French Security Against Terrorism

"The work on these attacks, on these terrorist and barbaric acts continues ... because we consider that there are most probably some possible accomplices."
"[The manhunt is still urgent since] the threat is still present."
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls

"A little girl was telling me earlier that she wanted to live in peace and learn in peace in her school."
"That's what the government, that's what the Republic, owes to all the children in France; security in all schools, especially in the schools that could be threatened."
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve

French soldiers prepare before patrolling, at the Satory military camp in Versailles, west of Paris, France, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015. France on Monday ordered 10,000 troops into the streets to protect sensitive sites after three days of bloodshed and terror, amid the hunt for accomplices to the attacks that left 17 people and the three gunmen dead. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

How awfully reassuring all of this is for the Jewish community in France. A community that has made its home in the country for hundreds of years. A community that has always been proud of its French heritage. Holding out the banners of freedom in the core French values of liberty, fraternity and equality. Those values are of inestimable need to Jews who have not throughout their history found fraternity and equality in the lands where they have lived for generations.

But those fundamental core values have been degraded in France, the country of revolutionary zeal, and determined secularism. Although Muslims too have lived in France for quite a while, those migrants from North Africa who settled in France were not of the same Islamist calibre of more recent migrants who brought with them the seething pathology of hatred of Jews. With their arrival and settling in, anti-Semitism has been revived with a vengeance.

And although it was a French Kosher supermarket that was attacked, the target originally was meant to be a Jewish school. The aspiration to kill and maim Jewish children in France has manifested itself on earlier occasions. The French government took great umbrage when French Jews were urged by Prime Minister Netanyahu to leave France for Israel, where they can live without fear of attack, among other Jews.

Soldiers stand guard outside a synagogue in Paris, Monday, Jan. 12, 2015. All of France's 717 Jewish schools will be given extra security in the wake of the attacks. (Jacques Brinon/Associated Press)

Of course, the very same scourge of hatred against Jews is alive and festering on the boundaries of Israel, just as it does in France, and deadly attacks by Jew-haters are not unknown in Israel. Perhaps comfort lies simply in living among other Jews who will not turn with hatred upon one another. France insists it will guarantee the safety of its French Jewish citizens, but it has proven spectacularly incapable of doing so up until now.

True, some 4,700 security forces are scheduled to be assigned to the protection of the 717 Jewish schools within France, but how long will they be deployed for, at a time when the incidents of anti-Semitism are on the rise? In France, jihadists select particular targets, such as the Charlie Hebdo staff, in payback for their insolence against the Prophet Mohammed. But all Jews without exception are seen as fair game by terrorists.

They have their sights as well on police and members of the military, viewing them as being responsible for the deaths in combat of Islamists. And since it takes about 60 security agents to follow the activities of one suspected terrorist until that individual takes violent action, how reactive can French authorities be in light of the fact that there are about one thousand French Muslims who have departed to take part in conflict abroad for jihad?

The staggering number of security personnel dispatched to monitor the actions and supposed menace inherent in their presence on return seems an insurmountable barrier to apprehending such attacks before they occur. It is beyond instructive that Germany's domestic intelligence chief urged on Turkey greater action to prevent extremists crossing Turkish territory to join the Islamic State militias, along with other terrorist organizations.

The recommendation was not taken lightly by Turkey, whose president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan scented what he claimed was hypocrisy in the reaction of the West to the attacks that took place in Paris. His response was to query why it was that Coulibaly and Cherif Kouachi hadn't been more closely monitored after their release from prison. "Doesn't the intelligence service there follow those who have been released?" he sneered.

"The hypocrisy of the West is plain to see. We as Muslims never sided with terrorism, we never sided with massacres. What lies behind these massacres is racism, hate speech and Islamophobia."  An amazing assertion, to be sure. "We ... Muslims never sided with terrorism"; where then does it come from if not from within the Islamist/Muslim community? "...we never sided with massacres", who is committing those massacres in sectarian violence if not Muslims?
 
A telling moment indeed. While Turkey's representatives marched in solidarity with the "We Are Charlie Hebdo" international protest, the government of Turkey at its highest level states clearly that the West provoked the attack, and the Muslim world is victimized by Western-linked hatred of Islam. Such attacks, in other words are a just response to umbrage given.

It is an opinion shared by that elder statesman who was once America's peerless president, Jimmy Carter who himself explained his opinion that the Paris attack owed its occurrence to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. As though hateful Islamism was born in the ashes of one failed Israel-Palestinian peace agreement after another.

Islamist jihad, martyrdom, suicide attacks, and the mass slaughter of Muslim sectarian bloodshed is the Phoenix that rises from the ashes of Israel's heritage in the Middle East.