RUTHFULLY YOURS

UPDATE MIDNIGHT

The correct spelling of the killer’s name is: Adel Kermiche.

Precisions on the judicial structure: for the past 30 years, all cases involving terrorism are theoretically handled by a specialized anti-terrorism section in which all the personnel, judges, magistrates, investigating judges, and the Procureur (prosecutor) are theoretically expert at handling these cases. The parquet, then, would be the chamber of the Procureur de Paris, François Molins, that opposed the liberation of Adel Kermiche.

But let us not get into the complexities of the French judicial system. And let us agree that “terrorism,” meaning jihad, is a challenge to all our democracies.

Debate is raging today and will continue to generate a mixture of light and noise for many days to come. All opinions, within the limits of decency, are aired. The government defends its position, its decisions, its management and leadership from top to bottom. Every proposal for strict measures and more rigorous application of those that already exist is rejected as an insult to the Constitution. The opposition is accused of grandstanding, flexing its muscles and bellowing out war cries, ignoring the values of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Le vivre ensemble [getting along together…but it really means getting along with Muslims]is constantly set forth as a kind of ultimate value that we must protect at all costs. All sorts of vague projects are attributed to Daesh and its ilk. They want to create divisions in our society, turn us against Muslims, spoil our diversity, provoke a religious war, make us relinquish our democratic principles and become autocratic and violent like they are.

Marine Le Pen said: they don’t want to divide us, they want to kill us

When priests have to fear their throats will be slit while celebrating morning Mass, no one is safe in France.
But did 85 years old Rev. Jacques Hamel had to die?
The murder of Father Hamel in a Catholic church at the center of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Rouen, Normandy, could have been prevented. The French security forces knew this church was targeted by ISIS when they captured some ISIS hit-lists months ago. Also, the attackers were known for their affiliation with ISIS.
The latest Islamic terrorists’ attack in France demonstrates without any doubt the complete incompetence of the French authorities at all levels. It illustrates either the total disdain for its own citizens or its inability to understand and act on the threat that is destabilizing the French society. This time, a Catholic church was the target. Previously there were attacks on synagogues, Jewish Kosher stores, a newspaper, concert halls, night clubs, sporting events and national celebrations including the mass killing in Nice during Bastille Day fireworks. These, in addition to many other smaller, unreported or underreported attacks throughout the country.
But the French authorities have done worse than nothing. Why the incompetence?
When public or private institutions are threatened, the first step is to try and eliminate or neutralize the source of the threat. If this fails, strong security is put in place to protect the threatened sites.
Regarding perimeter security, this church was left entirely unprotected. There were no guards. The two terrorists (there could be more, this is what we know about now) entered the church through an unlocked back door. Why was the door unlocked? Why didn’t the church have any protection? Responsibility for this falls on the shoulders of the French authorities and, perhaps, on the church if the warnings were passed to them, which is not known at present. Clearly, the congregants in the Church, and those who were taken hostage, including nuns, had no inkling they were on a hit list
Next; at least one of the terrorists was known to the police, and should have been on their terrorist watch list. He was arrested and sent to prison for an attempt to join ISIS in Syria. His computer contained the list of churches targeted for attacks, including this one. He was released from prison last March under parole to live with his parents and was wearing an electronic tag. But, under the terms of his release, he was allowed to do anything he wanted during the morning hours. Thus, his electronic tag was not monitored from 830 until 1230 every day. The attack at the church, nearby his parents’ home, in the center of Saint-Etienne du Rouvray took place at 9:45 am.
Why would the French judicial system parole a known terrorist? Why would they disregard extremely worrisome intelligence and not provide adequate protection to the church, and to their citizens?

UPDATE 3:30PM
A third person has been taken into custody. No further information on his identity but this is presumably the person that was picked up near the church right after the attack.
Precisions on the informally identified killer:
According to la Tribune de Genève, A.K. the 19 year-old Frenchman involved in the church attack, was arrested at Geneva airport on May 14, 2015, after he was sent back from Turkey. He had made two unsuccessful attempts to reach Syria, first via Munich, then via Geneva. He spent a few days in prison there before being extradited to France.
BACKGROUND
The Interior Ministry is currently embroiled in controversy about security, or its absence, at the site of the July 14th fireworks display in Nice, that ended with the murderous attack by a jihadist at the wheels of a 19-ton truck.
Sandra Bertin, a municipal police officer in charge, that fateful evening, of monitoring CCTV images claims the was pressured by someone from the Interior Ministry to falsify her report, by indicating that the better-trained better-armed national police were guarding the entry to the closed zone of the Promenade des Anglais. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who denies the accusation, is suing her for libel. The policewoman has not backed down. Libération daily published video allegedly showing that no national police were at the entry point, and the police cars that supposedly blocked traffic on the Promenade were in fact lined up along the road, not parked horizontally to physically block traffic.
The municipality refused a demand by government officials to erase all its CCTV images for the 24 hours surrounding the attack. (Copies of those images were already in government hands.)
Calls for stricter measures from the parliamentary opposition, les Républicains, are systematically dismissed by the government as playing politics. Journalists seem to like this scenario because they repeat it constantly to fill in the gaps in new developments and information. The Républicain primary will be held next fall so, wink wink, the various candidates want to show how tough they are.
The Front National curses both houses, blaming them for disastrous policies over the past 30 years.
Former president and future hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy enjoins the government to implement proposals his party has made for improved security. François Hollande says we are at war, Nicolas Sarkozy says we are at war: they don’t mean the same thing and don’t propose the same measures: Hollande raises constitutional arguments to oppose Sarkozy’s demand for administrative detention of flagged terror suspects. The president is convoking representatives of “all” confessions to make an umpteenth show of unity in the face of diversity.
Meanwhile, the annual festive Paris Plages operation is underway on the banks of the Seine. Last year’s invited “beach,” Tel Aviv on the Seine, provoked controversy, placated by authorization of a Gaza beach, animated by the BDS movement, right next to the Tel Aviv sector. This year the guest is Jasmin Beach, and the beachfront city of Sousse is honored. No protests, no complaints. The jihad truck driver came from M’kasen, a hotbed of Islamism a short drive from Sousse where 38 infidels were gunned down on the beach not long ago.
Daesh has threatened the same treatment for French beaches.
French churches had been warned that they were a target.
UPDATE 17:10
One of the nuns that was in the church when the killers arrived testified on BFM TV:
The killers recorded the whole scene. They forced the priest to kneel, they pronounced what seemed like a ceremonial in Arabic. When they started to slit his throat, she escaped, and notified the police.
According to some official sources, they arrived “quickly”…within 20 minutes.
N.B. Hollande says we are at war, meaning in Syria and Iraq. Sarkozy includes France. There’s the difference. The opposition is calling for a quasi-military domestic response to a war that the government is treating as a criminal affair.
One of the proposals made by the opposition and rejected by the governing party last week was to prohibit early release (for good behavior?) or parole of prisoners sentenced for terrorist acts or plots. Prison terms in France are generally reduced by one half. The prisons are overcrowded!

Jihad attack on little French church

Nidra Poller

As jihad attacks strike quick and fast, the otherwise ineffectual French government is at least supplying ample information in record time. Nothing about not knowing the motivations of the killers.

Here, briefly, is what has been reported at this hour:

The killers entered the church, slit the throat of the 84 year-old priest and knifed a second, as yet unidentified person who is fighting for his/her life. The church is in a quiet working class neighborhood that stands next to a not so quiet “diversity” neighborhood. One of the killers has been informally identified as coming from that troubled neighborhood.

And this is what is going to send French society into a spin: the killer from the tough neighborhood tried to join Daesh in Syria. Only made it to Turkey. The Turkish authorities sent him back to France. He spent a brief couple of weeks in jail before being released with an electronic bracelet. The judicial wing contested the liberation but the courts confirmed it. Presumably he was wearing the electronic bracelet when he slit the priest’s throat!

The German people are suffering the consequences of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s reckless open door “refugee” policy. Merkel laid down the welcome mat for around a million migrants last year, many of them from troubled areas of the Middle East and South Asia, including Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been four violent attacks in Germany within just the past week. Two of them were committed by Syrian migrants. A third was committed by an Afghan asylum seeker. The fourth, a mass shooting in Munich, was committed by the German-born son of Iranian asylum-seekers.

ISIS had forewarned that attacks in Germany were coming. Shortly after the Brussels airport attack, ISIS sent out a call for an attack on Germany’s Cologne airport. An ISIS video threatened to turn Germany into a “battle field” and targeted Chancellor Merkel for murder. After the attack in Nice, ISIS supporters celebrated on social media and said that Germany was next.

Now that the attacks have started, German government officials are trying to calm peoples’ fears, minimizing as much as possible any connection to ISIS. Chancellor Merkel’s Chief of Staff Peter Altmaier actually claimed early last week, after the first attack, that terrorist acts committed by refugees are “not larger or smaller than that in the rest of the population.”

However, the official explanations, including claims as to the mental instability of the perpetrators, ignore the reality that the attackers find legitimacy for acting on their hatred from the “new normal” of violence created by the successful actions of ISIS.

At least two of the most recent attacks in Germany have been directly linked to ISIS.

A Syrian asylum seeker, whom had pledged his allegiance to ISIS, blew himself up last Sunday and injured twelve other people, outside of a wine bar in the town of Ansbach. It could have been far worse. His original target appeared to have been a music festival, but fortunately he was turned away because he did not have a ticket to the event. ISIS claimed that the suicide bomber “was a soldier of the Islamic State.”

The Afghan refugee who attacked train passengers in Germany early last week, injuring four people, two of them critically, was found to have had an ISIS flag in his room. He is reported to have shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) several times. A news agency linked to ISIS claimed the assailant “carried out the operation in answer to the calls to target the countries of the coalition fighting the Islamic State.”

A machete-wielding Syrian asylum-seeker, who killed a pregnant woman in Germany, was arrested on Sunday. The police claim that, based on the current evidence, “there is no indication that this was a terrorist attack.” Nevertheless, ISIS exploited the incident to urge more so-called “lone wolf” attacks.