Thursday 29 March 2012

How French Counterterrorists Improved On Breivik's Cockup To Make Muslims Look Like Growing Threats

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Instead of looking backwards in light of Anders Breivik’s massacre, we should look forward to the shootings around Toulouse in France which killed three French soldiers of North African origin, and four Jews, three of them immigrants from Israel.The shootings certainly seem a right-wing improvement on what Breivik did since they set up an appropriate fallguy for the killing, what deranged Breivik had attempted all by himself after the failure of the recruited Muslim suicide bomber to do the job properly in Stockholm on December 11,2010.

The killers in southern France, especially the assassin who was described by a witnesses of the Montauban shootings as being blond, fattish, had a tatoo on his body, and scar on his left cheek, decided to set up Mohamed Merah as the killer. Merah had all the right credentials for being he as he had tried to enlist ‘jihadists’ for the wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He was even caught at an American Army checkpoint in Kandahar, and shipped back to France. Washington put him on its ‘no fly’ lists. After that French counterterrorists warned Spanish counterterrorists of his coming for a visit to attend some kind of Al-Qaeda conference, he even went to Israel, it seems, as an alleged tourist.

Little wonder that he was on French watch lists, and the French Ministry of Interior acknowledged that he had long been on its “radar”.

When the first French soldier was shot in Toulouse, its counterterrorists arrested three notorious neo-Nazis who had been expelled from the French Army because of their Nazi antics, but they were released because they had alibis – what seems to have been a deliberate diversion to protect the real killers.

After the second shootings on March 15th, the conspirators, it seems, decided to increase the entrapment by sending threatening letters to two Parisien synagogues, stating:”You are the people of Satin.Hell is waiting for you.”Since these were received before the killing of the four Jews, they certainly seemed part of an on-going conspiracy which had to be ended then as quickly as possible – what was indicated after the same assassin – dressed in black,and carrying a video camera on his chest like Breivik – throwing away the Colt .45 pistol nearby after the killings.

Then the alleged tape of the shootings was sent on a computer stick to Al Jazeera's Paris office where bits of the shootings were recorded while excerpts from the Koran are recited allegedly by Merah - what was finally acknowledged being received early this week, and the French President Sarkozy called successfully for it not to be released by the media because of the distress it would cause the victims' familities.

Then the counterterrorists tried to kill the scapegoat Merah by knocking down his door in the early hours of Thursday morning, hoping that he could be cut down by suprise, but he fought off the attempt.

In the following standoff – the French authorities just waiting until they had spread stories of his alleged confession, and placing the video film of his alleged shootings on some internet site – they killed him in the most destructive way to make it look like there had really been some struggle when he could have been taken alive with use of a tear gas attack.

The only things left for the French authorities to do was to claim that he wanted to die an apparent hero, his killing of the Jews was not planned but was improvised when he missed killing another French soldier, and dragging in his older brother and mother as part of the apparent conspiracy.

The killers of the seven people seem to be still on the loose - what the French authorities are playing down by claiming that they are still looking for an accomplice.