Major Terror Attack in Paris

Wednesday morning, at 11:26 am, three hooded individuals dressed in black and armed with Kalashnikovs and a rocket launcher, forced their way into the building of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, in downtown Paris and proceeded to carry out a five-minute shoot-out, killing 12 people, among which were two policemen deployed to intervene. Among the dead, a large part of the editorial board of this very popular weekly in France, gathered for their weekly editorial meeting. These include several of their star journalists and talented caricaturists, well-known to the French public as Charb, Cabu, Wolinski, and Tignous, plus left-wing economist Bernard Maris, a member of the Bank of France board, who is also part of the magazine’s editorial board.

As in other recent terror incidents in France, a policeman and several journalists who survived the attack report that the “terrorists” called themselves al-Qaeda affiliates, and shouted “Allahu Akbar” and “the Prophet will be avenged.” Reportedly they spoke French as their mother tongue.

While much more intelligence needs to be gathered, a first evaluation is that we are witnessing a full-fledged attempt to plunge Europe into a chaos scenario, pitting sections of the population against one another — pro-immigration against anti-immigration; pro-Muslim vs. anti-Muslim — at a time where they should, on the contrary, unite to face the major strategic problems of the time, the financial crash and the danger of war.

The so-called “Islamic” attack against Charlie Hebdo comes just four days after the attacks against three mosques in a Sweden, where the xenophobic Party of Democracy has doubled its strength since 2010. In the Netherlands, partisans of Geert Wilders of the Party of Liberty, wrote in their blogs their full support for those actions in Sweden, and said they would do the same in the Netherlands. The attack in France comes also at a moment when pro- and anti-immigration demonstrations in Germany are mobilizing thousands of people every Monday, under the leadership of PEGIDA (European Patriots against Islamization of the West), with 18,000 in Dresden alone on Jan. 5th!

Charlie Hebdo itself has been playing with this explosive fire for some time. In 2006, it was they who published the insulting Mohammed caricatures, after Denmark’s Jyllands Posten and the French daily France Soir. At that time, CounterPunch, a U.S.-based left-wing magazine, reported that neo-con Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum, was the one who furnished the cartoons to Jyllands Posten. At that time Geert Wilders had declared that the Koran was the same thing as Mein Kampf. When he was taken to court for that, the Middle East Forum announced proudly that they were financing Wilders’ legal defense. Furthermore, Robert Spencer, a friend of Pipes, founded Jihad Watch, and this whole operation at that time was coordinated through the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, a neo-con outfit funded by the Randolph Foundation, and the CFR, where one finds Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Bernard Lewis, Irving Kristol of PNAC, etc.

This time again, Charlie Hebdo was about to proceed to another provocation. The cover story of their new issue was on Michel Houellebecq, a professional “provocateur” who just published a novel Soumission (Submission). The scenario of the book is that in 2025, a French presidential election pits Marine Le Pen against a Muslim candidate who has the backing of the right-wing UMP, the Socialist Party, and other mainstream parties. He actually wins and runs a good policy overall, including peace and economic development, except that all the women have to veil themselves, stop working, etc.!

All the actors of this tragedy have obviously been profiled with a lot of make-up to create a certain appearance of reality. The specific aim of this operation is not yet clear. In various statements, LaRouche associate Jacques Cheminade noted that “this is a terrorist attack against France,” he called for “national solidarity” to deal with the crisis, and said that the real enemy is “financial power”. He also noted that the attack has been carried out by “professionals”. In a weak statement, given in front of the Charlie Hebdo offices, French President François Hollande did call for “national unity” and for France to respond with unity to this attack.