I highly recommend Nidra Poller’s 5-part series,
Part 1 can be found here – click.
Part 2 can be found here – click.
Part 3 can be found here – click.
Part 4 can be found here – click.
Part 5 can be found here – click.
Five facts on the Champs Elysees attack
Thirty hours after the Champs Elysées shooting, here are Five facts on the Champs Elysées attack, which took place in the country’s most famous avenue.
Read my article here.
Carlos the Jackal gets 3d life sentence
Following up on the prior post,
The self-styled revolutionary, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez and is now 67, was convicted of a 1974 grenade attack on a Paris shop.
Ramirez threw a grenade into the shopping area, killing two and injuring 34 others, the court found.
He denied the charges and called the trial, 43 years later, “absurd”.
Born into a wealthy Venezuelan family, Ramirez studied in Moscow before joining a militant group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He converted to Islam in 1975.
. . .The self-professed “professional revolutionary” has been found guilty of four bomb attacks:
- In March 1982, a bomb exploded on a train between Paris and Toulouse, killing five people and wounding 28
- A month later a car bomb attack was mounted on an anti-Syrian newspaper in Paris, with one passer-by killed and 60 injured
- On New Year’s Eve 1983, a bomb on a TGV fast train between Marseille and Paris killed three people and wounded 13
- A bomb at a Marseille train station killed two
The Jackal plays the victim
Venezuela-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, best known as Carlos the Jackal, was blowing kisses to his Paris audience in court yesterday
In an often rambling statement in the Paris court on Monday, the 67-year-old said that any murders he had committed were carried out in the name of “the revolution”.
“No-one has executed more people than me in the Palestinian resistance,” he said, “[and] I am the only survivor. In all the fighting, there were collateral victims, it’s unfortunate,” he said.
Wearing a jacket with a red pocket handkerchief, Ramirez smiled and blew kisses upon first appearing in the dock before kissing the hand of his lawyer and long-term partner, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre.
He then embarked on a diatribe in which he condemned wealthy “Zionist interests” who he said were eager to crush anybody who stood up to Israeli aggression.
He said that lawyers prosecuting him for the shopping centre attack in Paris 43 years ago were “scavengers” for forcing him back to court.
You may recall that Carlos the Jackal, when sentenced to life in jail for the 1975 murders of two French secret agents and a Lebanese informant, earned the high praise of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, who called him “a brother.”
UPDATE
Linked to by Silvio Canto. Thank you!
France: Royal lays an egg while in Cuba
Former presidential candidate, mother of four of president François Hollande‘s children, and current Minister of Ecology Ségolène Royal went to Fidel Castro’s funeral to lay an egg:
On Saturday, the former socialist presidential candidate called Castro a “monument of history” while rejecting accusations of human rights violations against him.
Her comments had attracted criticism in France.
She said that we must deviate from any systematic condemnation and that it was up to historians to take stock of this history. “I did not come here to take stock of the Fidel Castro period, but no one can deny that there is a negative and a positive,” she said.
Hollande’s ex also had to be reminded that Cuba is not a democracy:
French government spokesman Stéphane Le Foll stressed that “Cuba is not a democracy and there have been problems related to various freedoms for a long time.”
Royal really did this,
During the tribute to Castro, Royal said that in Cuba “when the international community requests a list of political prisoners, there are none.”
Amnesty International offered to send her updated lists of current political prisoners (link in French).
While we wait for Hollande to condemn the statements of his administration’s 3rd highest official, Danilo Maldonado “El Sexto” is doing hard time (h/t Babalu) without being charged,
Danilo Maldonado, known as “El Sexto,” was taken by Cuban security agents the day after the death of former leader Fidel Castro. Maldonado, 33, still has not been charged, but those familiar with the graffiti artist’s actions that morning say that he posted a Facebook message seemingly gloating over Castro’s death and urging people to “come out to the streets…and ask for liberty.”
Too bad Ségolène couldn’t drop by and try to visit him.
Over at the Vatican, Pope Francis expressed sorrow on the death of “His Excellency Mister Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz.”
Not exactly what I would call the dead S.O.B.
France: ISIS member beheads Catholic priest in his own church UPDATED – and filmed it
While no one at the DNC mentioned ISIS in yesterday’s speeches, two Islamists stormed into the church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen during mass shouting Allahu Akbar, and beheaded Fr. Jacques Hamel, age 84.
There are also reports that one of the attackers was a local resident who was under electronic tag surveillance having been jailed in France for trying to travel to Syria in 2015. His bail terms allowed him to be unsupervised between 8.30am and 12.30pm – the attack happened between 9am and 11am.
Ponder that for a moment.
The Daily Mail lists,
Today’s attack is the latest to hit Europe in what has been a year of bloodshed on the continent:
July 24:Festival suicide bombing – A failed Syrian asylum seeker set off an explosive device near an open-air music festival in the southern city of Ansbach that killed himself and wounded a dozen others.
The 27-year-old had spent time in a psychiatric facility, while the regional authorities said an there was ‘likely’ a jihadist motive for the attack.
However a spokesman for the interior ministry later said there was as yet ‘no credible evidence’ of a link to Islamic extremism.
July 24: Knife attack – A Syrian refugee was arrested after killing a Polish woman with a large kebab knife at a snack bar in the southwestern city of Reutlingen, in an incident police said did not bear the hallmarks of a ‘terrorist attack’ and was more likely a crime of passion.
Three people were also injured in the assault, which ended when the 21-year-old assailant was deliberately struck by a BMW driver, believed to be the snack bar owner’s son, trying to stop the man.
July 22: Munich mall mass shooting – David Ali Sonboly, 18, shot dead nine people at a Munich shopping mall before turning the gun on himself, having spent a year planning the rampage.
Police said that the German-Iranian was ‘obsessed’ with mass killers like Norwegian right-wing fanatic Anders Behring Breivik and had no links to the Islamic State group.
July 18: Train axe attack – A 17-year-old migrant wielding an axe and a knife went on a rampage on a regional train, seriously injuring four members of a tourist family from Hong Kong and a German passer-by.
ISIS group subsequently released a video purportedly featuring the assailant, named by media as Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, announcing he would carry out an ‘operation’ in Germany, and presenting himself as a ‘soldier of the caliphate’.
He is believed to have been Afghan or Pakistani.
July 14: Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel ploughed a truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day in the French Riviera city of Nice, killing 84 people and injuring over 300.
The Nice attack was the third major strike on France in 18 months and was claimed by ISIS.
March 22: Suicide attacks claimed by ISIS kill 32 people and wound more than 300 at the Brussels airport and Maelbeek metro station, near European Union offices. They appear to have been carried out by members of the same cell that committed attacks in Paris four months earlier.
November 13, 2015: Coordinated suicide attacks in Paris kill 130 people and wound more than 350 at the Bataclan concert hall, cafes and the national stadium. ISIS claims responsibility for the attacks.
Related: ISIS Slaughtering Christians “In Their Beds”
And, Few targets are softer than churches. Church attack nine years ago: Sunday horror: Church shootings in Colorado; gunman killed by armed female church security staffer
UPDATE
The Daily Mail confirms that the Islamist knifemen forced priest, 84, to kneel and filmed his death as they slit his throat
Two ISIS knifemen who stormed a church in Normandy forced an elderly priest to kneel before filming themselves butchering him and performing a ‘sermon in Arabic’ at the altar, a terrified witness has revealed.
BREAKING: Nun who escaped says #Normandy church attackers forced Father Jacques to his knees, slit his throat & filmed execution #Rouen
— Lisa Daftari (@LisaDaftari) July 26, 2016
Blogging on Latin America will resume shortly.
Last night in Nice
Last night an Islamist man named Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel plowed his rented truck at 40mph through a large crowd of people watching the Bastille Day fireworks at the Nice promenade.
Read my post, Last night in Nice.
Brazil: Brazilian member of ISIS planned attack against French Olympic team
Nothing in the U.S. media on this, but reported by France’s Libération and Brazil’s O Globo:
France’s Director of Military Intelligence, General Christophe Gomart, testified to the Parliamentary Select Committee investigating the 2015 terrorist attacks in France that a Brazilian national who belongs to ISIS planned to attack the French delegation at the Rio Olympic games.
Gen. Gomart would not go into detail about the possible arrest and the exact location of this Brazilian member of ISIS, who may not necessarily be in Brazil, according to Libération.
The information, which should have remained classified, was appended to a 1,000 page report published on Tuesday on the website of the National Assembly, which is how Libération came across it.
Libération: La délégation française aux JO de Rio, cible d’un projet d’attentat de l’EI [French delegation to Rio Olympic Games targeted by ISIS]
O Globo: Jornal diz que brasileiro do EI planejaria ato terrorista contra delegação francesa no Rio
Translated into English from the O Globo article in Portuguese, Brazilian member of the Islamic state planned to attack French delegation in Rio, newspaper says
General Christophe Gomart: At least three sources with references to websites Daech [acronym of the Islamic State] in several Syrian cities could also be evaluated thanks to the knowledge and DRM catches [Direction du Renseignement Militaire] (…) These changes enable you to recover and confirm the information in the theaters of operations [military term].
George Fenech (Member): I had not heard of this Brazilian who intended to commit attacks against the French delegation at the Olympic Games. How do you know that?
General Christophe Gomart: From our partners.
In the evaluation of the newspaper, “our partners” would be countries with which France contributes in the fight against terrorism. The “Libération” highlights that Brazil plans an “anti-terrorist center” composed of US, British, Spanish and French experts.
Brazil’s security forces are on high alert. On Tuesday they released a man whose wife – in the middle of a marital fight – called the police, accusing him of plotting a terrorist bombing, after finding no evidence.
They are still looking for the GITMO guy who went missing from Uruguay, though.
UPDATE:
Linked to by Gates of Vienna. Thank you!
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 27
- Next Page »