Category: Greece

TERROR MANHUNT: French Authorities Seeking Accomplices of Islamic Killers

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The perpetrators of Friday’s massacre in Paris have been identified, and the investigation exposes the worldwide menace of Islam:

Police [on Saturday] issued an international arrest warrant for one of three Belgian-born brothers believed to be at the heart of the eight-strong ISIS cell who murdered 132 people in Paris.
French police are hunting 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, from Brussels, who is accused of renting a Volkswagen Polo used by the suicide bombers who killed 89 people at the Bataclan music venue on Friday.
His brother Ibrahim is believed to have blown himself up during the Paris siege and a third unnamed sibling has been arrested in the Belgian capital.
An official told the Washington Post another of the shooters was Bilal Hadfi, who was from Belgium and had spent time fighting with ISIS in Syria, who also died after detonating his suicide vest during a murderous rampage.
The killer gang, containing a number of Frenchman living in Belgium, two others carrying Syrian passports after sneaking into Europe disguised as migrants and a female accomplice, are believed to have travelled together from Brussels to Paris in rented cars.
Serbian media claims Ahmed Almuhamed, 25, whose Syrian passport was found on the body of a suicide bomber, allegedly blew himself up at the Bataclan concert hall, where at least 89 people were slaughtered on Friday. Two other bombers were said to be carrying fake Turkish passports, it was being reported tonight.
French police have said homegrown terrorist Omar Ismaël Mostefai , 29, from Courcouronnes, Paris, was one of the Bataclan suicide bombers but he is said to have been radicalised by a Brussels-based hate preacher who spoke regularly at his French mosque.

We learn more about the role of “refugees” in the Paris attack:

The [Serbian] newspaper, Blic, claims [Ahmed] Almuhamed arrived with another of the bombers in Europe on the Greek island of Leros on October 3 on his way to Paris. Greek website Protothema have published ferry tickets showing the name of a second man, Mohammed Almuhamed, who could be a relation.
French police are hunting 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, from Brussels, who is accused of renting a Volkswagen Polo used by the suicide bombers who killed 89 people at the Bataclan music venue on Friday.
His brother Ibrahim is believed to have blown himself up during the Paris siege and a third unnamed sibling has been arrested in the Belgian capital. . . .
Bilal Hadfi, who was from Belgium and had spent time fighting with ISIS in Syria, who also died after detonating his suicide vest during a murderous rampage.
One of the attackers has been named locally as homegrown terrorist Omar Ismaël Mostefai , 29, from Courcouronnes, Paris. The petty criminal was known to police as a radical and identified by the fingerprint on a severed digit found after he detonated his suicide belt. . . .
The disclosure that some may have entered Europe as migrants, which came amid claims of French intelligence failures, inevitably raises new security concerns about the safety of Europe’s borders.
Meanwhile the black Seat Leon used by the terrorists who murdered diners outside the Casa Nostra pizza restaurant and the La Belle Équipe cafe has been found abandoned 20 minutes away in Montreuil with three AK-47s with five full magazines and 11 empty ones. . . .
Ahmed Almuhamed is believed to have taken around a month to travel to France posing as a migrant. He had entered Serbia at Miratovce, having crossed the frontier from Macedonia. The newspaper reported that Almuhamed, applied for asylum in Serbia in Presevo before crossing into Croatia and Austria.
Paris prosecutors confirmed that the suspects, all wearing explosive vests, roamed across the French capital in three teams, perpetrating the ‘worst acts of violence’ in the country since the Second World War. Fingerprint records show that two of the terrorists had arrived in the EU as refugees through Greece.

UPDATE: Read what Pamela Geller wrote:

Despite all this horror, the European Union elites are bringing into Europe millions of these savages. I have warned for years about this coming jihad. For doing so, I was attacked, smeared, and marginalized. We were right about it all, and yet still my colleagues and I are blacklisted. Hundreds are dead, and the war has just begun. We did everything in our power to save lives. But the political, media, and academic elites aligned with the savages. . . .
This is a world war. I have exposed hundreds of Islamic State social postings which name names and provide addresses and photos of U.S. soldiers here in the States, urging American Muslims to slaughter our boys and girls.
Right now, nothing is being done to stop jihad recruiting in U.S. mosques, even as several hundred young Muslims from the U.S. have gone to wage jihad for the Islamic State. And now they seek to wage jihad here at home.

UPDATE II: More on the terrorists who struck Paris:

French authorities have said seven suicide attackers died in Friday’s carnage and are hunting another believed to be “directly involved” in the bloodshed. Belgian authorities have arrested seven other men in connection with the attacks. . . .
Omar Ismaïl Mostefai was the first attacker named by French authorities. The 29-year-old is of Algerian heritage and grew up in Courcouronnes, just south of Paris, where he picked up a criminal record for petty offences. . . .
French intelligence took note of Mostafei when he began spending time at a mosque with radical links in 2010, but they lost track of him in 2013, when he may have travelled to Syria, the Washington Post reported. . . .
Salah’s brother Ibrahim Abdeslam was identified by prosecutors as the man who rented a Seat vehicle used in the attacks. He carried out the suicide attack at the Comptoir Voltaire cafe. He was 31.
A third Abdeslam brother, who has not been named, is believed to have been among seven people arrested on Saturday in the Molenbeek-Saint-Jean district of Brussels, suspected of being connected to the attacks.

Also, speaking to CNN, French senator Nathalie Goulet said that the suspect on the run is most probably the bomb-maker and is one of the three brothers thought to have been involved in the attacks. “With such heavy material, they need a professional.” The New York Times reports:

The carefully coordinated attacks on Friday night, which killed at least 129 people and which are believed to be the work of the Islamic State, increasingly appear to have involved extensive planning by a network of men with sophisticated weapons who plotted their attack from outside the country. . . .
French officials initially described eight attackers, but on Saturday night said that only seven had died — six by blowing themselves up and one in a shootout with police. . . .
The Salah brothers lived in Molenbeek, an impoverished section of Brussels that is mostly populated by immigrants from the Arab world and that has been linked to violence. “We don’t have control of the situation in Molenbeek at present,” [Belgium’s Interior Minister Jan] Jambon told VRT, a television channel.

Having surrendered control of their borders, by admitting many thousands of Arab immigrants, now Belgian officials are forced to admit they “don’t have control” over parts of their own capital city. It is in these neighborhoods — “no-go zones” that are effectively off-limits to non-Muslims, including police — that this attack on France was planned and organized. But you will be denounced as a “racist” if you call attention to this danger, because liberals always think it is better for innocent citizens to be murdered by terrorists than for any Muslim immigrant to have his feelings hurt.

(Via Memeorandum.)

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Greece Closes Banks in Crisis

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It was first announced that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras debt-ridden left-wing government would close banks Monday, but now they’ve decided the banks will remain closed all week:

Greek banks are to remain closed and capital controls will be imposed, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says.
Speaking after the European Central Bank (ECB) said it was not increasing emergency funding to Greek banks, Mr Tsipras said Greek deposits were safe.
Greece is due to make a €1.6bn (£1.1bn) payment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday – the same day that its current bailout expires.
Greece risks default and moving closer to a possible exit from the eurozone.
Greeks have been queuing to withdraw money from cash machines over the weekend, and the Bank of Greece said it was making “huge efforts” to keep the machines stocked.
Greek banks are expected to stay shut until 7 July, two days after Greece’s planned referendum on the terms it had been offered by international creditors for receiving fresh bailout money. . . .
Eurozone finance ministers blamed Greece for breaking off the talks, and the European Commission took the unusual step on Sunday of publishing proposals by European creditors that it said were on the table at the time.
But Greece described creditors’ terms as “not viable”, and asked for an extension of its current deal until after the vote was completed.
“[Rejection] of the Greek government’s request for a short extension of the programme was an unprecedented act by European standards, questioning the right of a sovereign people to decide,” Mr Tsipras on Sunday said in a televised address.
“This decision led the ECB today to limit the liquidity available to Greek banks and forced the Greek central bank to suggest a bank holiday and restrictions on bank withdrawals.” . . .
The temporary closure of banks in Greece, and the introduction of capital controls, is very bad news for Greece. Greek people will have less money to spend and business less to invest; so an already weak economy will probably return to deep recession.

(More at Memeorandum.) Notice how Tsipras suggests that the creditors are being undemocratic, rather than admitting that Greece has been irresponsible? Tsipras obviously believes Greeks have a right to other people’s money, and that it is wrong for European creditors to expect them to pay back what they borrowed.  Meanwhile the financial experts are getting worried:

The world will be unable to fight the next global financial crash as central banks have used up their ammunition trying to tackle the last crises, the Bank of International Settlements has warned.
The so-called central bank of central banks launched a scatching critique of global monetary policy in its annual report. The BIS claimed that central banks have backed themselves into a corner after repeatedly cutting interest rates to shore up their economies.
These low interest rates have in turn fuelled economic booms, encouraging excessive risk taking. Booms have then turned to busts, which policymakers have responded to with even lower rates.
Claudio Borio, head of the organisation’s monetary and economic department, said: “Persistent exceptionally low rates reflect the central banks’ and market participants’ response to the unusually weak post-crisis recovery as they fumble in the dark in search of new certainties.”

Oh, by the way: Puerto Rico can’t pay its debts, either.

 

Greece Runs Out of Other People’s Money

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The Eurozone’s problem child throws a tantrum:

Two senior Greek retail bank executives said as many as 500 of the country’s more than 7,000 ATMs had run out of cash as of Saturday morning, and that some lenders may not be able to open on Monday unless there was an emergency liquidity injection from the Bank of Greece. An official with Greece’s Capital Markets Commission, the markets’ regulator, also warned that the Athens Stock Exchange may be unable to operate on Monday without a cash injection into the banking system. A Greek central bank spokesman said it was making efforts to supply money.
The European Central Bank’s governing council was expected to hold a conference call on Sunday to review the banks’ liquidity condition, said a Greek official, who asked not to be named in line with policy. The Frankfurt-based central bank said in a twitter post that it’s closely monitoring developments and would review the situation “in due course.” . . .
Euro-area finance ministers rejected Greece’s request for a one-month extension of its aid program, which expires Tuesday, shutting down any last chance for a financial stopgap until the referendum is held.
After withdrawing more than 30 billion euros as the anti-austerity Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, took power, depositors are now reacting to the latest twist in the five-month standoff with European leaders and creditors.

(Via Memeorandum. More at Legal Insurrection.)

In addition to Margaret Thatcher’s famous maxim about socialists eventually running out of other people’s money, there is also Stein’s Law. This was coined by Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Richard Nixon’s presidency: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And the problem of the Eurozone’s weaker nations expecting bailouts from their rich neighbors obviously cannot go on forever. So what happens when it stops? We don’t know.

Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland — the other fiscal weak sisters in the Eurozone — may manage to avoid default, and the richer EU nations may be able to stabilize the overall regional economy. If so, the Greek problem is just a Greek problem. On the other hand, who knows?

Greece’s European partners shut the door on extending a credit lifeline to Athens, leaving it facing a default that could push it out of the euro after the leftist government rejected tough lender demands and put their bailout deal to a referendum.
Finance ministers of the other 18 countries sharing the euro met for the first time without Greece and flatly rejected its pleas to extend an expiring bailout until after the referendum on July 5 and setting the stage for Athens to default on a crucial IMF payment on Tuesday.
The 18 pledged to do whatever it takes to stabilize the common currency area and said they were in much better shape to do so than at the height of the euro zone crisis a few years ago. In a formal statement, they also implicitly urged Greece to impose capital controls to stabilize its banking system.

We’ve spent seven years in a slow, weak recovery from the crash of 2008, and it might be that the Greek crisis will trigger a worldwide recession. Riots, famine, hyperinflation — anything is possible.

“Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice!
Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!”

OK, probably not that bad. But you never know . . .





 

Greece Threatens Sovereign Default

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This could trigger a global financial crisis:

Greek premier Alexis Tsipras has accused Europe’s creditor powers of issuing “absurd demands” and come close to warning that his far-Left government will detonate a pan-European political and strategic crisis if pushed any further.
Writing for Le Monde in a tone of furious defiance after the latest set of talks reached an impasse, Mr Tsipras said the eurozone’s dominant players were by degrees bringing about the “complete abolition of democracy in Europe” and were ushering in a technocratic monstrosity with powers to subjugate states that refuse to accept the “doctrines of extreme neoliberalism”.
“For those countries that refuse to bow to the new authority, the solution will be simple: Harsh punishment. Judging from the present circumstances, it appears that this new European power is being constructed, with Greece being the first victim,” he said.
The Greek leader, head of the radical-Left Syriza government, issued a stark warning that his country will not submit to these demands and will instead take action “to entirely transform the economic and political balances throughout the West.” . . .
Mr Tsipras’s article is a thinly-disguised warning that Greece may choose to default on roughly €330bn of debt in the biggest sovereign default ever, and pull out of the euro, rather than breech its key red lines.
The debts are mostly to European official creditors and the European Central Bank. The situation has become critical after depositors withdrew €800m from Greek banks in two days at the end of last week, heightening fears that capital controls may be imminent.
Mr Tsipras’s choice of words also implies that Greece may turn its back on the Western security system, presumably by shifting into the orbit of Russia and China.

The problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher wisely observed, is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. Greek is effectively bankrupt, and Tsipras seems to imagine that he can blame this on Greece’s creditors. As much as that may suit Tsipras’ socialist ideas, it won’t produce any more cash. And if Greece stops paying bondholders, this would likely trigger a crisis in financial markets that would hurt a lot of innocent people who never set foot in Greece nor derived any benefit from the money Greece borrowed. Tsipras is reckless, irresponsible, and indifferent to the harm caused by his decisions.

Did I mention he’s a socialist? Pretty sure I did . . .

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Hey, Greece: Just Remember, Austrian Economics Don’t Work

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by Smitty

It looks as though the Greek election is another exercise in playing soccer on a long street with a can, kicking that can down another block.

The collapse of the Eurozone has become like the decline of the Warsaw Pact, only more complex and prolonged. Pro-austerity forces have won the latest election in Greece – sort of. Official projections show centre-Right New Democracy slightly ahead of radical socialist Syriza, which gives New Democracy an advantage in parliamentary seats. Syriza has conceded the election. However, reports say that New Democracy’s likely coalition partner, the austerity-minded centre-left Pasok, is unwilling to serve in a government that doesn’t give some role to Syriza. Syriza says no to a “grand coalition,” which means Pasok may be bluffing its way out of having to share the burden of austerity with New Democracy. Talks will begin and New Democracy has three days to form a new government. So the Euro is safe until the next election – in six weeks time?

Stanley veers off target in the conclusion:

Like communism, the Euro was sold to the poor of Europe as a magic bullet that would bring instant and lasting economic growth. One certainly can’t blame them for buying the propaganda, especially considering that several prominent Britons did, too.

Also, many prominent Britons did not. Thus, it may be time for a broad reverse psychology tactic. Tell the Greeks that what they ought to pursue is completely unworkable. Make them curious about common sense. Let them stumble upon it and think workable policies are their own idea. Can’t go any more wrong than the rest of the silliness over there.

Growing Up

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by Smitty

Victor Davis Hanson has another excellent essay on the situation in Europe. Read the whole thing. But let us focus on the Germany/Greece dichotomy.

In other words, it is as illogical as it is common for the wayward debtor to blame the thrifty creditor for his dilemma. The Germans now are in the impossible situation of being told they did something wrong by doing things mostly right. They retire too late and caused others to retire too early; they saved too much money so others had to borrow too much; they built too many things that others wanted; they acted too much like parents and so made others too much like children.
Right now the continent’s psychological problem is not that southern Europeans cannot pay the northerners back, but that they are often arguing that they should not have to pay them, as if those who lent are more to blame than those who borrowed. The Germans rightly know that if they were just to write off the debt, such magnanimity would only lead to the same disaster in another five years, as the southern Mediterraneans cited such largess as proof that the Germans were guilty all along of mercantilism and therefore finally evened up with their moral betters. For Germans, this serial blackmail is of course an impossible situation. Would you wish to be lectured by your poorer brother-in-law on why he should not have to pay your $1,000 loan back, as he critiqued your oh-so-conventional workaholic habits?

What comes to mind is the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. Let’s compare and contrast: Continue reading Growing Up →

Bank Run in Greece = DJIA Rises?

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Back in 2009, I started saying that U.S. economic policy was so far into uncharted waters that we’d reached that part of the medieval map where it says, “Here Be Dragons.” There was no precedent for what the Fed and the Treasury were doing, and any attempt to predict what came next was pure speculation because such bizarre conditions had never previously occurred in all human history.

Buy gold. Or maybe buy more ammunition. Maybe it didn’t matter, but the key point was that an awful lot of dung was being flung around, and sooner later, by the Law of Large Numbers, some of it would hit the fan. Anyway, today at Memeorandum I saw these headlines:

Greeks withdraw $894 million in a day:
Is this beginning of a run on banks?
— MSNBC

As Bank Withdrawals Surge,
Athens Relies More on ECB
— Wall Street Journal

Plug-pulling in Athens
— Financial Times

My first thought: What’s the Dow Jones Industrial Average doing? So I glanced over at the TV in my office and the Dow was . . . +25? WTF?

Evidence of a bank run in Greece, and investors aren’t pulling back? Or (alternate theory) European investors are buying U.S. stocks as a hedge?

Another theory: The zany inflationary policy at the Fed is so out of control that people are dumping dollars to buy stocks, figuring that at least stocks represent part of some tangible worth?

Who the helll knows anymore? “Here Be Dragons,” indeed!

UPDATE: Still watching the Dow. As of 2 p.m. ET, it was still around +13, defying what would seem to be normal economic logic. But again, I’m not any kind of expert. I just know a few common-sense basics. It would seem obvious that if Greece is on the verge of a final meltdown, with untold consequences for the rest of the Euro zone, there is at least a risk this could trigger a global financial crisis.

Given such a risk, one would think that investors would seek security, and nothing is more secure than gold. Perhaps the gold market has already calculated in that risk, however. Maybe investors are trying to snag the last few dollars of earnings before the crash hits.

Lots of possible explanations, but none of them make sense to me.

 


You Say That Like It’s a Bad Thing

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“François Hollande will strike fear into the hearts of the rich,” is the headline on a column by Nabila Ramdani in the British Independent.

Permit me to suggest two likely results (a) some genuinely rich people will leave France, taking their wealth with them, and (b) a lot of the “rich” people in France won’t be so rich any more.

The point is that “rich” is often used to designate people who, at any given time, have a high annual income. This is not the same as “rich,” as in having a massive net worth, and it is certainly not the same as the cartoonish Thurston Howell III stereotype: People born to ultra-wealthy parents, who grow up in extraordinarily affluent circumstances, with nannies and butlers and chauffeurs, top-flight private schools, winter ski vacations at the family chalet, summers in the Hamptons, etc.

It’s resentment of the Thurston Howell III types that fuels this spiteful rage to make the rich “pay their fair share,” and so if François Hollande tries to jack up taxes on those people, they’ll either find ways to evade the taxes or else they’ll get the hell out of France. One way or another, by driving investment capital out of the private sector, such a soak-the-rich policy will have the effect of stifling economic growth, and reduce the incomes of everybody, including some high-income people — entrepreneurs, high-skill technicians, sales executives — who, earning less money in a weakened economy, will therefore not pay as much taxes at the higher rate as they would had the rates stayed the same.

So all this “strike fear in the hearts of the rich” noise is either just noise, or else it’s a plan to spread the misery around.

BTW, yes, I realize this is my second post in a row about François Hollande, and yes, I realize you probably don’t give a damn about the French. But it’s all over Memeorandum, and the rest of the news seems kinda meh today. So let’s have more fun with Euro-weenies, eh? Here’s Independent columnist Peter Popham:

Rise of far right threatens
to pollute politics across Europe
They may not have claimed ultimate victory, but the biggest winners of the elections in France and Greece were the parties of the extreme right. Fringe parties, some of them routinely labelled “neo-Fascist” until recently, have made stunning inroads into mainstream European politics, to the point that in France, Norway, Finland, Hungary and Austria they either hold or threaten to hold the balance of power. Governments are increasingly faced with the choice of either giving ground on hot-button issues such as immigration and Islam, or ceding power.

Hang on here: France elects a socialist who wants to impose tax rates as high as 75 percent, and it’s the “extreme right” we’re worried about? Speaking of irrational fear, Charles Johnson is hearing jackboots on the cobblestones again, as Diary of Daedalus reports:

The Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party has won 7% of the votes in Greece’s recent election. They will get 21 seats in the new parliament. This gave Charles Johnson an orgasm since he is obsessed with Nazis!

Seven percent of voters in Greece, a country with a population (11.3 million) roughly the size of Ohio, vote for this far-right party, and Charles Johnson imagines . . . what? The Greek neo-Hitler building up a mighty war machine? An Aegean Kristallnacht? An invasion of Macedonia? Greek bombers and tanks rampaging across the Mediterranean? Headline from the London Daily Mail:

Rise of the Greek neo-Nazis: Ultra-right
party Golden Dawn wants to force
immigrants into work camps and plant
landmines along Turkish border

Sounds scary, except they only got 7% of the vote! Assuming that the other 93% of Greek parliament members aren’t down for this agenda, the wacko plans of these “ultra-right” guys are as much of a genuine danger as the threat of Ron Paul becoming president. (OK, that scenario had some people jittery in December.) We’re talking about a comparative handful of powerless kooks in a weak, impoverished and demographically collapsing country on the far side of the globe.

The same people who want us all to freak out about Greek Nazis, of course, would be the first to accuse of us of irresponsible fear-mongering if we pointed out the dangers of, inter alia, narco-terrorists in Mexico or Mahmoud Ahmahdinejad in Iran.

Hell, I’m more afraid of Canadians than I am of the Greeks, and we could probably wipe out Canada in a week or two without mobilizing much more than the Minnesota National Guard.

You people need to get a grip, or you’ll end up gibbering nonsense on “progressive” talk-radio like Charles Johnson: