http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/frances-anti-jewish-terrorism-epidemic/print/
Last March, when the French Muslim terrorist Mohamed Merah murdered a teacher and three children at a French Jewish school in Toulouse, a media firestorm resulted. Things have not gotten easier for French Jews since then. As the New York Times noted this week, French Jews say anti-Semitic threats have in fact escalated since March, Merah’s act having stirred “empathy” and “emulation.”
Indeed, the main thing that appears to have prevented further catastrophes is good police work. On Saturday French police raided the Strasbourg apartment of a 33-year-old French Muslim named Jeremy Sidney and ended up killing him in a shootout. Sidney’s DNA had been found on a grenade that, in September, was thrown into a kosher supermarket in Sarcelles (near Paris), wounding a customer.
Sidney, it turns out, was born in Melun, France, got a two-year sentence for drug trafficking in 2008, and converted to Islam while in prison. And he was no isolated case. As part of the same far-reaching operation on Saturday, police arrested twelve other suspected Islamic terrorists in Paris, Tours, Strasbourg, and Cannes.
“All,” reports CNN, “are being held on suspicion of…manufacturing deadly explosives, illegal possession of weapons and attempted homicide of police officers. Three of them have criminal records for drug trafficking, theft or violence….” AP says all of them were, like Sidney, “French and recent converts to Islam.”
CNN also tells us: “Police seized a number of items such as ammunition, a list of ‘Israelite’ organizations in and around Paris, a publication produced by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, wills, computer equipment and 27,000 euros ($35,000) in cash….”
As part of the probe, on Wednesday police also found bomb-making materials in an underground parking lot near Paris.
Israeli commentator Boaz Bismuth notes that one of the cell members, Jan Ansako, “was addicted to fundamentalist websites and uploaded [to his own site] photos of dead Palestinian babies and a photograph of an Israeli soldier aiming his weapon…. ‘How can you not hate this cursed nation?’ he wrote.”
The above-quoted New York Times article reports that these suspects “were described in various news reports as admirers of Mr. Merah, and some of them even called his actions ‘the battle of Toulouse.’”
Bismuth adds: “Although Jews are not the only targets on this terror cell’s list, they appear at the top.”
