The Tangled BBC Web Over the Toulouse Killer?

[Teddy Bear]

Besides the budget, one of the biggest stories of the day concerns the apprehension and identity of the Toulouse killer. The one who cold-bloodedly murdered 3 soldiers and 3 Jewish infants and the father of 2 of them.

Since it emerges that he's a Muslim, it's a forgone conclusion that the BBC will downplay this element, the only question is how.

Looking at one of their articles from yesterday where the BBC speculates; Toulouse school shootings: Who was behind the attacks? I noticed this strange facet.
The BBC posed this, The questions will not be laid to rest until the man is caught. The biggest one is this: what is the link between the killings at the Jewish school and last week's attacks on French soldiers....It is noted that the three dead soldiers were of North African origin, and a fourth who was injured is from the French Caribbean.
Then this The killer has a clear affinity with guns. Could he be a neo-Nazi type - maybe an ex-soldier or a member of the criminal underworld - with a hatred of all minorities, Jews and Muslims?

Now so far we've only been told by the BBC, here and in previous articles, that the soldiers killed were 'North African', so where does the Muslim element come from? Now this article then tells us
Some have gone further - indirectly pointing the finger at President Nicolas Sarkozy for recently raising sensitive issues such as halal and kosher meat in the run-up to the presidential election.

This tactic, they say, gives credibility to the far-right and "delegitimises" the Muslim and Jewish communities.

The problem with this theory is that it is not yet established that the killer deliberately targeted Muslim soldiers.

He met his first victim after answering an online advertisement for a motorcycle in which the seller identified himself as a soldier, but did not give his (Arabic-sounding) name.

The two subsequent victims were in uniform, and though of North African origin, physically indistinguishable.

So it seems equally likely, if not more so, that the killer selected the targets simply because they were soldiers.

This does not rule out that he is a far-right fanatic, of course. He may also have a grudge against the armed forces.

So this is the first time we are told that the soldiers murdered WERE Muslims, and even here indirectly. Since the BBC knows those targeted were Muslims and Jews perhaps it is understandable why they might be mostly going along the lines of 'right-wing nutter' doing the dirty, but why specifically MUSLIM SOLDIERS and Jews?

If the BBC wasn't so intent on manufacturing the spin they do, and actually understood what was happening around the world they might have immediately seen that the likely culprit was a Muslim extremist. The soldiers because they were seen by the murderer as having betrayed their faith, and the Jews - because they were Jews.

So today the identity of the killer is known - Mohammed Merah. According to reports he was trained by al-Qaeda, the BBC identify him as a 'Frenchman, and of Algerian descent.

No mention of him being a Muslim though. You might think 'well it's obvious'. The only difference is when you go to search the BBC website for Muslim extremist or killer, no mention of this story will appear.

All part of the BBC agenda, bowing to the 'religion of peace'.

[thehighlandrebel]

Appalling stuff from al-beeb
Once again on the R4 news tonight we had the scum at this organisation putting the blame for these childrens brutal murders at the door of Israels policy in gaza.

How sick and how low can these c*nts sink.

[Teddy Bear]

As low as they can!

[Teddy Bear]

Melanie McDonagh at the Spectator has made a similar observation

A man surrounded — and some assumptions exposed
Melanie McDonagh 6:28pm

There was an element of bafflement in the early BBC coverage this morning of the welcome news that police have identified and surrounded the suspected killer of seven people, including Jewish children, in Toulouse. To some people's surprise, the BBC correspondent remarked in the early reports, the suspect turned out to be a Muslim, Mohammed Merah. So the entire tone of the Corporation's coverage of the killings turns out to have been misplaced. Ever since the dreadful news that a gunman had attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse after killing three French soldiers, the overriding assumption on the part of the Corporation was that, unless the killer was merely unhinged, the suspect must be a far-right extremist, animated by a hatred of minorities. So every spokesman for the governing party hauled onto the news programmes on Radio 4 was interrogated as to whether President Sarkozy had somehow added fuel to the flames by talking about there being ‘too many’ immigrants in France and complaining about the alleged provision of halal meat to unsuspecting consumers. The possibility of an Islamist assassin was, by contrast, mentioned only in passing. In fairness, those lazy assumptions, based on what we wanted to be true, were voiced in France too.

As it turns out, the suspect, Mohammed Merah, apparently claims to have been motivated by the desire for revenge for the treatment of Palestinian children and for France's operations abroad. But for a disinterested observer, an Islamist suspect was likely from the outset. The French soldiers killed by the gunman were of North African origin; ergo, went the argument, he was animated by hatred of Muslims. But the critical thing about the soldiers was precisely that they were soldiers, and, as it happened, from a unit that had served in Afghanistan. That should have been the element that raised suspicions of Islamist motivation.

As for the attack on a Jewish school, the unpleasant reality is that anti-Semitism in Europe is now predominantly territory occupied by Islamists, not by old-fashioned fascists. And the reporting should have taken that fact into account. The BBC is not unique in its instinctive antipathy to the National Front in France — indeed, its recent Radio 4 series Driving on the Right suggests an aversion to all the European parties hostile to mass immigration — but it should not have allowed that antipathy to colour its coverage. Of course mass killers also come from the extremist right end of the political spectrum as well as from the squarely deranged — or, in the case of Norway's Anders Breivik, both. But when the probabilities conflict with our instinctive prejudices, we know how the reporting is going to turn out.

The good news is that President Sarkozy has appealed to the better instincts of the nation by insisting that terrorism should not be allowed to divide France. The reaction of the National Front, too, has been relatively restrained, though it seems likely to be the chief electoral beneficiary of the tragedy. It would be all to the good if our own coverage of the election could be, in future, a little more nuanced too.

[thehighlandrebel]

Has anyone heard any 'outrage' from the Muslim community over this?

Outrage like that which took the Muslims to the streets in this country over cartoons and the proposed burning of a few bits of paper.

No?..................neither have I.

[Teddy Bear]

Outrage? No! But of course if pressed they will deny that their teachings or precepts had nothing to do with this 'rotten apple'. Funny though how many rotten apples seem to grow from this tree. Religion of Peace.com tells us that there have been over 18,600 deadly terror attacks perpetrated by Muslims since 9/11. This of course doesn't include other murders within their society, like 'honour' killings, etc.

The BBC makes the point of including this snippet from the French Interior Minister;
Claude Gueant: "Merah jumped through a window while shooting"
"The French should not give rein to anger," he said.

"Our Muslim compatriots have nothing to do with the crazy actions of a terrorist. We should not embark on any stigmatisation.

Seems in every story of similar dynamics, it ends up as Muslims being the victim.

Melanie Phillips has a fine article as usual on the topic.

Laying the groundwork for the Toulouse massacre

When the Toulouse school massacre happened, the media rushed to say that the perpetrator was a white far-right racist. The lone gunman had mown down at close range a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school, wounding several others. He was thought to be the same killer who a few days earlier had murdered three black French paratroopers in two separate attacks. A killer who targeted Jews and blacks – must be a far-right white racist, right?

Wrong. The suspect who the French police have now cornered turns out to be a jihadi Islamic terrorist with self-declared links to al Qaeda, who has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past. Well, there’s a surprise.

Jews throughout the world are all potential targets for attack in a terrifying manifestation of global incitement to murder. Islamists regularly declare their intention to kill Jews wherever they can find them. Hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel over the past couple of weeks bear out daily the frenzied attempt to murder as many Jews as possible. In the Mumbai massacre in 2008, it turned out that the attack on the tiny ultra-orthodox Lubavitch centre was for the Islamic perpetrators of that atrocity the most important target. There have been repeated Islamic terrorist attempts on Jewish targets around the world. Oh -- and Islamists have been murdering black people in Libya because they are black.

Yet all this is ignored by the mainstream media. Desperate to sanitise Muslim genocidal terrorism and prove that racism and Jew-hatred is confined to white people and the ‘far right’, the media simply did not entertain the possibility that the perpetrator of the French killings might have been a Muslim. So a range of likely perpetrators was canvassed – but they were all variations on white racists.

And even when the perpetrator turned out to be an Islamic terrorist the media were still trying to spin it away, with Sky News stressing the deprivation of the killer and his family and interviewing a French female journalist living in London who claimed that this was ‘an attack against diversity’. As blogger Edgar Davidson observed here:

‘She said that it was all down to the racist climate in France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had introduced.’

Not only are the media and ‘progressive’ commentators in the west desperate to sanitise Islamic terrorism and genocidal incitement; they also join in. The Toulouse jihadist said he was

‘seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French military postings overseas.’

But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers in harm’s way in order to any minimise civilian casualties in military operations against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which it undertakes solely to protect its own people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product of war – and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children in harm’s way.

Yet this deranged belief that the Israelis deliberately kill Palestinian children is not only pumped out daily by the Arab and Muslim world inciting their people to hate Jews and to murder them as a holy act; not only do western progressives ignore this incitement and pretend instead that Islamic terrorism arises from legitimate ‘grievances’; these same western progressives themselves pump out precisely the same lies and incitement -- and then suggest that the deliberate murder of Jewish innocents is the moral equivalent of attempts by Israel to prevent the slaughter of yet more innocents.

Thus the EU foreign affairs chief, the British Baroness Ashton, seemed to equate the murder of the French Jews in Toulouse with the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza in Israeli military operations there. Although the EU now claims she was misunderstood and that she was merely referring to all violence against children, that does not let her off the hook – indeed, by underscoring the fundamental amorality of the remark, it not only attaches Lady Ashton to that hook yet more firmly but also now attaches the EU itself. And now Hamas itself, no less, has sprung to her defence:

‘“Ashton’s declarations are worthy of appreciation and support due to Israel’s attempts to pressure her,” said a senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, on his Facebook page.’

As a fine article in The Commentator points out:

‘No-one will ever know whether the tragedy in Toulouse would not have taken place if the atmosphere were different. But we can say that history teaches that mass demonisation can all too easily lead to the dehumanisation of the group or people or nation that is being demonised. From there it is only one single step to the belief that murder itself can be justified.’

The terrorist who carried out the French killings may now have been caught. But those in the west who provide an echo chamber for the diabolical discourse that incubates genocide have yet to be brought to account.

[thehighlandrebel]

The head of Frances domestic intelligence agency Bernard Squarcini said that Merah was not radicalised abroad or in jail but was self taught.

The book that was used to turn him into a terrorist and a mass murderer was, ahem, the 'holy' quran.

islamversuseurope.blogspot.ca/2012/03/merah-self-radicalised-reading-koran.html

Craig P Winn was correct in his book 'The Prophet Of Doom' when he said that the quran was the most widely used terrorist manual in the world today.
He also said that if the quran was written today it would be banned from publcation.

[Teddy Bear]

Amidst all the speculation and political agendas I doubt as if we'll ever really know the truth about how he became radicalised. From Sarkozy's statements it would appear he believes it happened in prison, which we know does go on. I see the media still claims he killed the 3 soldiers because of the French military presence in Muslim countries, in order to show and blame foreign policy for alienating Muslims. Yet they hide the truth that it was specifically Muslim soldiers that were targeted. Co-incidence, or were they seen as traitors to the 'cause'?

[Teddy Bear]

Adam Turner serves as staff counsel to the Middle East Forum's Legal Project. He is a former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee where he focused on national security law. He pretty much echoes the narrative we have covered above.

(Links to the various parts are available on the story linked to below.)

When political correctness kills
by Adam Turner

Starting on March 11 and ending on March 19, a terrorist wearing a motorcycle helmet that covered his face conducted a vicious killing spree in Toulouse, France, murdering three French military officers (two of Arab ancestry, one of Caribbean ancestry) and four French Jewish civilians (a 30-year-old Rabbi, his 5-year-old son, his 4-year-old son and an 8-year-old girl). Much speculation as to the possible motives and background of the terrorist followed. On March 21, 2012, the French armed forces surrounded an apartment in Toulouse where the killer lived and released his identity: It was a French Islamist named Mohammed Merah. On March 22, Merah was shot dead while jumping out of his apartment window

What was most disturbing about this terrorist act — aside from its occurrence — was that the elite Western public officials' and media's speculation about the true killer, prior to the discovery of his identity, heavily focused (also here and here and here) on the belief that he was a white European neo-Nazi, or perhaps another Anders Breivik, a white, European Christian killer who hated Islam and may have hated Jews.

Granted, the fact that both French Muslims and French Jews had been killed, and the fact that some neo-Nazis had recently been dismissed from the French military, made this a plausible assumption. But it was not the only possible assumption, and it was almost certainly not the most likely one.

The most likely assumption was what was eventually found to be true — that the killer was a Muslim jihadist who hated Jews and hated those "traitorous" fellow Muslims who served in the "infidel" French army. Indeed, not to toot my own horn, but this was my initial belief. The neo-Nazi Frenchmen who were originally focused on had never been accused of any actual violence against anyone, unlike the actual killer, Mohammed Merah.

Merah had numerous acts of violence on his record along with two short prison terms, in 2007 and 2009. And there was plenty more circumstantial evidence pointing to Merah. He had made two trips to Afghanistan and one to Pakistan — vacationing in a war zone, he claimed — had trained in a jihadist camp in Afghanistan, had been caught planting bombs in Afghanistan in 2007 but escaped from jail in 2008 to return to France, terrorized his French neighbors who in 2010 reported him to the police as a physical threat, was arrested in 2011 during his second trip to Afghanistan and sent back to Toulouse, was under surveillance by French authorities since 2008 for his Islamist beliefs and was even on a U.S. no-fly list. In fact, it turns out that after the first terror attack, Merah was actually placed on a list of possible suspects alongside his older brother Abdelkader, but little was done to trace either of them until after the Jewish school massacre, when the police secured the mobile phone of the first victim, the soldier in Montauban, which showed conversations between him and Merah.

Aside from this evidence, there were other good reasons why the police and observers should have suspected an Islamist killer. Since the 1990s, a large majority of the acts of terrorism in the West have been conducted by Islamic jihadists. This is simply a fact. According to one unscientific count, since 1992 there have been 72 Islamist terrorist attacks on Western targets. Taking a more global view, others cite a number of 18,616 terrorist attacks by jihadists since 9/11. Max Boot says "it is undeniable that the most prominent acts of terrorism in the past several decades have been committed by Islamists, whose ideology has displaced Marxism and even nationalism as the primary propellant for terrorism, as it was in the 1960s-1970s."

Meanwhile, during this same time, there have been very few non-Islamist acts of terrorism. The two most commonly mentioned are the attacks in Oklahoma City in 1995 and in Oslo, Norway in 2011. Breivik, by the way, was not a neo-Nazi, nor a Christian fundamentalist; he was ruled "a paranoid schizophrenic" by a Norwegian court.

Yet, in 2012, when these brutal acts of terrorism occurred in France, the immediate working assumption by the Western elites was that the perpetrator was a neo-Nazi. Let's be very clear about this. We all understand why this delusional thinking occurs — the desire to be politically correct and to not single out a specific religion as producing most of the world's terrorists for the past few decades. But facts are facts, and these PC feelings are dangerous. In the Toulouse case, Mohammed Merah was not even hiding, he was sitting in his apartment because he was "confident that police sought a neo-Nazi." It is even possible that he might have been caught sooner, perhaps prior to the killing of the children, had the French tracked down this terrorist criminal who was well-known to them.

Please remember, political correctness kills. Just ask them.