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.

Stephane Charbonnier “Charb”: “I’d rather die than live on my knees.”

Meanwhile, after his murder by Islamic fanatics, the yellowbelly New York Daily News has on its cover this photo of Charb holding up a cartoon from which the Muslim imam has been pixilated but the hook-nosed rabbi left in.

The Daily Caller is publishing a growing list of all the mainstream media outlets so cowardly that they are declining to publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons. These include the Associated Press, NBC, MSNBC and CNBC, CNN, The Telegraph, the Jewish Chronicle, the New York Times, ABC, and CBS.

Let’s hear it, on the other hand, for the Berliner Zeitung, the Berliner Kurier, and La Tribune, the only European papers so far which did.

Never Yet Melted, some readers may remember, was banned by Google Adsense back in 2013 for republishing, as news, Charlie Hebdo cartoons. It didn’t even take a terrorist attack to get Google to censor Mohammed cartoons.

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I am moved to republish this:

Mattheus van Beveren, Mohammed, leaning on his Koran, Trodden upon by Angels Bearing the Pulpit, Liebefraukirke, Dendermonde, Flanders, late 17th century

Among the slain: from left, clockwise, Stephane Charbonnier, known by his pen name Charb, editor of Charlie Hebdo; Georges Wolinski; Bernard “Tignous” Verlhac; Lead cartoonist Jean “Cabu” Cabut; and contributor Bernard Maris.

The best current account is from the Daily Mail:

Four of France’s most revered cartoonists – Stephane Charbonnier, Georges Wolinski, Bernard ‘Tignous’ Verlhac and Jean Cabut – were among 12 people executed by masked gunmen in Paris today at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Two masked men brandishing Kalashnikovs burst into the magazine’s headquarters this morning, opening fire on staff, also shooting dead contributor Bernard Maris, 68.

Police officers were involved in a gunfight with the ‘calm and highly disciplined men’, who escaped in a hijacked car, speeding away towards east Paris. They remain on the loose, along with a third armed man.

Charbonnier, 47, known by his pen name Charb, was the editor of the weekly magazine, and once famously said ‘I’d prefer to die standing than live on my knees’. He also declared, in the face of animosity from extremists, ‘I live under French law, not Koranic law’.

Cabut, 76, also called Cabu, was Charlie Hebdo’s lead cartoonist, Wolinski an 80-year-old satirist who had been drawing cartoons since the 1960s and Tignous a 57-year-old contributor to the publication.

The gunmen reportedly asked for the cartoonists by name before shooting them dead and yelling ‘the Prophet has been avenged’. …

[T]here were unconfirmed reports that one of the gunmen said to a witness: ‘You say to the media, it was Al Qaeda in Yemen.’ …

Mr Charbonnier, who once said ‘a drawing has never killed anyone’, was included in a 2013 Wanted Dead or Alive for Crimes Against Islam article published by Inspire, the terrorist propaganda magazine published by Al Qaeda.

In 2012 he said: ‘I don’t feel as though I’m killing someone with a pen. I’m not putting lives at risk. When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.’

Charbonnier said that he didn’t fear reprisals. After publishing naked pictures of the Prophet in 2012, he said: ‘I have neither a wife nor children, not even a dog. But I’m not going to hide.’

He added: ‘It should be as normal to criticize Islam as it is to criticize Jews or Catholics.’

Georges Wolinski, who lived in Paris, was married twice, first to Jacqueline Saba, with whom he had two children, Frederica and Natacha, and then in 1971 to Maryse Bachere. They had one daughter together, Elsa-Angela.

Cabu’s drawings first appeared in a local French newspaper in 1954. He was conscripted to the Army for two years for the Algerian War, but that didn’t stop his creative talent, which was put to use in the army magazine Bled and in Paris-Match.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s his career flourished, with the artist co-creating Hara-Kiri magazine, working on children’s TV show Recre A2 and eventually working on Charlie Hebdo as a caricaturists.

His most controversial moment came in 2006 when his drawing of the Muslim prophet Muhammad appeared on the cover with the caption ‘Muhammad overwhelmed by fundamentalists’ with a speech bubble containing the words ‘so hard to be loved by jerks’. …

Victim Bernard Maris was an economist who contributed to the newspaper and was heard regularly on French radio

As well as the AK47 assault rifles, there were also reports of a rocket-propelled grenade being used in the attack, which took place during the publication’s weekly editorial meeting, meaning all the journalists would have been present.

When shots rang out at the office – located near Paris’ Bastille monument – it is thought that three policemen on bicycles were the first to respond.

‘There was a loud gunfire and at least one explosion,’ said an eye witness. ‘When police arrived there was a mass shoot-out. The men got away by car, stealing a car.’

Survivor and Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Corinne ‘Coco’ Rey was quoted by French newspaper L’Humanite as saying: ‘I had gone to collect my daughter from day care and as I arrived in front of the door of the paper’s building two hooded and armed men threatened us. They wanted to go inside, to go upstairs. I entered the code.

‘They fired on Wolinski, Cabu… it lasted five minutes… I sheltered under a desk… They spoke perfect French… claimed to be from al Qaeda.’…

‘They were wearing military clothes, it wasn’t common clothing, like they were soldiers.’

Once inside the gunmen headed straight for Charbonnier, killing him and his police bodyguard first, said Christophe Crepin, a police union spokesman.

Minutes later, two men strolled out to a black car waiting below, calmly firing on a police officer, with one gunman shooting him in the head as he writhed on the ground, according to video and a man who watched in fear from his home across the street.

The witness, who refused to allow his name to be used because he feared for his safety, said the attackers were so methodical he first mistook them for France’s elite anti-terrorism forces. Then they fired on the officer.

‘They knew exactly what they had to do and exactly where to shoot. While one kept watch and checked that the traffic was good for them, the other one delivered the final coup de grace,’ he said. ‘They ran back to the car. The moment they got in, the car drove off almost casually.

Full article.

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French policeman murdered.

According to Twitter analytics tool Topsy, there have been more than 70,000 tweets using the JeSuisCharlie: hashtag so far today.

Social media are exploding with world-wide indignation over the massacre in Paris. This evening, Parisians are marching at the Place de la République, “for freedom of the press, democracy, and the Republic.”

A Parisienne demonstrates in solidarity with those killed. Photograph: Seán Clarke.