogan is slightly more frightening: “Allahu akbar!”

Charlotte Corday could not be reached for comment.




 

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FRANCE RALLIES; SUSPECT BOUMEDIENE FLEES TO SYRIA

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Hundreds of thousands are rallying today in the streets of Paris in the wake of Wednesday’s Charlie Hebdo massacre:

Dignitaries and world leaders are expected to join hundreds of thousands of people in France on Sunday in what government officials are calling a “unity rally” in defiance of a terrorism spree that claimed 17 lives.
French officials announced “exceptional measures” to protect not only the throngs expected to gather near the Place de la Republique in central Paris, but also a veritable who’s who of foreign leaders that will test security forces of a nation rocked by days of terrorist violence. . . .
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has outlined extraordinary security measures to protect VIPs such as Britain’s David Cameron, Germany’s Angela Merkel and Spain’s Mariano Rajoy.
Other dignitaries expected to stand with French President François Hollande are Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Queen Rania, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Extremely heavy security measures are in place in Paris:

French law enforcement officers have been told to erase their social media presence and to carry their weapons at all times because terror sleeper cells have been activated over the last 24 hours in the country, a French police source who attended a briefing Saturday told CNN terror analyst Samuel Laurent.
Amedy Coulibaly, a suspect killed Friday during a deadly kosher market hostage siege, had made several phone calls about targeting police officers in France, according to the source.

Meanwhile, we learn Coulibably’s wife Hayat Boumediene — who had been suspected as an accomplice — had left Paris before her husband and Kouachi brothers made their attacks:

According to CNN, she left France on either January 1st of 2nd — days before the massacre at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Sources close to French security say she crossed the border into Spain and flown from Madrid to Istanbul, a common stopover for many potential jihadis, before attempting to cross the border into Syria by foot.

Interesting coincidence (which may not be a coincidence): A man named Lakhdar Boumediene was one of the so-called “Algerian Six” who were taken captive by U.S. forces in Bosnia in January 2002 after the 9/11 attacks and held at Guantanamo Bay. He was the lead plaintiff in the Boumediene v. Bush case. After his release from Guantanamo Bay in 2009, Lakhdar Boumediene lived in France.\

I’m not sure how common a surname “Boumediene” is among Algerians, but the coincidence of terror suspect Hayat Boumediene sharing a surname with a former terror suspect is quite suggestive.

UPDATE: Islamic terror is everywhere:

A German tabloid that reprinted cartoons from the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo lampooning the Prophet Mohammed was targeted in firebombing Sunday, police said.
With security services on high alert after a killing spree in Paris by Islamic extremists, police in the northern German port city of Hamburg said no one was injured in the blaze at the headquarters of the regional daily Hamburger Morgenpost, which caused only slight damage.
“Rocks and then a burning object were thrown through the window,” a police spokesman told AFP.

UPDATE II: Ross Douthat on French decadence:

The France that endured a vicious terrorist attack last week is a France that has suffered, for decades and centuries, from anxieties about its own decline. And for good reason: Since the 18th century, when it bestrode Europe and seemed poised to dominate the globe, France has seen its relative power diminish, suffering defeats and humiliations at the hands of rival forces, from Britain’s navies to Germany’s jackboots to the invading might of American popular culture.
Now these longstanding anxieties have been thrown into relief by the murderous attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, an attack linked to all the various specters haunting contemporary France: fears of creeping Islamification and rising anti-Semitism, fears of the far right’s growing power and anti-Muslim backlash — and all of it bound up in a larger sense, amid economic stagnation, of betrayal at the hands of the Continent’s elite.
But notwithstanding these declinist fears, France isn’t actually irrelevant or spent. Instead, it’s arguably becoming more important, more central to the fate of Europe and the West.

If the fate of the West is in any way dependent on the French, then our civilization is doomed beyond all hope of redemption.




 

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The Hunt for Hayat Boumeddiene

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“The Charlie magazine team deserved what they got. Many warnings have been given before, but they were persistent. They had the freedom to use cartoons in their magazine, and we have the freedom to use bullets from our magazines. . . . The lions of Jihad have stood. The followers of Muhammad — peace be upon him — have never forgotten. As Sheikh Anwar Rahimahullah put it: The Dust Will Never Settle Down. Do not look for links or affiliation with Jihadi fronts. It is enough they are Muslims. They are Mujahideen. This is the Jihad of the Ummah.”
— Al-Qaeda message reported by the Intercept

Authorities in France continued searching Saturday for Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, the wife of Islamic terrorist Amedy Coulibaly, who was killed by police Friday in Paris. Coulibaly killed four people and took more than a dozen hostages at a kosher market in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood, one of the city’s main Jewish communities. Coulibaly was an accomplice of brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, Muslim terrorists who killed a dozen people in the Charlie Hebdo massacre Wednesday.

A report (translation added) from the French magazine Le Point:

Amedy Coulibaly et Hayat Boumediene ont été vus dans Paris ensemble jeudi dans la soirée, la veille de la prise d’otages, a-t-on appris samedi de source proche de l’enquête.

(Amedy Coulibaly and Hayat Boumediene were seen in Paris together Thursday night, the eve of the hostage-taking, a source close to the investigation said Saturday. . . .)

Hayat Boumediene, est recherchée dans l’enquête sur la fusillade mortelle de jeudi matin à Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine), mais les enquêteurs n’excluent pas qu’elle ait pu “avoir un rôle logistique” dans la fusillade et la prise d’otages près de la Porte de Vincennes, selon cette source.
“Elle ne figure pas parmi les personnes décédées ou blessées lors de la prise d’otages et de l’assaut”, a expliqué une source proche du dossier.

(Hayat Boumediene is sought in the investigation into the fatal shooting [of police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe] Thursday morning in Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine), but investigators do not exclude that she could “have a logistical role” in [Coulibaly’s] shooting and hostage taking near the Porte de Vincennes, the source said. “She is not among the dead or injured during the hostage-taking and assault,” explained a source close to the case. . . .)

Des liens “constants et soutenus” existaient au travers de leurs compagnes entre Chérif Kouachi, l’un des auteurs de l’attaque de Charlie Hebdo, et Amedy Coulibaly, le preneur d’otages de Paris, a indiqué vendredi soir le procureur de Paris François Molins. . . .
L’épouse de Chérif Kouachi, Izzana Hamyd, est depuis mercredi en garde à vue. François Molins a révélé vendredi soir que l’examen de la téléphonie des suspects avait permis de déterminer que Mme Hamyd avait “passé plus de 500 appels sur l’année 2014 avec la compagne de Coulibaly”. Un chiffre qui est selon le haut magistrat “de nature à établir des liens constants et soutenus entre les deux couples”.

(There were “constant and sustained” links through their wives between Cherif Kouachi, one of the authors of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and Amedy Coulibaly, the Paris hostage-taker, the prosecutor of Paris François Molins said Friday. . . . The wife of Cherif Kouachi, Izzana Hamyd, has been in custody since Wednesday. François Molins said Friday evening that a review of the suspects’ telephone records had determined that Ms. Hamyd had “spent more than 500 calls over the year 2014, with the wife of Coulibaly.” [The large number of phone calls] “establish consistent and sustained ties between the two couples.”)

Relatively little is known about Hayat Boumeddiene, who apparently was recruited to radical jihad by her husband:

Boumeddiene is believed to be of Algerian descent but changed her name to make it appear more French and reportedly worked as a cashier before being radicalised.
She and Coulibaly are believed to have married in a religious ceremony in 2009, which is not recognised in French law.
The 26-year-old reportedly lived in his apartment while he was in prison for his part in a plot to help Paris metro bomber Smain Ait Ali Belkacem escape.
During that time, he is believed to have met Cherif Kouachi. Both men and possibly Boumeddiene were avid followers of extremist Djamel Beghal. . . .
Beghal, a convicted terrorist who was once based at London’s Finsbury Park mosque, was jailed for plotting to bomb the American embassy in Paris and mentored Coulibaly and Cherif Kouachi, according to Le Monde. . . .
Boumeddiene was previously interviewed by French anti-terror police in 2010, it was reported, but it was unclear whether any action was taken against her.
During interrogation, she reportedly said she was inspired by her boyfriend and radicals she lived with to “read a lot of books on religion”.
“When I saw the massacre of the innocents in Palestine, in Iraq, in Chechnya, in Afghanistan or anywhere the Americans sent their bombers, all that . . . well, who are the terrorists?” she said, according to the Daily Mail.

You can read the Daily Mail report here. Boumeddiene’s views on U.S. policy were basically the same as any MSNBC viewer or Daily Kos contributor during the “Bush lied, people died” era. There was no fundamental disagreement between her and Keith Olbermann. The liberal Democrats who hate America and the foreign enemies who hate America only quarrel over why America is wrong, bad and evil. In the famous words of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, they always blame America first.




 

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TERROR IN FRANCE: POLICE KILL MUSLIM FANATICS IN STANDOFFS; UPDATE: HUNT FOR FEMALE TERRORIST BOUMEDDIENE

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Hayat Boumeddiene (left) and Amedy Coulibaly (right)

Events in and around Paris unfolded so rapidly Friday that news reports were still confused and tentative as night fell in France:

French police have released the names and pictures of two suspects wanted in connection with the killing of policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe in Montrouge and an ongoing hostage siege at a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb.
The suspects, 32-year-old Amedy Coulibaly and 26-year-old Hayat Boumeddiene, are described as “armed and dangerous” and are being hunted by police for the killing of the policewoman.
Coulibaly is also believed to be behind the shootout and siege at a Jewish supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, in which two people have reportedly died and at least five people are being held hostage, including women and children.

Culibaly was reportedly killed by police, and the death toll of hostages at the kosher market is now reported at three. Boumeddiene is said to be at large. Coulibaly was reportedly an accomplice of the two brothers who killed 12 people in the Wednesday attack. Both of them were killed by police after a hostage standoff Friday:

The French police on Friday killed the two brothers suspected of massacring 12 people at a Paris newspaper on Wednesday and freed a hostage they had been holding unharmed, the authorities said. The police also killed another hostage-taker, described as an associate of the brothers, in a separate assault on a kosher supermarket in Paris.
Three hostages were killed and five injured at the market, although it was not immediately clear how many of those may have been shot in the final assault. Five hostages were reported to have been freed unharmed, a senior French police official said.
The assault against the two brothers, suspects in the attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, began shortly after 5 p.m. Explosions and gunfire were heard at a printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goële, outside of Paris, where the gunmen were holding a single hostage.

UPDATE: The suspect who remains at large:

The whereabouts of Hayat Boumedienne are unknown after police named her as an “armed and dangerous” suspect.
The 26-year-old is believed to have been in a relationship with Coulibaly since 2010 and reportedly lived in his apartment while he was in prison for his part in a plot to spring Paris metro bomber Smain Ait Ali Belkacem from prison.
According to Le Monde, Boumeddienne said they practised firing crossbows together in the countryside while visiting Islamic radical Djamel Beghal. . . .
Boumeddienne was previously interviewed by French anti-terror police in 2010, it was reported, but it was unclear whether any action was taken against her.

UPDATE: More information emerges:

Boumeddiene is linked to the Kouachis through Couliably, whom police believe became radicalized after meeting one of the brothers around 2005 while he was jailed for robbery.
Coulibaly was later arrested in 2010 in connection to plans to free a terrorist serving a life sentence for the Paris metro attack in 1995 and served a four-year prison sentence. After being released in 2014, he moved in with Boumeddine.
In 2010, during a visit to Djamel Beghal, a convicted al Qaeda terrorist under house arrest in southern France, Boumeddiene and Couliably took a series of photos together. When Boumeddiene was asked about the trip by police she claimed they were there for “crossbow practice.”

This is astonishing. All of these Muslim terrorists — Boumeddiene, Couliably and the Kouachi brothers — were known to French authorities and yet they were evidently permitted to loiter around in the suburbs of Paris, plotting their deadly attack? Really? Who is in charge of the French anti-terrorism unit, Inspector Clouseau?




 

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