I like the approach of those Belgian hackers better.

DEBKAfile says the last of the suspects being hunted by French authorities is long gone, and the al-Qaeda-Arabian-Peninsula stuff may have all been disinformation.

French intelligence failures over the Charlie Hebdo terror attack will not be upstaged by the Unity March of millions that President Francois Hollande leads in Paris Sunday, Jan. 11, to dramatize the free world’s protest against Islamist terror. The case of Hayat Boumeddiene, the 26-year old wife of the terrorist Amedy Coulibaly who murdered four Jews in cold blood at the kosher supermarket, stands out.

Friday, Jan. 9, after the police assault on the store, French security sources reported she had escaped with a stream of rescued hostages and reached Syria via Spain and Istanbul.

In fact, she never was in the Paris store.

The female terrorist had skipped France and arrived in Syria on Jan. 1-2, more than a week before the wave of terror first struck Paris at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

This could have been discovered simply by examining the records at French, Spanish and Turkish border posts. …

Western security sources have been playing up the three terrorists’ connection to the Yemeni headquarters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). That is because, if ISIS was able to pull the strings for multiple terror in the heart of Europe, the air campaign that the US-led coalition of 20 countries including France is conducting in Iraq and Syria would look pretty tame. And its leader Abu Baqr al-Baghdad would be laughing.

But was it really ISIS or AQAP which set up the three attacks which claimed 17 lives in three days?

That is the big question.

Said and Cherif Kouachi told French television shortly before they were shot dead that they belonged to Yemen Al Qaeda, whereas Coulibaly claimed he was acting for ISIS.

This apparent contradiction raises the scary suggestion that the two murderous Islamic groups may have collaborated for the first time to hit France. That scenario assumes an even more ominous dimension in the light of the chatter picked up Sunday by US intelligence indicating that all Al Qaeda’s branches are preparing to follow up the Paris operations with a major campaign of terror in Europe.

Boumediene’s arrival in Syria ahead of the Paris attacks appears to part of a comprehensive plan for setting up a command and control center for this campaign or, possibly, to prepare safe asylum for the gunmen who manage to get away. If that is so, then the center of this campaign would be situated on ISIS – not AQAP – turf.

The sight of many thousands of gendarmes and security officers rushing around in combat gear to chase the female terrorist may have helped reassure a frightened population, who were not to know the guardians of security were on a fool’s errand.

But the truth was that France’s external security service (DGSE), anti-terror police branches and border authorities, who were supposed to operate in concert, fell down on the job and revealed their weakness to the enemy. Homegrown and foreign jihadis were shown to have established safe exit routes for reaching the Islamic battlegrounds of the Middle East and returning home – well trained, heavily armed and filled with hatred for the societies which bred them.

Underground jihadist networks spent months undiscovered by the internal security service (DGSI) in the setting up of complicated multi-site operations, like the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket.

And the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) took too long to run them to earth and eliminate them.

After murdering the top journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, the two Kouachi brothers emerged from the building packing two submachine guns, but none of the dozens of armed police outside was able to cut them down.

And finally, thousands of French police and soldiers from various units put to siege the print works outside Dammartin-en-Goele, where Said and Cherif Kouachi were holed up for hours, with nearly 100,000 security officers mobilized across France. Still, they hesitated to break in.

All this provides fodder for the trainers to inspire the next generation of jihadi terrorists for action that is guaranteed to win them prime time on all the world’s television screens.

Hayat Boumediene with Amedy Coulibaly

Our friends at Mossad’s mouthpiece, DEBKAfile, report:

In the three days since the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, the French authorities have rounded up 900 individuals across France on suspicion of involvement in Islamic terror. The detentions on an unprecedented scale for France continues.

“If there was a distinctive modern style in torture, it was French modern: the field telephone magneto adapted with alligator clips, usually conjoined with water torture…”

—Torture and Democracy.

The security forces of the French Republic have been historically unconstrained by the kind of sentimental humanitarianism which has so conspicuously afflicted counter-terrorist interrogation efforts by US Intelligence. The French have traditionally wired up the interrogation subject to a field telephone and happily turned the crank until he talked.

One wonder if they have 900 field phones available these days.

Tony Barber

Theodore Dalrymple responds to one of the most prominent editorial advocates of poltroonery in the face of Islamic threats and intimidation.

It took less than four hours for an associate editor of the Financial Times, Tony Barber, to post a piece on the website of his august publication blaming the journalists and cartoonists of the satirical French magazine (and the two policemen as well?) for their own deaths. Here is what he originally wrote and posted, though he later edited out the final clause:

[Charlie Hebdo] has a long record of mocking, baiting and needling French Muslims . . . [This] is merely to say that some common sense would be useful at publications such as Charlie Hebdo . . . which purport to strike a blow for freedom when they provoke Muslims, but are actually just being stupid.

According to this perverted logic, if the relatives of the 12 murdered men were now to storm into the offices of the Financial Times and shoot 12 staff members because of the considerable provocation offered by Tony Barber, it will prove only that Barber had just been stupid.

There is, of course, a relevant difference between the two cases: when he wrote his disgraceful little article, Barber knew perfectly well that the relatives of the murdered men would not behave in this fashion, and that therefore he was not “just being stupid.” Hence, he equates prudence with cowardice, a sure way to encourage (though not perhaps to provoke, in his sense of the word) more such attacks.

The last aurochs (Bos primigenius primigenius), the wild ox from which all domestic cattle descend, was killed in Lithuania sometime in the 1600s. The aurochs, like the European bison, was a survivor of Pleistoscene Europe representing the grandest possible hunting trophy.

Naturally, Nazi potentate Hermann Goering, driven by Romantic nostalgia for the pre-modern and mythic older Europe, made an effort to breed cattle backward in order to re-create the aurochs. The Heck Brother, directors respectively of the Berlin & Munich zoos, bred from a variety of ancient European cattle breeds and produced their own breed, thought to come very close to the original aurochs in size, temperament, and color.

In 2009, it was reported that Derek Gow, a British conservationist, was importing a herd of Heck cattle from the Netherlands to Devon.

The Daily Mail recently reported that Mr. Gow’s experiment proved rather dangerous, and that Gow was reducing his herd of thirteen by seven in order to eliminate the most dangerous and aggressive examples.

[Y]esterday Mr Gow said he ‘couldn’t handle’ the rogue members of the herd, adding: ‘What the Germans did with their breeding programme was create something truly primeval. The aurochs were wild bulls.’

The Hecks’ programme was so successful the cows flourished and were used in propaganda material during the Second World War. Mr Gow says they are shorter than the aurochs, but retain their half-ton ancestors’ muscular build and lethal horns.

Mr Gow, a father of two, said he had to reduce his herd because the cows had tried to kill some members of his staff and would ‘attack at any chance they could’. They have now been sent to an abattoir.

Mr Gow said the cows he sent to the abattoir will be turned into sausages and will be sold in Europe.

He added: ‘As far as being a commercial breed is concerned, they have little value, but they are a significant animal from a conservation point of view. For instance, each cow can produce its own weight in dung every year, which is a great source of food for insects and bugs and nutrients for the environment.’

But he added of the aggressive ones: ‘I have worked with a range of different animals from bison to deer and I have never come across anything like these.

‘To get them into the trailer to get them off the farm we used a young and very athletic young man to stand on the ramp and they charged at him before he quickly jumped out the way.

‘When the Germans were selecting them to create this animal they used Spanish fighting cattle to give them the shape and ferocity they wanted.

The half-tonne cattle died out in Britain 4,000 years ago but remained widespread across much of Europe until the 1600s.

However, they were finally wiped out in 1627 after they were hunted to extinction for their horns, hide and meat.

They were saved in the early 1930s when Hitler wanted to recreate the breed to evoke the power of the ‘runes, folklore and legends of the Germanic peoples’.

Heinz and Lutz Heck found their descendants in a cattle from the Scottish Highlands, Corsica and the French Camargue, as well as Spanish fighting bulls.

They then identified the particular Auroch gene, which they were able to use to bring them back from the ‘dead’.

The cows were later transported to game parks in Schorfheide near Berlin, and the Neander Valley in Dusseldorf.

Mr Gow said: ‘The Aurochs were wild bulls. Julius Caesar recorded them as being bulls as big as elephants.

‘Young men hunted these bulls as preparation for battle and leadership in war, but also to obtain these huge 6ft-wide horns that the bulls had as drinking vessels and war horns. They were huge trophies.’

‘The reason the Nazis were so supportive of the project is they wanted them to be fierce and aggressive.

‘Since they have gone it is all peaceful again. Peace reigns supreme on the farm.

‘Despite these problems, I have no regrets at all. It has been a good thing to do and the history of them is fascinating.’

The meat from the slaughtered cows was turned into sausages which Mr Gow said were ‘very tasty’ – and a bit like a cross between venison and beef. They will be sold in Europe, he said, but probably not marketed as ‘Nazi sausages’.

He explained: ‘I’m not sure how appealing Third Reich sausages would be but they might be popular with some.

‘They are very tasty though and taste like a cross between beef and venison and are sought after in Austria and Germany. They are a different product with low fat and cholesterol.

‘I don’t imagine any of them are sold locally but we are looking in the future to create a speciality market for them.

‘But we need to get to a stage where it is a manageable herd that can be used for normal farming.’

———————

Modern Farmer said, in essence, what do you expect to get, when you try raising Nazi cattle?

“They look like cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. It makes you think of the light of a tallow lamp and these huge bulls on these cave paintings leaping out at you from darkened walls.” Gow admiringly told the Telegraph at the time.

But that’s hardly all that the cattle evoke. This particular breed dates back to the 1920s, when German zoologists and brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck, recruited by the Nazis, began a program to resurrect extinct wild species by cross-breeding various domestic descendants — an effort typically referred to as “back breeding.” Among their success stories was the half-ton Heck cattle, a reasonable facsimile of the hearty and Herculean auroch cattle that dated back some 2 million years prior and has roamed en masse all over Germany centuries prior.

The back-breeding program reflected the dual Nazi obsession with eugenics and nostalgia; the wild ancestry of the auroch reflected a time of “biological unity” before civilization softened and “uglified” man and beast alike. And in fact, the program’s research patron, one Hermann Goring, sought to preserve biological unity not only by resurrecting extinct species, but by restoring them to their original habitats; thus his plan was to return the aurochs to the primeval Białowieża forest.

Is anyone really surprised that the cows turned out to be murderously dangerous?

Richard Littlejohn, in the Daily Mail, points out how Islamicists are successfully exploiting the liberal establishment’s Pavlovian cringe in the direction of any alleged victim group to step-by-step move back the limits of free speech.

Islam is just one of the New Establishment’s favoured client groups. Exciting ‘hate crime’ laws have been invented to grant them special privileges and punish their critics.

So mad mullahs in Midlands madrassas can call for homosexuals to be stoned to death. But a Christian preacher who objects to gay marriage can expect to be arrested and given a criminal record.

We have also created a ‘victim’ culture, which allows minority groups to justify any kind of bad behaviour on the grounds that they are being oppressed.

You didn’t have to look far yesterday to find allegedly ‘respected’ voices prepared to blame the staff of Charlie Hebdo for bringing the wrath of the Islamists down on themselves. They shouldn’t have been so ‘provocative’.

Sky News gave house-room to one of the Islamist apologists from central casting who — while condemning the Paris massacre, natch — then went on to claim that Muslims in Britain were treated like blacks in Thirties America.

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

We’re celebrating 800 years of Magna Carta, which may not have mentioned free speech specifically but laid the foundations for the liberties we are supposed to enjoy today – the idea that no one is above the law and we should be spared the excesses of an overbearing state.

Yet free speech is being eroded in the name of ‘celebrating diversity’ and the overbearing state is on the march, often under the guise of keeping us ‘safe’.
Free speech is being eroded in the name of ‘celebrating diversity’

You may not like to hear this, but the Paris massacre is another victory for the terrorists. Ever since 9/11, the State has seized upon ‘security’ as an excuse to accrue more powers and impede our liberty.

This is much bigger than the current argument about free speech, even though in a truly democratic society the right to take offence must co-exist with the right to cause offence.

There’s talk about a ‘war on terror’ when really we should be discussing the war on Western civilisation being waged by medieval madmen in the name of Islam.

The politicians posture and say the men of violence can’t win. But they are winning – in Africa, in the Middle East, in Pakistan.

They have set their sights on extending their bloodthirsty caliphate throughout Europe and even though they have no prospect of immediate triumph, they’re in it for the long run.

In return, the West wrings its hands and offers knee-jerk assurances that this butchery is nothing to do with Islam.

Every time there’s another atrocity, the authorities cede more ground to the terrorists. After 9/11 it was by criminalising airline passengers. After the recent Toronto parliament killings, it was relocating guardsmen behind the gates.

In the Seventies, the State responded to IRA bombings by removing all the litter bins from railway stations. Most of them have never been put back.

After Paris, who knows what they’ll come up with. But, rest assured, they’ll think of something. This is how freedom dies. Little by little, piece by piece.

Today, there’s outrage and introspection, just as there has been in the wake of every other major terrorist incident.

After a week or two, it will all be forgotten and we can get back to squabbling about Ched Evans or which party is to blame for Mr Bert Jones’s lumbago operation being cancelled.

Meanwhile, our enemies bide their time and another notch of the ratchet moves inexorably in their favour.

Eric Dubos, who hunts with several French packs, posted this image of a red deer supporting free speech.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Unfortunately not everyone agrees on the probable location of the great khan’s tomb. (click on picture for larger image)

Motherboard has one of those stories that fires the imagination. We just have to hope they’re working on the right location.

Genghis Khan really, really didn’t want anyone to know where he was buried. The soldiers escorting his body to its final resting place killed everyone they passed, killed the people who built the tomb, and then were killed themselves. Some say Mongol troops grazed herds of horses over the site or even diverted a river over it to keep it hidden. The area where many suspect Genghis Khan is buried is one of Mongolia’s most sacred heritage sites—it’s name, Ikh Khorig, actually translates to “The Great Taboo.” For 800 years—until 1989—archeologists weren’t allowed in, and even then the first expedition was met with public protest.

“Mongolians detest any attempt to touch graves, or even wander around graveyards,” Mongolia Today explains. “According to ancient tradition, burial spots are forbidden areas in which no one is allowed.”

Still, and perhaps for that very reason, this region is really interesting for archeologists. That first three-year expedition identified 1,380 underground cavities that could be the graveyards or tombs of Mongolian nobles, potentially even predating Genghis Khan.

Albert Yu-Min Lin, from the Center for Interdisciplinary Science in Art, Architecture, and Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, devised a way to hunt for Genghis Khan’s tomb without touching or toppling anything: Have anyone who’s interested in doing so tag potential sites of investigation from the comfort of their own homes, on images taken from the respectful distance of satellite orbit.

“Explorers” were welcome to map rivers and roads, and flag modern structures, as well as potentially ancient structures on thousands of ultra-high resolution satellite images of the region. There was a lot of ground to cover—6,000 square kilometers, but there were also a lot of volunteers. The system was launched in June 2010, and in just its first 90 days, 5,838 people had contributed more than 1.2 million tags. By the end of the year, over 10,000 participants had generated 2.3 million tags—contributing a total of 30,000 hours of human visual analytics to the images, according to the study’s initial results, just published in the journal PLOS One.

The results have given future explorers plenty to chew on, too. “Of the top 100 accessible locations identified by the crowd,” the study states, “55 potential archaeological anomalies were verified by the field team, ranging from bronze age to Mongol period in origin.”

Read the whole thing.