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May 21, 2013
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 Toulouse Killings Send Tremors Through French Presidential ElectionPosted on Apr 3, 2012
PARIS—What had seemed a long, tranquil current of political success that was conveying Francois Hollande to the French presidency (first-round consultation April 22) has run into turbulence during the past few days, and while his canoe is still buoyant, Hollande has suffered a touch of mal de mer. He seems too reasonable and nice a fellow to be a great success as a politician—not accusations anyone makes about President Nicolas Sarkozy. The contrast was evident during the recent days of the Toulouse killings: a young would-be jihadist’s slaying of three paratroopers, and then the cold-blooded killing of three young Jewish children and a rabbi at a Jewish school. Sarkozy was quickly at the scene of the siege that followed, witnessing the drama and naming a close aide to head the government’s collaboration with the police who had found and surrounded the suspect, eventually killing him in a prolonged shootout. Sarkozy had once worked with the same police unit when he was a young mayor in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, and had personally gone into a school threatened by a demented bomber to rescue hostage children. That first made his political reputation. Hollande is not action-man, and his presence on the scene in Toulouse inevitably was one of passive observer, accompanying the journalist who is now his domestic companion. The Socialists are also identified more with sympathy and tolerance for immigrants and their rights than is Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party. The latter has followed the crisis with orders banning a number of radical Muslim imams from France, whereas Hollande has confronted the problem that the Toulouse crimes revealed the existence of a more sizable network of jihad sympathizers than anyone expected. While the present government should logically be attributed responsibility for this situation, the Socialists’ record inevitably links them to the support of Muslim immigrants and of the social practices and standards of the immigrant community. This affair has been followed by accumulating campaign difficulties for Hollande, where his alliance with the ecologists’ parties, to which he ceded a certain number of reserved parliamentary constituencies, threatens to come apart. The Green party candidate, Eva Joly, a Norwegian immigrant in France who for many years was an investigating magistrate in the police and court system, has failed to awaken much enthusiasm. She is running 2-3 percent in the polls, and Socialist party members are anxious that she retire and the constituencies be handed over to Socialist candidates who seem much more likely to win them. Advertisement The latter usually have managed to establish a role in the electoral competition (sometimes a significant one, even if their adherents tend toward the adolescent or the nostalgic; their presidential candidate last time was a sympathetic postman, who went on delivering the letters during the election). This spring Melenchon has held unexpectedly large and enthusiastic rallies at the Place de Bastille and elsewhere, far outflanking, on the Left, the campaign promises of the orthodox Socialists. The threat—still relatively small—is that Melenchon might capture a large enough part of the Socialist vote to prevent Hollande from winning the first round of the presidential election. It is scarcely imaginable that he could displace Hollande, but his candidacy could combine with other marginal parties to throw the election into confusion. Hollande, in order to win the presidency, must have a clear-cut second-round showdown with Sarkozy, which present polls say he will easily win. But then you can never tell. Melenchon possesses demagogic talents unseen and unheard of in France since the days of Georges Marchais (1920-1997), who was for 22 years secretary general of the French Communist Party, a veteran of the international apparatus of the old Soviet-controlled party and for years a major figure on the French political scene, taking over the party in succession of the wartime generation of leaders. Marchais spent his war in a Messerschmitt aircraft factory in Germany after 1942, as one of the “volunteer” laborers requisitioned by Germany during the war. I have always suspected that Marchais’ mission to Germany as a volunteer laborer was in fact as a Comintern secret agent, keeping the party alive among French exile workers during the terrible war years. When the war ended, and the prewar French Communist leader, Maurice Thorez, returned from Moscow, the hitherto obscure party functionary that Marchais had been suddenly bloomed into a major Communist leader. Marchais’ era in France reached its culmination in the united front formed with the Socialist leader Francois Mitterrand in the presidential election of 1981. An alarmed conservative electorate was in a panic that a Leftist victory would see chateaux looted or burned from one end of France to the other. At the Place de Bastille in Paris, the Left’s victory was celebrated as the “great dawn” of a new revolution. All were disappointed. In the legislative election that followed, the Communists did so poorly that they lost all leverage in the Socialist-dominated cabinets that followed. Hollande has a similar dream.
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By moonraven, April 6, 2012 at 9:24 am Link to this comment
hettie:
You have nothing to do with anything except recycling gringos-uber-alles sheet music on this site.
Get a job.
Report thisBy heterochromatic, April 5, 2012 at 8:58 pm Link to this comment
dia—- not a damn thing wrong with our invasion of Afghanistan…..., Iraq though
had not a damn thing right with it.
Report thisand neither one had a damn thing to do with Algeria.
By diamond, April 5, 2012 at 8:23 pm Link to this comment
‘The film shows not only the causes of terrorism but also the immorality of some of the choices that terrorists make.”
You mean like doing black ops and invading Iraq and Afghanistan on the strength of them? I agree. State terror is a completely amoral thing.
Report thisBy moonraven, April 5, 2012 at 1:11 pm Link to this comment
Oh really?
If you have seen the film or read anything about the Battle of Algiers you are WELL AWARE that the bombing of civilians in the casbah of Algiers was BEGUN BY THE FRENCH.
Moreover, when DeGaulle was set to sign the Independence Accords at Evian in March of 1962, far-right French expats tried to stop that process by several false-flag attacks on their own people.
That SHOULD sound familiar. If it does not, then you should not be posting on this thread or any other regarding geopolitics.
Report thisBy heterochromatic, April 5, 2012 at 12:58 pm Link to this comment
I’m not ever gonna say a kind word for French policy in Algeria…but I’m neither
gonna gonna say that blowing up random civilians is anything excusable.
Report thisyou’re always unbalanced, birdie.
By moonraven, April 5, 2012 at 12:52 pm Link to this comment
Uh, nice try, sneakypants.
1. The film shows how terrorism becomes the last resort when all legal means have been denied them—in this case legal methods to gaining independence from the French—and oppressed peoples have noithing to lose. The French imposed a colonial rule on Algeria in 1832, and it was not iuntil 1962 that they became independent due to DeGaulle’s deciding that the cost of maintaining a colony with which they were at war (and largely losing that war, especially in the rural areas of the country) was simply too high.
2. The film shows as well the methods of counterterrorism that regimes use—torture and bombings primarily—in order to discourage folks from persisting. This is particularly timely as it directly applies to the current counterterrorism campaigns of Israel and the US in occupied Palestine and occupied Afghanistan—especially in the former, where Israel refuses to allow Palestine to become an independent state.
You have absolutely NO SHAME, Hettie.
Report thisBy heterochromatic, April 5, 2012 at 12:42 pm Link to this comment
it’s still available on Netflix and is also regularly shown on public tv stations.
Report thisthe film shows not only the causes of terrorism but also the immorality of some of
the choices that terrorists make
By moonraven, April 5, 2012 at 12:28 pm Link to this comment
Diamond:
One problem here is that most folks, if not almost all, posting on this site have never been to France or to any Muslim countries.
I keep telling folks to watch Battle of Algiers—not just because it involves the French colonials and the Algerian Arabs, but because it explains how terrorism and counterterrorism operates, and WHY.
The film USED to be available on Net Flix for renting or streaming. I don’t know if it still is. If it is not, and you’re unable to score a dvd (the Criterion collection’s 3 dvd set is excellent), Pontecorvo’s OTHER film on the same theme, attached to imperialist capitalism, Burn! (released in 1969 and starring lBrando) IS available on NetFlix.
Report thisBy diamond, April 5, 2012 at 12:22 am Link to this comment
“There’s no other reason to believe Jews would kill their own children just to make Sarkozy look good—and how their deaths boost his ratings defies logic.”
Clearly you know nothing about the sinking of the boat full of Jewish immigrants in Haifa harbour. This boat was sunk by Jewish terrorists who were furious that these prospective settlers were being sent back to their countries and not allowed to settle in what was then Palestine. They thought the British would never dare again send a boat full of settlers away - and they never did. Psychopaths like these never hesitate to kill their own people if it’s for the ‘greater good’. A lot of Jews died in the bombing of the King David Hotel too.
Sarkozy’s ratings have been boosted - that has already happened so you don’t need to theorize about it. And I can assure you he would be making no mileage at all if someone had burst into a Muslim school and killed three Muslim children and an Imam. The kind of people who support Sarkozy would have thought that was progress but more needed to be done. They agree with people like Breivik, the mad killer of Norway who shot 69 teenagers dead purely because they were members of the Labour Party which he believed was allowing Muslims to ‘take over Europe’. Clearly you don’t have any understanding of what kind of game is being played.
Report thisBy vector56, April 4, 2012 at 8:28 pm Link to this comment
sharonsj;
an after thought to your declaration of “Jews don’t kill their children”; they don’t seem to have a problem killing other peoples children.
Recall the Israel’s attack on Lebanon and Gaza; hundreds of Muslim children were ripped apart by cluster bombs, daisy cutters and burned to their very cores with White Phosphorous.
Don’t be so quick to judge others before looking into a mirror.
Report thisBy heterochromatic, April 4, 2012 at 6:42 pm Link to this comment
vec—yup. we agree that you’re a little touched (wink,
Report thiswink)
By vector56, April 4, 2012 at 6:21 pm Link to this comment
“vec is not fucked-up like the Rat.”
heterochromatic, I’m touched!
Report thisBy vector56, April 4, 2012 at 6:03 pm Link to this comment
“The guy has already been buried so it’s hard to ask him.”
How true moonraven; hell I had about a million questions for that guy they shot in the face and dumped in the Indian Ocean before his body got cold?
Even the Nazi’s got trials (Neuberger) is anyone here consider the ones we label Terrorist less human than the Nazis?
“Both vector56 and Rehmat are either religious bigots or jihadis”
OK, sharonsj are you really that two dimensional? Anyone who disagrees with you is a “jihadis”; WHICH IS ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING THEY SHOULD KILLED ON SITE.
I am many things;
A N*gger Lover
A Communist Sympathizer
An Indian lover
an Atheist
But never have I been called a jihadis! Nice trick you fascist simpleton; tag us with the “Terrorist” label and allow your buddies at the NSA to do their thing; shame on you!
Now to your last point; “Jews do not kill their own Children”; Ever heard of MASADA?
“According to Josephus, when Roman troops entered the fortress, they discovered that its 960 inhabitants had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and committed a mass suicide. Modern archaeologists have found no evidence of mass burial at the location and only some thirty skeletons have been recovered on the site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada
Among that 960 people there were many children. Many of my hero’s are Jewish (Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein) ; many of my friends are non-Zionist Jews:
http://jewsnotzionists.org/
Being a Jew is much more than Zionism.
At the core of your statement is a pure “racist” assumption; “Jews do not kill their children”. Many assume that under the right conditions other human beings human beings resort to drastic unthinkable actions; I am sure that most of “your elk” have no problem imagining a Muslim mother strapping a bomb on her 5 year old? I personally have gotten drunk with many a Vietnam Vet who swore that every other toddler he blew away was booby trapped. Such is the mind of a “racist”; other people are capable of horrible things, but not us! “They don’t feel pain or love like we do”.
Look, I am not saying that Jews kill their own children (any more after Masada); but I would not put much pass the Mossad and the CIA (your comrades).
Report thisBy heterochromatic, April 4, 2012 at 5:27 pm Link to this comment
the first one is just an obsessive bigoted asshole.
vec is not fucked-up like the Rat.
Report thisBy sharonsj, April 4, 2012 at 4:10 pm Link to this comment
Both vector56 and Rehmat are either religious bigots or jihadis. There’s no other reason to believe Jews would kill their own children just to make Sarkozy look good—and how their deaths boost his ratings defies logic.
And what about the deaths of the soldiers? How is that supposed help Sarkozy? But simple logic escapes conspiracy nuts.
We’ve already had these fools blame the Mumbai massacres on Hindu Zionists and the Asian tsunami on Jewish death rays….
Report thisBy moonraven, April 4, 2012 at 12:00 pm Link to this comment
I agree. It looked like a Lee Harvey Oswald patsy op to me.
The guy has already been buried so it’s hard to ask him.
Report thisBy vector56, April 4, 2012 at 5:08 am Link to this comment
“Toulouse shooting was a Mossad false flag operation to boost its agent Sarkozy’s falling ratings. “
Most would dismiss Rehmat’s above statement out of hand; I would not.
Those who seek to maintain and spread the Chaos never sleep.
Report thisBy Rehmat, April 3, 2012 at 8:21 pm Link to this comment
Toulouse shooting was a Mossad false flag operation to boost its agent Sarkozy’s falling ratings.
Report this