Gun attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo kills 11

[Joe Hillshoist]

About Israel, however, there IS an interesting and relevant point to be made here.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015 ... -cartoons/

Fair enough Joe, I understand your position and let me be clear, I was not and never have tried to pin this or anything on Israel, the players that I am speaking of are way, way above Israel. What I had to say had absolutely nothing at all to do with Israel. I am talking about global elites who stand to benefit from the war on terror and have a need to continue to vilify Muslims. This may be exactly what it is, two brothers avenging their Prophet, or it could be something else entirely, I do not know but I tend towards the latter.

Thanks for that article. Some of it does accurately reflect the way about the issue. I don't think jews or Israel "control the media" per se, but there are well organised groups of Jews and israelis whose interests often overlap and who are dedicated to promoting their world view and challenging those that question it.

Here's an example from Australia. With a cartoon and someone who lost their media job...

Lots of people defend and conflate isaeli and jewish interests, enough that some other people claim the existence of a "Jewish lobby". And informally there certainly is, but is it any different from any other lobby group - ie is it organised, able to control and direct its communications and able to mobilise a base of grass roots (or otherwise) supporters. there really isn't anything sinister about this in itself - a society like ours should thrive on communication of ideas - on lobbying. Lots of groups do the same thing with varying degrees of success. One group that don't seem to be allowed this recourse is Muslims in western society. That context has to be acknowledged wrt charlie Hebdo and I don't think it has been.

And no one's ever said Jeebus Malala or je suis Malala or whatever it is.*

* Maybe they have, but they've not received the sort of support that we've seen recently.

[blankly]

Was there a reward offered for the murder of Charb? http://sturdyblog.wordpress.com/

[smiths]

but is it any different from any other lobby group

yes, the speed and consistency with which critics of Israel are silenced or removed in 'the west' is unparallelled,

but again, aren't we heading kind of off-topic here?

[Joe Hillshoist]

I dunno, its around the topic given this attack did target a particular thing in our culture, as well as the individuals who made it. Whatever the facts of this attack "terrorism" especially this act has implications. Maybe that needs its own thread.

[coffin_dodger]

I dunno, its around the topic given this attack did target a particular thing in our culture...

Jewish patrol cars out in force in London amid fears of copycat attack in wake of kosher store siege in Paris Daily Mail 11 Jan 2014

Extra Jewish security patrol cars and police were out in force in North-West London yesterday following the kosher store siege in Paris.

The cars look very similar to police vehicles and bear the security group’s name ‘Shomrim’ – Hebrew for ‘guards’ – along the sides and back.

The Orthodox organisation, which works closely with the Metropolitan Police, tweeted: ‘Following events in Paris we will have on extra patrols throughout NW London over Shabbos [ the Jewish sabbath].'

Shomrim volunteers receive police training and uniforms, including knife-proof vests.

cont - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2905047/Jewish-patrol-cars-force-London-amid-fears-copycat-attack.html

[Joe Hillshoist]

I was referring to free speech and it was free speech in the form of a lefty satirical magazine not some racist prick calling for the slaughter of all darkies. I guess thats how its been framed in my part of the world.

I'm not surprised by what you've posted tho. And I'm not really disturbed by it either... I mean i'm no more disturbed by this than by any private security agency or the cops for that matter. I have no problem with ethnic minorities looking after their own safety and given whats just happened that includes jews. Anti jewish violence has never gone away, sometimes there is more of it, sometimes less. That is a reality independent of what is happening in Palestine. Its not the only racist violence there is, but it does exist. So there is a valid re...

edit

...ason for something like Shomrim to exist. I'm in Melbourne at the moment - a stinking city and there's G4S security vans everywhere. Thats a way bigger deal than Shomrim doing extra patrols in the wake of a terrorist attack.

[coffin_dodger]

Thats a way bigger deal than Shomrim doing extra patrols in the wake of a terrorist attack.

I do have a problem with private security forces 'defending their own' in times of crisis. It creates deeper divisions and winds up the locals.

Funnily enough, I don't see many patrol cars on the streets of London driven by black people looking out for their rights, or Arab patrols looking out for the rights of Muslims. This is absolutely unprecedented on the streets of my home. I am shocked.

[Luther Blissett]

6 Ideas For a Cop-free World mentions these kinds of localized "guardian angel"-style patrols.

[MacCruiskeen]

I was amazed to see this at the subway news-stand today. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (Germany`s biggest "quality" Sunday paper -- a boring pompous right-wing rag, but read by all the movers `n` shakers in politics and "business") had an enormous headline* on the front page of their print edition saying:

And already they`re starting to believe it was a plot
Following the Paris attack, German Muslims suspect a conspiracy against Islam

pdf link to German original

-- followed by a lengthy description of their "interviews" (i.e., informal chats) in Berlin with "around 30" "Muslims" (i.e., people of Turkish or Arabic descent, many of whom are about as Muslim as I am Catholic). Nearly all of them are deeply sceptical about the story they`re being told by the media, and suspect the involvement of Western intelligence services. (Incidentally, no interviews with "non-Muslim" Germans are reported, or with any of the other hundreds of nationalities who live here. Why not? Presumably so that the FAZ can pretend that all this wacky "conspiracy theorising" is a purely "Muslim" phenomenon, which it most certainly isn`t.)

An equally huge cartoon fills the other half of the front page. It depicts two shadowy gunmen, one of them shouting "Lügenpresse!" ("Lying media!") -- the message being, I suppose, that only masked thugs with Kalashnikovs could doubt the sacred word of the German press.

Anyway, here it is (pdf - and if anyone knows how to copy-and-paste this to the thread, please do so, I`d like to save it):

http://www.onleihe.de/static/content/fa ... 150111.pdf

There have certainly been similar large-scale propaganda attacks on "conspiracy theorists" in Germany in the past, most especially after 9/11 -- but it took the mass media about two years to get to get going with that campaign. For a long time they just put the population`s growing scepticism on "ignore". But then it just grew until it was unignorable. The FAZ has been extremely quick off the mark this time. Looks to me like a pre-emptive strike. It also looks like protesting too much. It is also strikingly subdued and well-mannered in tone, especially when compared to the vicious hysterics of Der Spiegel and German TV a decade ago.)

PS Strangely enough, this gigantic front-page headline story-plus-cartoon appears to be completely absent from the online edition.

*German: Und schon keimt der Glaube an ein Komplott. Keimen = germinate. "And already the belief in a plot is germinating". Kind of hard to translate snappily. It combines an air of jaded sophistication ("Oh Lord, they`re at it again. how predictable....") with a suggestion of something sinister and unwholesome growing underground.

ON EDIT: completed the sub-headline by adding the words "against Islam", which I`d forgotten. And thanks to SLAD for posting the image (below)!

[seemslikeadream]

[Luther Blissett]

…So, the question is:

Why would two highly-trained, highly-competent professional killers waste time so unnecessarily and take such unnecessary risks?

To which two possible answers come to mind:

1) They knew they were taking no risk.

2) They did it so that they could be filmed doing it. (Who made that film, by the way? He was remarkably well-placed, and also remarkably cool.)

I thought I could answer the last question, but now it's looking like I can't. I thought it was filmed by a journalist in the same building, but I can't find that information again. If my memory serves, that was the idea being floated in the immediate aftermath.

[seemslikeadream]

can someone translate that German article?

[MacCruiskeen]

Luther, I thought it was (allegedly) filmed by someone in the house opposite the magazine offices. But I don`t know. Whoever he was, they can always plausibly claim that he wants to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

Certainly the attack would have been a much less effective mass-media Spectacle without that close-up film, made from a grandstand seat, of a brutal, merciless and entirely superfluous murder. If a picture`s worth a thousand words, then a moving picture must be worth a million or more.

Also (for whose benefit?), it allowed us to hear them shouting "Allahu Akhbar!", thus handily confirming that The Islamist Threat to the West is not dead, even if it smells a little off. The audio track may in fact have been the main point of the film.

-- What do you make of that "winding-up" hand signal? To me it looks obvious that he is signalling to someone ahead of him, further down the street, and not to the accomplice directly behind him, whom he has no reason whatsoever to make any kind of hand-signal to.

[MacCruiskeen]

can someone translate that German article?

SLAD, thanks for posting that image of the front page. It`s really not really worth translating the whole thing, though, and I can`t face it right now. (I`m off out in a little while.) It just quotes a bunch of ordinary people who are asking the obvious questions ("Who benefits? And who will suffer?") and who suspect that some combination of the US, Israeli and French intelligence agencies may well have had a hand in it. They also say, without exception, that they condemn the attack.

People in Germany have good historical reasons for mistrusting what their rulers tell them.

[Hunter]

You would think they would have better things to do than address ridiculous conspiracy theories on the front page.


Unless of course...