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Charlie Hebdo Tag

Police in France have arrested a Muslim leader who reportedly issued a fatwa, or the Islamic death warrant, on the school teacher beheaded in Paris on Friday, the French-language newspaper Le Soir confirmed on Monday. The suspect, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, leads an organization called "Cheikh Yassine Collective," which was set up in the memory of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the slain founder of the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas.

A French teacher was beheaded by an Islamist in a Paris suburb on Friday for discussing Muhammad caricatures with his class. The knife-wielding attacker, identified as an 18-year-old immigrant, shouted "Allahu Akbar" at the scene of the gruesome killing, media reports say. The jihadi was shot dead after he charged at the police following the gruesome killing. 

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has reprinted the Mohammed cartoons as the trials for the 2015 Islamic terror attack begins at a Paris court this week. "We will never lie down. We will never give up," magazine's editor Laurent "Riss" Sourisseau wrote in its latest edition.

French police and prosecutors have opened an investigation into new threats French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo over images of naked Muslims they published. The threats come over a year two gunmen slaughtered eleven people at Charlie Hebdo over "offensive" images of Mohammad. They also killed a security guard outside of the building.

A year ago today, Muslim terrorists murdered twelve people. Eleven of those killed worked in the same building as France's satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The twelfth was a Parisian cop. al-Qaeda took credit for the attack and claimed "offensive" images of Islamic Prophet Mohammad sparked the gruesome attack. After the terrorist assault on free speech, papers refused to re-publish those "offensive" cartoons. Pundits in our own free press blamed Charlie Hebdo for inciting violence. Fast forward one year. What has changed? Monday, Professor Jacobson blogged about Charlie Hebdo's anniversary cover. The Guardian reported:
French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo will mark a year since an attack on its offices with a cover featuring a bearded man representing God with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, accompanied by the text: “One year on: the assassin is still out there.” One million copies of the special edition will be available on newsstands on Wednesday, with tens of thousands more to be sent overseas.

January 7 is the one-year anniversary of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and, two days later, the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket. yemen al qaida charlie hebdo The cover for the anniversary issue of Charlie Hebdo has been released. The Guardian reports:
French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo will mark a year since an attack on its offices with a cover featuring a bearded man representing God with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, accompanied by the text: “One year on: the assassin is still out there.” One million copies of the special edition will be available on newsstands on Wednesday, with tens of thousands more to be sent overseas. It will mark a year since brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi burst into Charlie Hebdo’s offices in eastern Paris and killed 12 people, including eight of the magazine’s staff.

A three-day long controversy broke out recently over the use of the term "No-Go Zones" with regard to certain European cities in light of the Charlie Hebdo and HyperCasher supermarket attacks by Islamic radicals. Steve Emerson of The Investigative Project, a longtime expert on terrorism and its connection to Islamist radicals, made a misstep when he overstated the case while appearing on Fox News.  That created a near-perfect storm of groups just waiting to jump all over him: Fox News haters like the NY Times (even though it previously used the term) and the liberal entertainment media; British and European politicians who prefer not to deal with the sources and implications of domestic terror; and groups that have made professions of tarring people with the Islamophobia epithet. Emerson handed it all to them on a silver platter, as Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal explains:
Steven Emerson, the expert on terrorism, has caused a sigh of relief among the bien pensants of the Western world. By making inaccurate and false claims on Fox News, he has enabled them to pour righteous scorn on him and thereby avoid thinking about uncomfortable social realities.
A defense of Emerson's basic point, if not his specific description, is provided by the Gatestone Institute, European 'No-Go' Zones: Fact or Fiction? Part 1, France. (added) See also, Jonathan Tobin, ‘No-Go Zones’ Are Not a Conservative Meme. Regardless of whether "No-Go Zone" is a proper term in a general way, there is no doubt that there are cities and sections of many cities in Europe which are no-go zones for those publicly identifying as Jewish by dress (e.g., wearing a kippah/yarmulke) or symbols (e.g. wearing a Star of David) or appearance (e.g., long beard in combination with dress and symbols). We have explored the problem of Walking While Jewish repeatedly over the years, including recently regarding "Kippah Walks" in placed like Copenhagen to protest harassment of Jews on the street, frequently by groups of Muslim young men. Though it's not only men, as this woman in Copenhagen demonstrated with her Heil Hitler shout when she spotted Jews at a restaurant:

Bill Maher has been on a free speech tear lately, and if you look back at the last few months it makes perfect sense. In December of 2014 he was booked to speak at UC-Berkeley's commencement; but liberal students who disagreed with his views on Islam and free speech tried to shut him down. Of course, Professor Jacobson predicted all of this. Maher ultimately spoke at Berkeley---and used the opportunity to bash Republicans. Even so, you have to admire Maher's recent strong defense of free speech. Here's a clip from his Friday show where he took liberals to task on political correctness over Islam. He even takes a poke at the "Stop Rush" crowd. (NSFW for language) Josh Feldman of Mediaite does a great job outlining the segment:

President Bill Clinton appeared on the Seth Meyers show last week and offered some common sense about the double standard of Islamic radicals who take advantage of freedom in western countries. Clinton's view is distinctly different than what we've heard from the Obama administration which is having trouble even naming America's enemies. Greg Gutfeld and the panel of The Five analyzed Clinton's comments on the air yesterday: Naturally, liberal news outlets are ignoring that part of Clinton's appearance, instead choosing to focus on another segment.

We recently covered the No-Go Zones of Europe. In the newest edition of Afterburner, Bill Whittle takes a close look at France and the events that led to the attack on Charlie Hebdo, particularly European multiculturalism which is anti-assimilationist. Whittle also makes an excellent analogy to American Politics, citing the identity groups that sprang up around Obama in the 2008 election. Watch it below: Speaking of Europe and multiculturalism, Sweden is at a crossroads. Although usually hailed by progressives as a standard for society, the political system in Sweden is breaking down.

The U.S. failed to send any senior official to the Paris Solidarity Rally. Eric Holder even was in Paris at the time, but did Sunday morning talk shows. Instead, yesterday John Kerry brought James Taylor to France to play "You've Got A Friend" to smooth things over. http://on.aol.com/video/james-taylor-sings--youve-got-a-friend--during-kerry-visit-to-paris-town-hall-518604326?socialmd=0%7C577%7C63%7C2 We suggested that Barry McGuire's Eve of Destruction was a better choice. Using James Taylor as foreign policy political cover was embarrassing for our country. But Kerry seemed oblivious to the imagery, as he went into a dreamy trance as Taylor sang. (See Featured Image) Here are five songs the French could have, and maybe should have, played back at Kerry.

1. Bobby Vee - Go Away Little Girl

John Kerry had a near lip lock with French President Hollande (via Instapundit). http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/201070/ Which makes Bobby Vee - Go Away Little Girl (1962) my number one pick:

The Obama administration has engaged in absurd linguistic gymnastics to pretend that the terrorists who shot up Charlie Hebdo and the HyperCasher supermarket merely were individuals who happened to adopt radical Islamic extremism almost by chance.  Could have been any extremism, we're told. Generic "extremism" is the problem, as if it lived out of body. By playing these word games, the administration does no favor to those in the Muslim world who recognize the reality and want it to stop.  To the contrary, the administration's word games constitute an abandonment. The President of Egypt is one of those voices, calling for a revolution within the Muslim world against the extremism. Another voice is Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya In late September 2014, I wrote about an article by Melhem, The Barbarians Within Our Gates. Melhem made points as a Muslim examining the Muslim world that would get him labeled "Islamophobic" and "racist" by groups like CAIR and the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed.... And let’s face the grim truth: There is no evidence whatever that Islam in its various political forms is compatible with modern democracy. From Afghanistan under the Taliban to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and from Iran to Sudan, there is no Islamist entity that can be said to be democratic, just or a practitioner of good governance. The short rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under the presidency of Mohamed Morsi was no exception. The Brotherhood tried to monopolize power, hound and intimidate the opposition and was driving the country toward a dangerous impasse before a violent military coup ended the brief experimentation with Islamist rule....

Ronald Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech set forth the stark choice facing free societies in the fight against Communism: After the attacks in France and throughout Europe on Jews, often motivated and perpetrated in the name of anti-Zionism, it's no longer possible to sit on the sidelines. It's another time for choosing. Whatever Israel's problems with regard to balancing the fight against terror with preservation of freedom, such problems pale in comparison to what goes on in the rest of the region and most of the world, where balance is not even attempted. We saw it in the intimidation and threats against "journalists" in Gaza during the 2014 summer conflict, where Hamas bullying resulted in refusals to report key facts such as Hamas using schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure as rocket firing locations. Some evidence, however, slipped out, particularly after "journalists" left Gaza. That is true also in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, where there is no independent journalism except directed at Israel. Israel and Israel alone is under a microscope from hundreds of journalists and Non-Governmental Organizations whose primary job is to wake up every morning and find something wrong that then can be broadcast through Western and Arab media.

British lawmakers are shifting uncomfortably after receiving pushback over proposed anti-terrorism legislation that scholars say could fatally limit the fundamental rights of British citizens both at home and abroad. Via Bloomberg:
Provisions in the bill would allow the government to invalidate a British national’s passport while he or she is abroad and prevent their return to the U.K. without an agreement to comply with certain conditions. “This gives rise to a very real risk that the human rights of U.K. nationals will be violated as a result of the imposition of temporary exclusion orders,” Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights said in a 43-page report published today. “We are opposed in principle to any exclusion of U.K. nationals from the U.K., even on a temporary basis.” Home Secretary Theresa May introduced the bill in November, saying the terrorism threat in Britain is greater now than at any time since the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. Militants in Syria “are trying to direct terrorist attacks in the U.K.,” Andrew Parker, the head of the domestic intelligence agency known as MI5, said in a Jan. 8 speech.
The fact that this pushback is happening so soon after terror attacks ravaged the streets of Paris is not insignificant, especially in the UK. As early as late November of last year, UK Home Secretary Theresa May was pushing for new laws that would force schools, universities, and councils to join the fight against terrorism, and afford authorities much more investigative power and control over terrorism suspects. Parliament's joint human rights committee has expressed concerns over the lack of rights protections in the new legislation, saying that if enacted, it could severely limit academic freedom on campus: