Terror in France: A mystery

Of the French murderer Mohammad Merah, the Mail blared:

Al Qaeda fanatic is DEAD

It would be interesting to know if he really did join Al Qaeda, if only because many observers have expressed doubt that Al Qaeda remains much of a going concern. According to Al Jazeera, French Interior Minister Claude Guéant (speaking to reporters) has linked Merah to Al Qaeda. However,

Michael Stephens, a researcher with the Royal United Services Institute in Qatar, however, told Al Jazeera the interior minister needed to step back until there was more evidence.

"There is very little evidence of organisational structure behind the attack. It is more likely he was acting alone and radicalised by al-Qaeda ideas," he said.

The BBC says that Merah "reportedly" identified himself as a member of Al Qaeda. Apparently, he did so in this fashion:

Several witnesses in Les Izards are quoted by La Depeche as saying Merah turned up outside the family's home dressed in camouflage and waving a sword, shouting "al-Qaeda! al-Qaeda!"

Not exactly subtle, eh? The 9/11 hijackers were a lot more low-key. CNN also reports that Merah kidnapped a 15 year-old boy and made him watch videos of Al Qaeda-linked beheadings. (I presume this refers to Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg.)

Merah was, in short, acting like an emotionally disturbed wannabe, not like a well-trained agent. Making matters supremely odd are the reports from associates who say he was, for most of his short life, apolitical.

CNN describes Merah as being among those

who are "self-radicalized," who remain beyond any cell structure, who drift from one job or place of residence to another...

But is that picture accurate? We have excellent evidence that someone was helping -- even manipulating -- Mohamed Merah. Although he was, by all accounts, a lazy ne'er-do-well with a prison record (the Telegraph says he "lived on the dole"), the 23 year-old Merah somehow found the funding to make two trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is a curious fact that these mysterious young men who make the news in startling ways always tend to have incomprehensibly luxurious travel budgets. We still don't know how Lee Oswald got to Russia. By contrast, when I was 23, I had a hard time scraping up enough gas money to go from L.A. to San Diego.

Here's more:

He had, however, been known to the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI) - the powerful super agency created by Sarkozy in 2008 - since 2010. Merah first visited Afghanistan that year, was stopped at a road checkpoint by Afghan police in Kandahar province and sent back to France by American forces.

Isn't that reaction kind of odd in and of itself?

"Since the DCRI was following Mohamed Merah for a year, how come they took so long to locate him?" Socialist party security spokesman Francois Rebsamen asked on the JDD.fr website.

Merah, a French citizen of Algerian extraction, was also able to amass a cache of at least eight guns under the noses of French intelligence, including several Colt .45 pistols of the kind he used in the shootings, but also at least one Uzi submachine gun, a Sten gun and a pump action shotgun.

In Washington, two U.S. officials said Merah was on a U.S. government "no fly" list, barring him from boarding any U.S.-bound aircraft. The officials said that his name had been on the list for some time.

Wikipedia says that he also had an AK-47 and some hand grenades.

Strange. How does one impecunious Charlie Nobody -- a former jailbird who lives in a country with gun control laws, someone whom the authorities had been watching for years, someone on the no-fly list -- manage to amass such an impressive collection of armaments?

Never mind, for the moment, the problem of acquisition. How could he afford that collection? Again: When I was 23, I had a hard time paying for a decent ratchet wrench. This guy traded a Colt for a mobile phone -- a fact which tells me that he had lots of weaponry and no folding money. He treated weaponry as money.

Side note: Just to prove that Americans don't have a hammerlock on mania, one of the Mail commenters offered this gem:

All you leftwing do gooders must be gutted... It is the left who are determined to ruin the west, our values, our culture, our beliefs and way of life. It is they who control our immigration policy, and it is they who bribe people, be they good or criminal, in a head long rush to dissolve us from history.

A killing spree like Merah's can only help to spread that mentality. And now, back to our story...

A rather dubious French-language site called Alter Info has a story up right now: Mohamed Merah, real terrorist or useful idiot victim of a state conspiracy. Here's the Google translation.

Let's have an excerpt from this piece in a "cleaned up" translation...

How is it that the French, reputedly very effective, were unable to prevent these attacks, even though no Muslim can escape the surveillance of these services, let alone those who have made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan?

We have already shown in the past how Western services have fabricated public opinion and manipulated the authors of acts attributed to Islamists, up to the point of inciting them to take action, and even recruiting them while posing as a terrorist organization.

Those words were written after Merah was identified but before his death. The follow-up article is titled Mohamed Merah, better dead than alive:

In order to make an impression on minds already drained of all objectivity, all French media have, since yesterday, continuously disseminated information which, though often contradictory, always toes the same propaganda line about a young suburbanite turned Islamist terrorist -- even though, according to many sources, this youth has absolutely no terrorist profile; quite the contrary.

Unfortunately, the article gets goofy after that. First, the author claims that Bin Laden died in 2001. I have learned (the hard way) that folks who bray this "fact" with utter confidence usually don't know the difference between proof and surmise. Our French conspiracy theorist then asserts that the killings of innocent Jews, attributed to Merah, were actually committed by Mossad agents. Even I find that suggestion incredibly offensive, and nobody has ever called me a Mossad admirer. (Again, please note the "speculation = proof" mentality at work.) Naturally, the Jews also get the blame for 9/11.

Despite the silliness exhibited by this Gallic version of Alex Jones, he finishes his piece with a couple of genuinely intriguing claims.

1. Apparently, the mother refused to speak to the son during the final stand-off. That is odd.

2. Even odder:

According to initial evidence, the killer was Caucasian with blue eyes and a tattooed face. By what miracle of genetics is a Caucasian suddenly transformed into Semite with a sunburned complexion?

Well, the blue-eyed tattooed white guy description doesn't really favor the "Mossad hit squad" theory, does it? Come to think of it, any hit man who gets a facial tattoo would have to be a complete fool. A mundane appearance would seem to be a job requirement.

Still, this is interesting stuff. I'd like to see the exact wording of this description. Who gave it? Did this person get a close look at the killer? Where was the description first published?

I am not among those inclined to dismiss an eyewitness simply because that person has said something which inconveniences an official story. I am also not among those who accepts wild conspiratorial assertions simply because they contradict an official story.