Deutsche Welle reports that the French Terror Alert Meter has reached the Surrender level.

Charlie Hebdo” editor Laurent Sourisseau has told “Stern” magazine he will no longer draw cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Souriseau’s statement comes six months after a deadly attack on the magazine’s offices.

During an interview with the Hamburg-based news magazine “Stern,” editor of the French weekly “Charlie Hebdo” said he would no longer draw comics of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

“We have drawn Muhammad to defend the principle that one can draw whatever they want. It is a bit strange though: we are expected to exercise a freedom of expression that no one dares to,” Sourisseau told “Stern.”

The editor said that the magazine had done what it set out to do.

“We’ve done our job. We have defended the right to caricature,” Sourisseau said. …

Sourisseau, who owns 40 percent of the company’s shares, survived the deadly terrorist attack on the offices of “Charlie Hebdo” on January 7 by playing dead.

Read the whole thing.

Terrorism works. Je ne suis pas plus Charlie.

Business Insider had the details on tomorrow’s issue today.

The first cover of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after a terrorist shooting at its Paris headquarters has been revealed. As expected, the cover defiantly features the Prophet Muhammed, in response to the radical Muslim gunmen’s efforts to silence the often controversial magazine.

The cover features the Prophet Muhammed holding a sign that says “Je Suis Charlie,” the popular slogan being used by many in support of the magazine. Above Muhammed’s head are the words “All is forgiven.”

Released this Wednesday, the special issue will have a special printing of 1 million copies, with the ability to print as many as 3 million, according to Reuters.

“We have requests for 300,000 copies throughout the world — and demand keeps rising by the hour,” Michel Salion, a spokesman for Charlie Hebdo’s distributor MPL, told Reuters. “The million will go. As of Thursday, the decision will probably be taken to print extra copies … So we’ll have one million, plus two if necessary.”

It will be offered in 16 languages for readers around the world, according to AFP.

Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer, Richard Malka, told France Info radio that the issue will feature cartoons making fun of Muhammed and other figures.

The magazine usually prints about 60,000 copies a week, selling 30,000, according to the AFP.

Revenue from the issue will go toward ensuring the survival of the magazine, which has been near bankruptcy in recent years. …

With the magazine’s headquarters still an active crime scene, the editorial staff has worked out of the offices of Liberation newspaper to get the issue out.

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.

The New York Daily News and Gateway Pundit both comment upon just how conspicuous was the absence of major representatives of the Obama Administration at the Paris march against Islamic terrorism.

It was an international rally against terror.

Over 50 world leaders were in attendance.

But no Obama.

The Obama administration sent three representatives to Michael Brown’s funeral in Ferguson, Missouri.

But only the Ambassador to France made the historic anti-terror march in Paris today.

Attorney General Eric Holder was in Paris but was not seen at the march.

But when you elect a president educated at a madrassa as a child, who thinks the ululations of the muezzin are a pretty sound, who has celebrated the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with an Iftar dinner each year he has been in the White House, who told the United Nations in 2012 that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” and who has worn since at least 1981 a ring with “There is no God but Allah” inscribed in Arabic, would you really expect him to fly to Paris to march in this parade?

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Twitter hashtag: ReasonsObamaMissedFranceRally

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.

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.