FRANCE: What Preceded The Islamic State Attacks In France

What Preceded The Islamic State Attacks In France

Posted by Editor on November 14, 2015 in Culture & Religion, Europe, France, Middle East, News & Analysis, World

Cartoon of the day by Carlos Latuff

by Moon of Alabama

This happened last night: At least 120 dead in Paris attacks, Hollande declares emergency

Gunmen and bombers attacked restaurants, a concert hall and a sports stadium at locations across Paris on Friday, killing at least 120 people in a deadly rampage that a shaken President Francois Hollande called an unprecedented terrorist attack.

The Islamic State claims responsibility (English version) for the attack.

But who weaponized and financed the Islamic State or prior organizations in Syria and Iraq from which this terror attack grew? Is this cartoon justified?

Consider:

In 2012 – Hollande admits arming Syrian rebels in breach of embargo – book

The French president has admitted delivering weapons to the Syrian rebels during a period of EU embargo, a new book about to be published in France reveals.The deliveries took place in 2012, before the embargo was canceled in May 2013, according to François Hollande’s last year interview with journalist and writer Xavier Panon. “We began when we were certain they would end up in the right hands. For the lethal weapons it was our services who delivered them,” Hollande told the writer, …

Oct 2012 – Rebel Arms Flow Is Said to Benefit Jihadists in Syria

WASHINGTON — Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats.

Dec 2012 – France funding Syrian rebels in new push to oust Assad

France has emerged as the most prominent backer of Syria’s armed opposition and is now directly funding rebel groups around Aleppo as part of a new push to oust the embattled Assad regime.Large sums of cash have been delivered by French government proxies across the Turkish border to rebel commanders in the past month, diplomatic sources have confirmed. The money has been used to buy weapons inside Syria and to fund armed operations against loyalist forces.

Aug 2014 – France delivered arms to Syrian rebels, Hollande confirms

President Francois Hollande said on Thursday that France had delivered weapons to rebels battling the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad “a few months ago.”

Nov 2015

Murad Gazdiev @MuradoRT
French APILAS rocket launcher supplied to #syria rebels fall into hands of #ISIS. Pics from #Deraa, Southern #Syria
12:09 PM – 6 Nov 2015

Jun 2014 –‘Thank God for the Saudis’: ISIS, Iraq, and the Lessons of Blowback

[T]wo of the most successful factions fighting Assad’s forces are Islamist extremist groups: Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the latter of which is now amassing territory in Iraq and threatening to further destabilize the entire region. And that success is in part due to the support they have received from two Persian Gulf countries: Qatar and Saudi Arabia.Qatar’s military and economic largesse has made its way to Jabhat al-Nusra, to the point that a senior Qatari official told me he can identify al-Nusra commanders by the blocks they control in various Syrian cities. But ISIS is another matter. As one senior Qatari official stated, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”

France benefited from its support for the U.S.-Wahhabi regime change project in Syria and Iraq by getting huge orders for military equipment from the medieval Wahhabi regimes:

Apr 2015 – France and Qatar seal $7 billion Rafale fighter jet deal

Qatar has agreed to buy 24 Dassault Aviation-built Rafale fighter jets in a 6.3-billion-euro (4.55 billion pounds) deal, the French government said on Thursday, as the Gulf Arab state looks to boost its military firepower in an increasingly unstable region.

June 2015 –Saudi Arabia and France ink $12bln deal

Saudi Arabia and France agreed Wednesday to sign $12 billion of deals, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubair said during a landmark visit by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to Paris.

Even after it became obvious for everyone that the regime change project in Syria has led to an expansion of terrorism Hollande was still demanding the end of the Syrian state.

Sept 2015 –François Hollande of France Says Assad Must Go

President François Hollande of France told the United Nations General Assembly on Monday that his country would “shoulder its responsibilities” in global efforts to end the fighting in Syria, but that the conflict could be resolved only if President Bashar al-Assad was removed from power.

Can Hollande now change his tune?

This article was originally published at Moon of Alabama

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Comments

Joop Jansen November 16, 2015 at 12:21 am | Permalink

David Van Reybrouck Privé

Monsieur le Président,

What an extraordinarily reckless choice of words you exhibited in your speech on Saturday afternoon, going on about an “act of war” carried out by a “terrorist army”. What you said, literally, was: “What took place yesterday in Paris and Saint-Denis is an act of war, and when faced with a war the country must take appropriate measures. An act perpetrated by a terrorist army, Daesh (IS), against all that we are, a free country in dialogue with the entire planet. An act of war that was prepared and planned elsewhere, with internal involvement which the investigation will seek to establish. An act of total barbarity.”

I am in complete agreement with you when it comes to that final sentence, but the rest of your discourse is a hideous, almost literal repetition of what George W. Bush told the American Congress shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001. “The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.”

The consequences of those historic words are well-known. Any head of state who characterizes an event as an act of war has to take appropriate action. That led Bush to invade Afghanistan, which seems justifiable enough seeing that that country was sheltering Al-Qaeda – even the U.N. agreed on that. After that came the completely preposterous invasion of Iraq, with no U.N. mandate, simply because America suspected the presence there of weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were present, but the invasion resulted in a thorough destabilization of the region which continues to this very day. After the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country in 2011, a power vacuum arose. Not long afterwards, in the wake of the Arab Spring, when civil war broke out in neighboring Syria, it became clear for the first time exactly what an undermining effect the American military actions had had. In the northwestern part of uprooted Iraq and in the east of war-torn Syria there was, apparently, room enough not only for the government forces and the Free Syrian Army, but also for the rise of a third major player: ISIS, later known as IS.

Without Bush’s idiotic invasion of Iraq, in other words, there would never have been an IS.

Millions of people, including myself, protested against this in 2003, and those protests were worldwide. And, damn it, we were right. Not that we were able to see twelve years into the future, we were not quite that clairvoyant. But now we understand: what happened on Friday night in Paris was an indirect result of the martial rhetoric used by your colleague Bush in September of 2001.

And what do you go on to do then? How do you react, less than 24 hours after the attacks? By using exactly the same terminology your American confrère used back then! By singing the very same tune, for God’s sake!

You fell for it, while in full possession of your senses, Monsieur le Président. You fell for it, because you felt rowdies like Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen breathing down you neck – and you already had such a reputation for being a milquetoast. You fell for it. Elections are coming up in France on December 6 and 13, and even if they are only regional ones, after the attacks they will nevertheless be dominated by the issue of national security. You fell for it, because you handed over precisely what the terrorists were hoping for: a declaration of war. You gladly accepted their invitation to jihad. With your attempt at a firm reaction you are running a gigantic risk of allowing the spiral of violence to escalate even further. That seems less than wise to me.

You talked about a “terrorist army”. First of all, there is no such thing. It is a contradiction in terms. A “terrorist army” is sort of like “bulimic dieting”.

Countries and groups may have an army; if they don’t succeed in putting one together, they may choose for terrorism, i.e., for incidental actions with a maximum of psychological impact, rather than a structural military expansion with geopolitical ambitions.

But an army? Sit back and think: at this point we don’t know whether the attackers were Syria veterans who had returned or who had been deployed. We don’t know whether the attacks were planned in the Caliphate or in the banlieue. And although there would seem to be evidence pointing to a Syrian masterplan (the synchronization with an attack in Lebanon and perhaps even on a Russian passenger plane), it is still striking that the IS communique came in awfully late and contained nothing that was not already making the rounds on the Internet. Was this a case of coordination, or of recuperation?

By the same token, we are talking here about eight totally unhinged individuals, probably former French citizens who returned from Syria, where they gained experience with explosive devices and firearms and where they were submersed in totalitarian ideology, crypto-theology and wartime activities. Monsters is what they were molded into, each and every one of them, but not necessarily an army.

The IS communique praised the “accurately chosen” locations for the attacks, your own government services also stressed the culprits’ professionalism: as far as that goes, you speak each other’s language. But that’s not what it looks like, is it? The three who went to Stade de France, where you were attending the friendly match with Germany, seem to have been amateurs. Apparently they were hoping to force their way in, perhaps to assassinate you, who knows. But anyone who blows themselves up next to a McDonald’s and succeeds in dragging only one other person to their death along with them is a lousy terrorist. Anyone who kills only four people in the course of three suicide bombings is a klutz. Anyone who enters a theater with four companions and tries to slaughter the whole audience without barricading the emergency exits first is not exactly a brilliant strategist. Anyone who hops out of a car and opens fire on a few sidewalk cafes occupied only by unarmed, innocent people is not a competent military tactician but a coward, an asshole, a completely deranged loner who has put his fate in the hands of other completely deranged loners. A pack of lone wolves, that’s possible too.

Your analysis pointing to a “terrorist army” doesn’t hold water. Your term “act of war” is extremely tendentious, even if that bellicose rhetoric has been shamelessly adopted by Mark Rutte in the Netherlands and Jan Jambon in Belgium. In your attempt to allay the fears of the nation, you have risked making the world less safe. In your attempt to speak out forcefully, you have shown weakness.

There are other ways of being firm besides pounding the drums of war. Immediately after the attacks in his country, Norwegian prime minister Stoltenberg made an outspoken plea for “more democracy, more openness, more participation”. In your speech you referred to liberty. You would have done well to also refer to those other two values of the French republic: equality and fraternity. At this juncture, it seems to me, there is a greater need for that than for your highly questionable wartime rhetoric.

Joop Jansen November 16, 2015 at 12:19 am | Permalink

MY OPINION: what happened in Paris can also happen in my country the Netherlands, well they say they are people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods … This remains the problem that young people in those areas do not feel represented by the institutional political practice. They feel pressed into a corner … they do not count …. If you want a job with a name like Mohammed..forget it.. It is suggested that also spontaneous events that disrupt public order may have a political meaning, as they show that they have the idea they not to count in society. There lies the problem if you exclude people they rebel and that is their right. Politics plays a very large role but wish to close the eyes. Wilders and Le Pen etc are also partly to blame. ….

Miss Castello November 15, 2015 at 11:17 am | Permalink

“Can Hollande now change his tune?”

Depends whose hymn-sheet he’s singing from. He who lives by the sword first has to buy it……

...and who are the victims...innocent civilians