Category Archives: France

The anti-religion and anti-establishment history of Charlie Hebdo

Vice News reports: Charlie Hebdo has never paid much attention to sacred cows, and has lampooned everyone from the pope to presidents in its polemical caricatures and irreverent editorials.

Speaking to VICE News on Wednesday, Peter Gumbel, author and global fellow at The Wilson Center’s Global Europe Program, described Charlie Hebdo as “a magazine that provokes deliberately,” and called the attack “a carefully premeditated attempt to destroy the magazine and kill all the cartoonists.”

“They picked the day when there was an editorial meeting when all the staff would be there,” said Gumbel, “they knew who they wanted, they asked names of people before they killed them, it was premeditated murder.”

Tom Bishop, director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture, and a professor of French at NYU, explained that Charlie Hebdo “holds a very particular place in French culture because of the country’s tradition of satiric magazines.”

“They’re not at all party-aligned,” Bishop told VICE News. “They tend to be viewed as holding nothing sacred. That’s their attraction.”

Famous for its unsparing, sardonic — and often obscene take on the news, politicians, and religion, Charlie Hebdo was pretty much born out of controversy, after its former incarnation, Hara-Kiri (subtitled “Stupid and vicious newspaper”) was banned by the government in 1970 over an insulting headline about the death of former French president and military hero Charles de Gaulle.

The new publication, which was baptized Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) in homage to Charlie Brown, soon made a name for itself as an anti-religious, anti-clerical, and anti-establishment voice in the French media landscape. Despite a limited circulation, the leftist and staunchly secular magazine was well known across France, and together with satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaine came to form the backbone of French political and religious satire.

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France to deploy aircraft carrier to fight ISIS, says report

AFP reports: The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and its fleet will be deployed to the Gulf to support operations against the Islamic State group, a military news site reported on Tuesday.

The deployment of the marine battle group is due to be announced by President Francois Hollande when he gives his annual new year’s speech to the armed forces onboard the Charles de Gaulle on January 14, according to the “Mer et Marine” news site.

The Elysee Palace confirmed to AFP that the carrier would travel to the Gulf on its way to India, where it is due to take part in exercises in mid-April.

“The Charles de Gaulle will be available to participate, if necessary, in all operational missions”, the Elysee spokesman said. [Continue reading…]

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Who are the #CharlieHebdo killers?

One of the hallmarks of terrorism is that provokes its audience to prematurely assign meaning.

Today’s brutal attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has swiftly been taken to be an attack on free speech and this meaning seems so obvious, no one pauses to consider whether it is accurate.

The attackers identities remain unknown but there is little reason to doubt that they are Islamic extremists of some description. Exactly who is a detail that is probably of less concern to those whose first need is to condemn violence and to defend free speech.

I neither doubt the sincerity of these condemnations nor the need to defend free speech, but it’s important to try and understand exactly what happened.

A few hours before the attack, the magazine tweeted:

The caption says “Greetings from al-Baghdadi as well” and the ISIS leader is saying, “…and especially health.” The magazine adds, “Best wishes, by the way.”

But Kim Willsher at The Guardian notes this important detail about the timing of the attack:


If the attackers had studied the work schedule of the journalists that carefully, it’s reasonable to infer that this operation was painstakingly planned and its occurrence right after the Baghdadi tweet was either pure coincidence or just a useful pretext.

It’s now reported that the gunmen told a bystander that the attack was carried out by Al-Qaeda in Yemen. The gunmen have been described as wearing military dress and armed with Kalashnikovs and a rocket launcher.


Drawing a distinction between AQAP and ISIS may seem like a distinction without a difference. But the two jihadist groups have different objectives and competing interests.

In late November, NBC News reported:

Escalating a war of words between terrorism’s old and new schools, an Islamic scholar with al Qaeda’s Yemen-based offshoot on Friday accused ISIS of “planting … disunity” among the various Islamic extremist factions fighting to topple the Syrian government and rejcted the authority of the Iraq- and Syria-based group’s self-declared caliphate.

Harith Al-Nadhari, a spiritual leader and Shariah law scholar with the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), said in a videotape released on YouTube and other social media that the infighting among Syrian rebel groups was “the biggest disaster that hit the Ummah (Arabic for the Muslim community) at this stage.”

He blamed ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, for the divisions, saying that it had exported “infighting and fitna (Arabic for strife) to other fronts,” according to a translation of his comments by Flashpoint Partners, which monitors terrorist group’s online communications.

Al-Nadhari also criticized ISIS for what he described as an overreach by calling for Muslims everywhere to “pledge allegiance to the caliph.”

While AQAP acuses ISIS of sowing discord between Muslims, the Charlie Hebdo attack is clearly aimed at sharpening the divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims and between the East and the West.

To the extent that this message resonates with those whose support for ISIS has become shaky, the attack may serve a strategic goal: to present al Qaeda rather than ISIS as the preeminent defender of Muslims.

An ISIS critic, noting the difference in expressions of concern about deaths in Syria versus those in Paris, tweets:


At the same time, there is also apparently an ongoing effort to use the attack to coral support for ISIS:


Naturally, the conspiracy theorists — yet to agree on their narrative — are busy at work:


Meanwhile, Jeffrey Goldberg tweets:


Many have retweeted a 2012 New Yorker cartoon which depicts the price of capitulating to the opponents of free speech.


And in defense of the satirists, it’s worth noting that as much as they were criticized for being provocative, their sharp statements were not lacking in nuance:


And neither was their critical focus reserved for Islam:


Before too many voices get raised in an unreflective and uninformed defense of Western ideals, let’s hope the gunmen are caught and they are carefully questioned.

An eyewitness description of the attack may turn out to be quite significant:

“Everything happened very calmly, without shouting, without insults.”

That the attackers operated with clinical efficiency suggests that their operation was not only planned meticulously but there was probably as much thought put into anticipating its effect.

That’s why I’m inclined to think that this was designed not simply to send a narrow message — this is the price for insulting Islam — but to have a much wider impact, deepening the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims.

It’s largely our choice whether the attack has this effect.

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We should beware Russia’s links with Europe’s Right

Luke Harding writes: It sounds like a chapter from a cheesy spy novel: former KGB agent, chucked out of Britain in the 80s, lends a large sum of money to a far-right European party. His goal? To undermine the European Union and consolidate ties between Moscow and the future possible leader of pro-Kremlin France.

In fact this is exactly what’s just happened. The founder of the Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, borrowed €2m from a Cyprus-based company, Veronisa Holdings, owned by a flamboyant character and cold war operative called Yuri Kudimov.

Kudimov is a former KGB agent turned banker with close links to the Kremlin and the network of big money around it. Back in 1985 Kudimov was based in London. His cover story was that he was a journalist working for a Soviet newspaper; in 1985 the Thatcher government expelled him for alleged spying. (During the same period Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden.)

In Paris, the FN confirmed last week that it had taken a whopping €9.4m (£7.4m) loan from the First Czech Russian bank in Moscow. This loan is logical enough. The FN’s leader, Marine Le Pen, makes no secret of her admiration for Putin; her party has links to senior Kremlin figures including Dmitry Rogozin, now Russia’s deputy prime minister, who in 2005 ran an anti-immigrant campaign under the slogan “Clean Up Moscow’s Trash”. Le Pen defended her decision to take the Kremlin money, complaining that she had been refused her access to capital: “What is scandalous here is that the French banks are not lending.” She also denied reports by the news website Mediapart, which broke the story, that the €9.4m was merely the first instalment of a bigger €40m loan.

The Russian money will fuel Marine Le Pen’s run for the French presidency in two years’ time. Nobody expects her to win, but the FN topped the polls in May’s European elections, winning an unprecedented 25% of the vote; Le Pen’s 25 new MEPs already form a pro-Russian bloc inside the European parliament. [Continue reading…]

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At the gates of power: How Marine Le Pen is unnerving the French establishment

Charles Bremner writes: On a rainy November morning, dockers from Calais are firing flares in protest against port job losses outside the regional council in Lille, the capital of France’s old industrial north. Inside the plush chamber, a tall, solidly built blonde woman in jeans and boots crooks a leg over her knee and flicks through a news magazine. Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, which has 18 council seats, has dropped in from a day at the European Parliament in nearby Brussels, where the party has 23 MEPs. Le Pen looks bored as the councillors drone on about allocating €1.1bn of EU money to help revive the bleak economy of Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

When her moment comes, she launches into a riff on the evils of the Union. EU funds just reinforce the dictatorship of Brussels and impoverish the downtrodden rural and small-town folk of the region, she says. “I have to remind people ad nauseam that this is not European money. It’s part of French taxpayers’ money that transits through Brussels with the rest going to pay for central and eastern Europe.” With that, the terror of the French political establishment picks up her papers, closes her beige wool jacket and slips out to a car for the drive back to Paris, missing the council’s splendid lunch. So it goes for Le Pen as she tills the fertile electoral soil of the north as the prelude to a run at the Élysée Palace in two years’ time.

France has been frightening itself with visions of a President Le Pen since 2002 when Jean-Marie, Marine’s father and the founder of the far-right Front, landed in the run-off for the presidency. He was roundly defeated by Jacques Chirac when voters rallied in a “republican front” to block the leader of a pariah party. Now, with his pugnacious daughter in charge of the family firm, the prospects of an anti-Front reflex are dimmer and Marine’s prospects look bright. [Continue reading…]

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Russia is returning to Soviet military strategy

Alexander Golts writes: French President Francois Hollande has essentially vetoed the transfer of the first Mistral helicopter carrier to Russia. The Elysee Palace announced that Moscow’s actions in Ukraine do not create the necessary conditions for the transfer of the warship. In response, Russian officials threatened to appeal to international arbitration and sue France for 3 billion euros — against the purchase price of 1.2 billion euros for two Mistral carriers — and several State Duma deputies have called for a ban on imports of French wine.

The situation has obviously reached an impasse. The Kremlin shows no intention of budging on its Ukraine policy and the French authorities worried that they might ultimately see their Mistral ship landing Russian troops on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. The Mistral deal seems to have run aground for the foreseeable future.

In an attempt to put a good face on a bad situation, the Defense Ministry hurried to declare that the warships were not all that necessary anyway. If that is true, why did Russia agree three years ago to put up so much money for them? I think the Mistral deal symbolized the attempt to establish military cooperation between Russia and the West, and France’s refusal to transfer an already completed ship indicates the failure of that attempt. [Continue reading…]

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Refugees from the world’s worst conflicts struggle to reach Britain

The Washington Post reports: Ibrahim’s odyssey has taken him over the hot sands of the Sahara and across the vast Mediterranean in a death-defying, thousands-of-miles-long quest.

Now the 21-year-old from the Sudanese region of Darfur is so close to his destination that he can see it shimmering on the horizon — his dream, his salvation, his England.

It beckons to him, and it taunts him.

If Ibrahim were a day-tripping tourist, a jaunt from this French port city across the English Channel would take 35 minutes in an underwater train. But because he’s an asylum-seeking refugee, getting to Britain means braving coils of barbed wire, clouds of tear gas and an illicit journey wedged between a truck’s axle and the racing pavement.

“It’s very dangerous,” Ibrahim said softly as he prepared for his latest attempt to cross. “Maybe I’m going to die.”

Whatever the risk, it has not deterred Ibrahim or the more than 2,500 other refugees who have made Calais their temporary home. Drawn from the world’s worst crisis zones, they are contributing to a new crisis in the heart of Europe, on the watery border between two of the planet’s most affluent nations. [Continue reading…]

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Video shows French ISIS fighters calling for attacks in France

The New York Times reports: A new propaganda video from the militant group Islamic State shows three French fighters calling on Muslims in France to carry out attacks in France or to join the group’s fight in Iraq and Syria, according to a jihadist monitoring organization.

The seven-minute film, released on Wednesday by Al Hayat Media Center, an affiliate of the Islamic State, also shows what appear to be French jihadist fighters burning their French passports. The video appears to be part of an intensifying propaganda effort by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to use foreign fighters to recruit members and to encourage the spread of violence. [Continue reading…]

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Maxime Hauchard, seen in ISIS beheading video, known to French since 2011

The Guardian reports: Maxime Hauchard, the Frenchman identified by authorities as a jihadi involved in the beheadings of an American and Syrian captives, is a 22-year-old from Normandy who converted to Islam at 17.

Hauchard appeared in the Islamic State (Isis) video which on Sunday showed the killings of 18 Syrian captives and American aid worker Peter Kassig. In the video he is standing in a lineup of jihadis and is not masked. He was recognised by French writer and journalist David Thomson who tweeted a picture of him. Prosecutor François Molins confirmed his identity at a press conference on Monday afternoon.

Hauchard is from Le Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, which has a population of 3,250. He took on the nom de guerre Abu Abdallah el-Faransi, reflecting his French citizenship, and has never sought to conceal his affiliation with Islamist fighters, posting photos on social media of himself carrying weapons. In July he gave an interview to BFMTV in which he described how he became interested in Islam via the internet and how he travelled to Syria in August last year to help create a caliphate. [Continue reading…]

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Hollande urges Turkey to open up its border to help Kobane

AFP reports: France’s president Tuesday urged Turkey to open its border to allow reinforcements to reach the besieged city of Kobani and called for more help to those fighting the advance of ISIS.

Francois Hollande stressed that “all countries concerned,” including those not in the coalition fighting the ISIS, should provide weapons to those battling the jihadists.

“I think about what is happening today in Kobani, a martyred town, a symbolic town. If we have to intervene, as we decided for France in Iraq, we also have to give the moderate Syrian opposition … all the support, all the help necessary,” he said.

“I am launching an appeal here, beyond the coalition, to all countries concerned to give this opposition the support they expect from us, the means they need to fight against terrorism,” Hollande said. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. air strikes in Syria targeted French intelligence officer who defected to al Qaeda

McClatchy reports: A former French intelligence officer who defected to al Qaida was among the targets of the first wave of U.S. air strikes in Syria last month, according to people familiar with the defector’s movements and identity.

Two European intelligence officials described the former French officer as the highest ranking defector ever to go over to the terrorist group and called his defection one of the most dangerous developments in the West’s long confrontation with al Qaida.

The identity of the officer is a closely guarded secret. Two people, independently of one another, provided the same name, which McClatchy is withholding pending further confirmation. All of the sources agreed that a former French officer was one of the people targeted when the United States struck eight locations occupied by the Nusra Front, al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate. The former officer apparently survived the assault, which included strikes by 47 cruise missiles. [Continue reading…]

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French hostage in Algeria is beheaded in new video

The New York Times reports: A French tourist captured in North Africa by a group aligned with the Islamic State is seen beheaded in a video circulated on Wednesday, according to SITE Intelligence, which tracks jihadist groups.

The Frenchman — Hervé Gourdel, a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from Nice — was abducted in Algeria on Sunday by the terrorist group, known as Jund al-Khilafah. Mr. Gourdel had arrived only a day before on a trip to go hiking in Algeria’s northern mountains.

The terrorist group issued a statement after his abduction, saying that it was following the guidance of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which has seized large parts of Syria and Iraq and has called on its sympathizers to strike Westerners — especially the French — wherever they can. [Continue reading…]

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Paris wants Iran to help crush ISIS

The Associated Press reports: France is prepared to invite Iran to an international conference Monday aimed at coordinating actions to knock out the Islamic State extremists in Iraq — even though that runs counter to the U.S. refusal to deal with Tehran.

The position reflects a recent shift in France’s policy toward Iran, a Shiite Muslim nation and neighbor of Iraq that joins regional states and the West in adamantly opposing the advance of the radicals. Tehran’s long-time influence in Sunni Iraq, including at times a military presence, makes it a logical partner in France’s eyes.

A French official helping plan the conference says the only hitch is agreeing with partners, but added “we are not far from a consensus.” The official, who was not authorized to be publicly named, didn’t elaborate. [Continue reading…]

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French jihadist, alleged ISIS torturer, ‘looking for a destiny of his own’

Nicolas Henin, a French journalist who was released in April after being held hostage in Syria by ISIS, has identified Mehdi Nemmouche, who is also French, as one of his captors. Henin says that over a period of several months he was repeatedly tortured and beaten by Nemmouche.

In July, Nemmouche was charged with murder following the killing of four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium, in Brussels, on May 24.

The case of Nemmouche raises concerns in at least two ways: firstly, because he is viewed as a fear come true by those who warn of the risk posed to the West by European passport holders returning from the war in Syria who, having been trained by ISIS, may bring their jihad home. Secondly, his violence is being linked to the rise of antisemitism across Europe, particularly in France.

Henin’s perspective on Nemmouche is interesting because unlike terrorism experts who maintain much more distance from their subjects, the French journalist got to know this individual in a much more intimate way: as his torturer.

It would be easy to conclude that the nature of this relationship would make it impossible for Henin to be objective. Maybe so. But I think it’s just as likely that a victim of torture would feel driven to try and understand the mind of his persecutor — especially when they were in the unusual situation of sharing the same first language.

For this reason, I find Henin’s brief psychological profile of Nemmouche particularly interesting.

Henin observed that Nemmouche “came to Syria not because he wanted to fight for a specific cause but because he was looking for a destiny of his own.”

The term “radicalization” appears in the media a lot these days and it conjures up images of empty vessels — young men susceptible to being radicalized.

While that might accurately describe the hapless path that leads some into jihad, there are others — and who’s to say which are more numerous — for whom jihad simply becomes the vehicle for a destiny they were already pursuing.

My hunch is that it is the latter kind of jihadist for whom ISIS has the greatest appeal — that they are pursuing destinies of their own for which they have been provided an ideological vehicle which legitimizes and articulates their visceral drives.

France has about 70,000 prisoners, 60-70% of whom are Muslim. However prevalent the radicalization of Muslim prisoners has become, only a small minority become jihadists. Given that only 5-10% of the French population is Muslim, France’s larger concern should be that so many Muslims are being thrown in jail.

The French journalist Marc Weitzmann recounts how one prisoner describes the system.

Karim Mokhtari, who was sentenced to 10 years in the mid-1990s after he tried to rob a drug trafficker and accidentally killed him with a shotgun, reveals in his book Redemption how easy it is to be approached by Islamists there. “In prison,” he told me, “there are two things you catch as soon as you get there. One is how lonely you are, and the other is how lonely you don’t want to be. So you look in the courtyard and you ask yourself, to which group do I belong? There are the junkies, there are the dealers, there are the rapists, and so forth. And there are the religious. Cleaner than the rest, they also seem to suffer less, they take care of each other. I watched them for a week, then the improvised Imam came to me to ask if I were a Muslim and I said no, not yet, and he introduced me to someone freshly converted — a European — who taught me the first rudiments of Arabic, the first prayers and rituals. And it went on from there.”

After the conversion rate started to turn the group into a force of some sort, the administration decided out of precaution to dismantle the religious group: The imam was transferred. He came to Mokhtari’s cell, as Mokhtari told me: “ ‘Listen’ he said, ‘I’m being transferred and I must leave. But you, your mission as a Muslim is to kill. Kill miscreants anywhere you find them. You need to keep in touch for that even when you’re out so do it. And if you need military training, we have places for that too.’ ”

“That’s when I realized what I was going into,” Mokhtari said. He was the son of a violent mixed marriage, and his French mother got divorced and remarried to a racist Frenchman who lived on welfare and off robbery. … Mokhtari started to get regularly beaten by the man, who also woke him up at 4.a.m. on Saturday nights to take him along with him on his robberies of villas and apartments while Karim kept watch. But despite an incomparably more violent background than Nemmouche endured, Karim Mokhtari never turned to terrorism.

In the following film, Mokhtari describes his own redemption.

Destiny is a dangerous and intoxicating idea. It empowers the individual by allowing him to shed doubt.

Where there is no internal struggle, conviction easily translates into action. Those pursuing their destiny, swiftly move forward, while those unsure of their destiny, are more inclined to waver, aware of their capacity to make mistakes. Destiny is dangerous both subjectively and objectively.

If we believe some individuals are destined to become to become terrorists, we’re also likely to view them as irredeemable.

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More opposition to ISIS among Gazans than Europeans

Max Fisher writes: 85 percent of polled Gazans said they oppose ISIS. That’s awfully high, especially considering that Europeans were much less likely to say they held an unfavorable view of the group:

Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been arguing that ISIS is indistinguishable from Hamas, the Palestinian group that rules Gaza (he is wrong for a number of reasons), it turns out that at least Palestinians in Gaza see a strong distinction. While the Gaza poll did not ask for Hamas approval/disapproval, it did return favorable-sounding results on two questions: “Was the Palestinian resistance prepared for this aggression [by Israel against Gaza],” to which 58 percent said yes; and “do you support disarming the Palestinian resistance,” to which 93 percent said no and 3 percent said yes.

Again, Gazans and Europeans were asked slightly different questions by different polling agencies, but it is still awfully striking that more Gazans gave the anti-ISIS response than did Western Europeans.

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Western powers temporarily abandon democracy-building efforts in Libya

The Washington Post reports: Three years after Western powers helped Libyan rebels overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, they have at least temporarily abandoned efforts on the ground to bolster Libya’s foundering democracy.

On Wednesday, France evacuated its embassy in Tripoli, where warring militias have traded rocket and artillery fire over the past two weeks in the worst violence in the capital since Gaddafi’s ouster. French ships moved diplomats and French and other European citizens across the Mediterranean to Toulon, just days after U.S. diplomats left by road for Tunisia and then traveled to Malta, where they have set up an embassy-in-absentia.

Although Britain has not formally suspended operations at its Tripoli mission, it has removed all but essential personnel and advised all citizens to leave the country. [Continue reading…]

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Jewish businesses in Paris are being looted and destroyed by protesters over Israel Gaza offensive

AFP reports: France’s interior minister Monday slammed “intolerable” acts of anti-Semitism after a rally against Israel’s Gaza offensive descended into violence pitting an angry pro-Palestinian crowd against local Jewish businesses.

Sunday’s demonstration in the north Paris suburb of Sarcelles was the third to deteriorate in a week, as shops were looted and riot police lobbed tear gas and rubber bullets at the crowd.

The rally had been banned amid concern the Jewish community would be targeted after protesters last weekend tried to storm two synagogues in Paris.

“When you head for the synagogue, when you burn a corner shop because it is Jewish-owned, you are committing an anti-Semitic act,” Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters outside the Sarcelles synagogue.

In the Paris suburb sometimes nicknamed “little Jerusalem” for its large community of Sephardic Jews, the rally descended into chaos when dozens of youth — some masked — set fire to bins and lit firecrackers and smoke bombs.

Eighteen people were arrested after looters wrecked shops, including a kosher foodstore and a funeral home as protesters shouted: “Fuck Israel!”. [Continue reading…]

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London: Massive protest against Israel’s assault on Gaza; protesters in Paris defy ban

Reuters reports: Pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with police in Paris on Saturday as they defied a ban on a planned rally against violence in the Gaza strip.

A Reuters photographer said demonstrators in northern Paris launched projectiles at riot police, who responded by firing teargas canisters and stun grenades. Demonstrators also climbed on top of a building and burned an Israeli flag.

President Francois Hollande earlier said he had asked his interior minister to ban protests that could turn violent after demonstrators marched on two synagogues in Paris last weekend and clashed with riot police.

“That’s why I asked the interior minister, after an investigation, to ensure that such protests would not take place,” he told journalists during a visit to Chad.

In defiance of the ban, large crowds gathered in northern Paris chanting “Israel, assassin” until they were dispersed by tear gas.

Peaceful rallies were also held in more than a dozen other cities, from Lille in the north to Marseille in the South.

“This ban on demonstrations, which was decided at the last minute, actually increases the risk of public disorder,” the Greens Party said in a statement. “It’s a first in Europe.” [Continue reading…]

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