Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Will France wake up in time? - Boaz Bismuth



by Boaz Bismuth


On Sunday, as France was still trying to figure out how to digest the previous day's attack, a French national of North African origin carried out a vehicular ramming attack in Dijon "for the children of Palestine and Chechnya." He was quickly declared mentally ill. And 24 hours later, a 37-year-old man ran over 17 people at a Christmas market in Nantes. In both of these incidents, witnesses heard the attackers shouting, "Allahu akbar." And in both cases, French authorities made sure to explain that not every mentally ill person is a terrorist.

There is an old French saying, "Let's call a cat a cat," the equivalent of the English saying, "Let's call a spade a spade." This phrase has unfortunately been highly relevant in France in recent days ahead of Christmas and New Year's. In three cities (Joue-les-Tours, Dijon and Nantes) in three days, a series of incidents -- or attacks, if you will -- have taken place in which young local men have carried out grave acts of violence (in one case a stabbing, and in the other two vehicular ramming of pedestrians) while shouting, "Allahu akbar" ("God is great"). This has caused the French people to wonder if these were individual unrelated acts, as French authorities quickly asserted, or if they represented a dangerous jihadist awakening in the homeland of human rights.

"We must call a cat a cat," the French news website Medias-Presse-Info wrote on Tuesday, stating that at least the Joue-les-Tours incident should be called a terrorist attack. 

In Joue-les-Tours on Saturday, Bertrand Nzohabonayo, a French national born in Burundi, went to a police station and stabbed three police officers before being shot to death. Nzohabonayo had posted an Islamic State group flag on his Facebook page before the attack and his brother had planned to join Islamic State. So Nzohabonayo was certainly not a righteous gentile.

So after Saturday's attack, all of France should have been alarmed. A French citizen had answered Islamic State's call for "true Muslims" who could not join the fighting in Syria and Iraq to conduct acts of jihad in their home countries. Nzohabonayo did this with the simplest possible means -- a knife.

Was the recent running over of a soldier in Canada or the hostage taking in Sydney the direct result of Islamic State influence over Muslims in Western countries? It is reasonable to think so.

On Sunday, as France was still trying to figure out how to digest the previous day's attack, a French national of North African origin carried out a vehicular ramming attack in Dijon "for the children of Palestine and Chechnya." He was quickly declared mentally ill. And 24 hours later, a 37-year-old man ran over 17 people at a Christmas market in Nantes. In both of these incidents, witnesses heard the attackers shouting, "Allahu akbar." And in both cases, French authorities made sure to explain that not every mentally ill person is a terrorist.

Even French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a voice of sanity in today's West who just a few days ago said France has never faced as serious a jihadist terror threat as it does now, said on Tuesday that the recent incidents in France were not connected.

It may be true that the attackers themselves were not connected with each other, but they were bound together by their enthusiasm for jihadist terrorism against a country that has disappointed them. To cure a disease, there must be an accurate diagnosis. But as of now, the French prefer to call a cat a sheep.


Boaz Bismuth

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=11007

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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