Tolerance for Intolerant Islamism

"They were too tolerant with these people. We are all Muslims, but I love life. Life is beautiful, no?"
Alphonse Bangoura, 40

It is Mr. Bangoura's opinion -- quite unlike the opinion of other French Muslims interviewed by reporters in the past few days whose thought was that France had it coming for involving itself in Muslim affairs abroad -- that French authorities failed to pay sufficient attention to what went on in mosques. This, he says, is where the jihadism indoctrination begins. And he has a little story of an imam informing the faithful how wrong it is to drink Coke, the beverage of the Americans.

These are people who have French citizenship, who congregate in their thouands to Saint-Denis where a multi-ethnic, heavily Muslim population lives. It is an area that has become notorious for the proliferation of drug dealers, and the constant of petty crime. Boudouma Nabi, decribing himself as a devout Muslim proclaimed that those who were responsible for the killings "are going into flames. They are going to hell." 

Reuters / Monday, November 16, 2015

An undated photograph of a man described as Abdelhamid Abaaoud that was published in the Islamic State's online magazine Dabiq and posted on a social media website. A Belgian national and the suspected mastermind of the attacks that killed 129 in Paris was among those killed in a police raid in a suburb of the French capital, the Paris prosecutor said in a statement. According to RTL Radio, Abaaoud is a 27-year-old

He seems confident enough. This was in the wake of Wednesday's French police assault on the northern Paris suburb when they converged in riot gear and a seven-hour standoff ensued at an apartment building. What remains to be explained is how it could be that a squalid apartment building in a somewhat state of disrepair housing people so in need of shelter that they accept such sub-par dwellings as their own, had a fortified door installed at the targeted apartment.

Fortified as in difficult to enter without permission. Sufficiently so that an explosive charge was required to open it, so to speak. Behind which were individuals of reputed Islamist malice preparing to launch yet another series of attacks, buoyed by the outstanding success of their and their now-dead colleagues' series of attacks that took place on Friday, 13th of November. If French intelligence proved to be a dismal failure in the original attack last week, they were no doubt anxious to repair their reputation in launching this operation preventing a reprise.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molin spoke of "Sustained, almost uninterrupted gunfire followed for nearly an hour" once that fortified door had been dismantled allowing entry. That, furthermore judging from the weapons in the hands of the jihadists, their organization and their determination the "commando unit" had been on the cusp of carrying out another surprise for France. "On the police side, nearly 5,000 bullets were fired", he said.

And, of course, there was also an explosion of sufficient strength to demolish the floor on which the suicidist, a woman, a cousin of the sought-after principal who engineered Friday's attacks evidently triggered through her explosives vest. Her cousin, it appears, the sought-after Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian citizen whose history of terrorism-related exploits were previously explained in the international press, was also a casualty of that raid, so he will not be available for questioning.