Paris Terrorist Outrage

(Please see UPDATE at end)



An attack on well-known satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has killed at least 12 people, including the editor and 3 other cartoonists and 2 police officers, with at least 4 seriously and a number of others less-gravely injured. It has been reported that two (later amended to three) gunmen used assault-rifles to kill those in the office before engaging in a gunfight with police outside and using a vehicle to escape, later found abandoned in a northern Paris street. The magazine obviously lampoons many targets, but it seems clear that its satirical cartoons mocking Moslem extremists have provoked this latest awful outrage. Free speech must be defended and maintained and terrorists not permitted to prevail!

Fuller details may be read in the BBC website here, with a regularly updated news and comment feed here.

I have added this awful outrage to the permanent memorial page in my personal website; the list of crimes marked there grows ever longer unfortunately.

UPDATE (Sunday 11JAN2014 14.15 GMT) Events moved swiftly after the first killings on 7th January, so this update attempts to summarise concisely the events of the next two days until resolution of the initial and later outrages was achieved. Summary - death toll in 4 separate locations; 17 victims and 3 of the terrorists. It began on 7th January with an attack on well-known satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in which 12 people were killed, including the editor and 3 other cartoonists and 2 police officers, with a further 11 injured. The attack was carried out by two Moslem extremist gunmen and after a hide-and-seek operation across a wide area north-east of Paris, two were cornered in a printing works in Dammartin-en-Göele (Seine-et-Marne) and very close to the main Paris airport of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle two days later; they were killed by police when they exited the building firing weapons. On 8th January a police officer was shot dead in the Paris suburb of Montrouge by one or two terrorists. On 9th January, two different terrorists took hostages in a Kosher (i.e. Jewish) grocery store, resulting in the deaths of 4 of the hostages. One of these two terrorists was shot dead, the other has escaped and is being searched for although various reports indicate she may already have left France and perhaps have travelled to Syria. Free speech must be defended and maintained and terrorists not permitted to prevail by intimidating us into silence!

New York and its Islamic Center ('mosque') controversy

Amidst all the nonsense I've been hearing from the US about whether a 'mosque' should be permitted at 'Ground Zero' or not, it is a profound relief to have someone like Keith Olbermann come out and say clearly (and as usual quite loudly - that man should watch his blood pressure!) that the US should be a defender of freedom, not its oppressor. Mind you, I've been railing for years about the US's recourse to what most civilised people consider to be 'torture' and 'extra-judicial incarceration' in its response to events since '9/11', a stain upon American deomocracy that will take many years and probably decades to erase. To be clear, the so-called 'mosque' is not a mosque at all, but a multi-purpose cultural centre and although it will have a prayer room it will also have sports facilities, nor is it 'at Ground Zero', but several city blocks away and will not be visible from the old World Trade Center site. Anyway, watch this subject being aired in Keith Olbermann's unique style; incidentally he points out that a small Islamic Center has been operating nearer to 'Ground Zero' without incident since 1970, before the World Trade Center was even built:



(thru Chicken Yoghurt)

والحزن والشفقة

Eight years already



My personal memorial is here.
('wal-Hazin wal-shafaqah' - The Sorrow and the Pity - this is of course the translation of the title of a French film about World War II in France, but I think similar sentiments are evoked when we remember the events of eight years ago today in the US.)

Talibanisation grows in Pakistan and is resurgent in Afghanistan

The Guardian has a truly shocking video of a young woman being thrashed violently for not conforming with what the Taliban considers the social norms. According to the Guardian article, one of the men holding her down, whilst she screams and whimpers "Please stop it - Either kill me or stop it now" is her brother, particicpating to restore the family's 'honour'. Warning - it is very difficult to watch and made me retch when I saw it.
(thru The Spectator - Coffee House here)

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, legislation has been signed-off by President Karzai (but has apparently not yet come into effect), under conditions of extreme secrecy (no doubt because of the international outrage it was undoubtedly realised it would cause), which explicitly allows marital rape and imposes upon married women an absolute obligation to provide sexual services for their husbands. I have been completing YouGov online surveys for a couple of years now and there was a recent survey gleaning attitudes towards our involvement in Iraq and our continuing involvement in Afghanistan. I supported the former and broadly-speaking also support the latter - but now I'm not so sure we should be supporting Karzai if this is the kind of appalling nonsense he is prepared to append his signature to in order to obtain the support of extreme elements there in the forthcoming elections; we should certainly not allow our continuing presence there to be used to support this kind of barbarism.

Police and CPS condemned for 'fake' claim about Moslem TV documentary

Channel4 television and production company Hardcash Productions have today been totally vindicated for a 'Dispatches' programme (Undercover Mosque) detailing the extreme views being propagated in some mosques.

I watched the programme when it was broadcast and was astonished when I heard later that the broadcaster and production company had been accused by West Midlands Police and the CPS of 'selective editing' and 'distorting' (i.e. faking) the filmed material and evidence they had gathered. They were also accused of 'undermining community relations'. Media wathcdog Ofcom, to whom the police referred their allegations, has thrown them out declaring that the programme had "accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context". Ofcom also stated that it was a "legitimate investigation, uncovering matters of important public interest” and that each quote was "justified by the narrative of the programme and put fully in context".

The allegedly (by the police and the CPS) 'distorted' commments by Moslem clerics included the following:

— Whoever changes his religion from al-Islam to anything else — kill him in the Islamic state — Take that homosexual and throw him off the mountain — By the age of 10, it becomes an obligation on us to force her [young girls] to wear hijab, and if she doesn't wear hijab, we hit her — Allah created the woman deficient — If I were to call homosexuals perverted, dirty, filthy dogs who should be murdered, that is my freedom of speech, isn't it?

In exactly which context would such comments ever have been justified? The police and CPS need to explain exactly what was their thinking when they made the allegations they did.

It is stated that a 'six figure' sum in libel damages is being paid by the CPS and West Midlands Police for their outragreous attempt at stifling legitimate exposure of shocking utterances. However, although this sum will undoubtedly come out of a police and/or CPS budget, it will ultimately be borne by all tax-payers as it is they who fund theoretically public services such as the police and the CPS.

Now that this ridiculous case has been thrown out, when are the police going to recommend a prosecution by the CPS against those Moslem clerics who uttered those obnoxious sentiments, quite clearly in contravention of British law? I am not holding my breath!