Charlie Hebdo: Gun attack on French magazine kills 11

but I think CH was such a weird institution that it's hard to place it in a debate concerning the immigrant french youth.

― Van Horn Street, Wednesday, January 7, 2015 9:36 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The culture of satire and mockery in media in France is so ancient, I doubt in France it's perceived as a "weird institution"?

The three supposedly arrested according to Liberation.

liberation liveblog say not arrested, just located?

Said arrested two minutes ago but has changed.

French media reports have circulated claiming to identify the three shooters as Saïd Kouachi (age 34), Chérif Kouachi (age 32) and Hamyd Mourad (age 18). Saïd and Chérif Kouachi are said to be brothers native born to France, while Mourad’s nationality is unknown. Police have also reportedly conducted raids on two apartments in the efforts to track down the shooters.

Chérif Kouachi, one of the alleged assailants in today’s attack, was sentenced to three years in prison in 2008 for attempting to travel to Iraq and join the insurgency active there at the time. As Bloomberg News reported at the time of his sentencing:

“Kouachi said on the stand that he was inspired by detainee abuse by U.S. troops at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, though he was relieved he was stopped. The court said Kouachi had wanted to attack Jewish targets in France, but Benyettou had told him that France wasn’t a “land of jihad” but Iraq was.

Kouachi, who alternated between periods of smoking marijuana and attending Benyettou’s classes, said he’s now working in a supermarket and his main interest is rap music.”

Update (4:04PM): Le Point reports that Saïd and Chérif Kouachi had “returned to France from Syria last summer”.

not quite clear on how fixing the place where these men learned how to talk, walk, and eat without dribbling food on the floor is relevant to this story of mass murder

Guardian is reporting arrest now.

Tons of Europeans are in Syria/Iraq fighting on one side or the other at the moment, and people have been warning that they would be 'radicalized' when they came home for quite some time (also, traumatized and all that) So news that they were warriors in Syria is very very relevant to this story.

yeah the syria angle is one of the scariest parts of this whole, very scary thing.

btw i didn't say by the way that the charlie hebdo folks were not provocateurs (the cover above intimating incest b/t marie le pen and her dad is a case in point!) just that they were hardly /just/ provocateurs. or put another way, they were unusually sophisticated provocateurs. and good artists. that they were assassinated like this is just...

and yeah although i liked juan cole's piece a fair bit the "irony" he identifies is lost on me.... muslims killing other muslims is not an anomaly--it's actually, horrifically quite routine these days.

Channel4News: Ukip's Nigel Farage tells #c4news what happened in Paris is the result of having "a fifth column" living in France and the UK who "hate us".

muslims have been killing other muslims since the dawn of the religion, it's kind of a thing

xp

obviously the dog whistle he's employing there is repulsive (since he doubt means to implicate all muslims in europe, not just the radicalized few), but in a sense he's not incorrect.

xpost to tracer

That makes sense about Syria, I didn't think that through, still there's something unhelpful about establishing "french born" vs not, as like the primary piece of valuable information about these people

It is to french people, what with Marine Le Pen and the FN and their nationalist rhetoric.

it's not unhelpful if we're looking at how this will push the oncoming debate about integration here. there's a lot of effort put into integrating new arrivals (I know, we're among them!) but it's different for those from here. I'm talking about in schools, where these murderers were educated, how they were educated; because this will be a point of discussion right away (and rightly so)

Tons of Europeans are in Syria/Iraq fighting on one side or the other at the moment, and people have been warning that they would be 'radicalized' when they came home for quite some time (also, traumatized and all that) So news that they were warriors in Syria is very very relevant to this story.

Thats been a big big thing here in AU as well - a rising number of mostly young kids (male and female - and not always already muslim either) running away to join the ISCircus. And, more often than not, ending up dead about 15 mins after they land there.

In Britain the government is trying to find ways of revoking passports of the impressionable young men who go out there, rendering them stateless. VERY dodgy, against international law etc. - better to take these young adults back home and deal with them maturely, because there will always be impressionable hot-headed young adults with grievances and it is possible to direct that energy to a less toxic place.

It is very important that they were french born. It is a big change in terrorism in Europe that it is no longer foreign cells, or cells organized from abroad, but perhaps small groups radicalized and choosing to do something on their own. It changes how intelligence should work massively.

Of course, big reason they are getting radicalized is massive amount of islamophobia going around in Europe.

Arrest operation going down in Reims

Is there a good streaming radio station with live / updates? I've tried BBC 4 and World Service but they're just doing bulletins.

It is a big change in terrorism in Europe

unless you're taking a long view, it's not really that new. the train bombers in london were uk-born.

and Mohammed Merah was also french born.

idk if there are any up-to-date English-language resources. Guardian just walked back the arrest story that the raids in Reims overtook half an hour ago.

Rolling coverage/pictures of the raids here: https://twitter.com/France3CA

Though "police go into a building"..."police come out of a building" doesn't add a whole lot to our knowledge.

Lost of French tweets now about the Reims raid being a decoy operation iirc. Stunned by the poor reporting on the raid from French journalists, even if it is a chaotic situation. Unless this is the effect of the authorities having asked the press to stay put while this is going on.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/paris-magazine-attack/paris-attack-suspect-dead-two-custody-n281761
maybe

That's been up for a while, but no French media are confirming it.

There is however a new big raid going on, in Charleville Mézières right now.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B6ypp1KIcAAjo6V.jpg:large

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.
This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century.

http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html

that's a great article, thx alba

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-attack-cartoonist-says-gunmen-threatened-to-kill-her-toddler-daughter-unless-she-let-them-in-9963788.html

Holy shit, just imagine being this woman right now. Or her toddler for that matter.

Grenade attack on a mosque in Le Mans. Thankfully no reports of injuries.

i don't really believe in "evil" but it's really hard to think of much else right now

I do believe in cretinism however.

things are really fucked up today, obviously

I can't help feeling disturbed by some of today's headlines and thinkpieces. What happened was barbaric - there's no justifying a massacre of this kind, no matter what. However, the right-wing are saying it's an attack on freedom; the liberal papers an attack on democracy; while so many others are saying this is an attack on freedom of speech. Possible alternate agendas aside, this was an attack on a satirical magazine by a group of highly confused people who felt that the paper's provocations somehow justified the killing of over a dozen people.
The buzzwords being used in the media and online - 'democracy', 'freedom' - are direct echoes of post-9/11 rhetoric, but with the added sexy militancy of 'freedom of speech' thrown in. In this context, these words are needlessly evocative. They elevate these murderers from the ranks of cold-blooded killers to enemies of fundamental Western virtue.
These are not just terrorists who've been brainwashed into thinking that killing civilians and law enforcers is justified by their beliefs, they represent a more insidious attack on our right to vote, our right to roam, and our right to say whatever the hell we like whenever we like.
I believe we already have a thread for this, and I'm sure it's been said elsewhere and in not-so sensitive terms (one article from the FT was especially insensitive in a 'what did they expect?' kind of way) but is this what 'freedom of speech' is all about? I can imagine a lot of right-thinking moderate Muslims weren't all too happy about Charlie Hebdo's representation of the Prophet. This is, after all, one of the more sensitive parts of Islamic tradition. So should we hold up or 'sacralize' CH as a pillar of Western virtue any more than we should hold the gunmen up as anything more than faith-blinded murderers?

Muhammed waged wars, battles and invasions all over the place. He ordered slaves, sold woman and children into slavery, had a child by a slave woman.

He had people assassinated for writing bad poems about him. (http://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Killings_Ordered_or_Supported_by_Muhammad)

Imagine if Jesus, an important but of course subsidiary prophet in Islam, did any of this stuff? Struck people down with his sword? Wouldn't be possible to follow his teachings.

why are we comparing the two?

Like I said, Muhammed ordered people killed for "mocking him through poetry". How is that different to what these people did? They are just following it to the word.

Plenty of Christians follow the Bible to the word, and would be prepared to kill over it too.

i don't see how this conversation is relevant. these are atrocities committed in the name of religion and like it or not, killings in the name of religion happen around the world on a daily basis.

wikiislam.net definitely seems like a site with rigorous standards for accuracy.

dog latin, don't feel like you have to respond to this person in good faith.

so sad about these killings.

xp

You're saying you don't see how following the words and actions of Prohpet Muhammed are relevent in an attack waged in his name, for his justice, and for his vengence? ("The prophet is avenged" is what they shouted.)

I think I'm going to follow horseshoe's advice and politely ignore you, RT as I can't see your argument for all the strawmen you're putting up. If you're insinuating that there is some sort of inherent evil in the teachings of Islam, then I'm definitely ignoring you.

You need to read up.

is this what 'freedom of speech' is all about?

yes

ban tanuki

i did flag tanuki but immediately regretted it because he does get an absurd number of bites, that conscious rap thread is hilarious

def looking forward to tanook's analysis of cherif kouachi's rap skills tfs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OoRjFCP5spE