From the first intelligence surveillance to the final shootout,
France’s clumsy handling of its spate of Islamic terrorism in March
was a case study in how not to deal with a jihadist. With the
largest Muslim community in Europe—nearly 10 percent of the
population—and thousands of young Frenchmen going to Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Egypt, and Yemen on the pretext of studying the Koran,
it does not bode well for the country’s domestic tranquility.
Neither does the fact that officials have long been in denial,
minimizing the threat for fear of alarming the public and
antagonizing an increasingly restive ethnic-Arab minority. Thus
tranquillized, the French public shrugs and says pas de
problème: a recent poll shows only 53 percent think the
terrorist threat is dangerous, the lowest level of concern since
2001.
Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent who
shot three French soldiers point blank in the South of France, then
slaughtered a teacher, his two young sons, and an 8-year-old girl
at a Jewish school in Toulouse, said loud and clear that he was
acting for al Qaeda. His coolly professional assassinations,
intended to “bring France to its knees”—President Nicolas Sarkozy
compared them to the 9/11 attacks in the U.S.—bore the jihadist
imprint right down to filming them and ensuring he died a martyr’s
death seen on the world’s television screens. He signed his social
network account “Mohamed Merah-Forsane Alizza,” meaning “Knights of
Pride,” an outlawed France-based jihadist outfit.
Yet the government energetically pooh-poohed the idea that
France was seriously threatened by Islamic fundamentalists. “These
crimes were the work of a fanatic and a monster,” Nicolas Sarkozy
insisted. “To look for an explanation…would be a moral fault.” He
instructed the French not to blame the attacks on “our Muslim
compatriots [who] had nothing to do with the crazy motivation of a
terrorist.” Most of the obedient French media went along with the
politically correct whitewash.
Despite his claims to the contrary, Merah was officially
described as a loner with no assistance from any al Qaeda
affiliate. Indeed, the favorite theory of the chattering class was
that he must be a right-wing neo-Nazi. Or failing that, just your
typical underprivileged, disaffected guy who had had a miserable
childhood in the slums. The left-leaning Le Monde reported
that he had “an angelic face, a fascinating beauty.” His 15 arrests
and doing time for everything from stoning buses to violent theft
and fighting with rivals? Liberals outdid themselves to show he was
the psychologically disturbed victim of an unjust society. “A
pathetic young man…the victim of a social order that had already
doomed him, and millions of others like him, to a marginal
existence, and to the non-recognition of his status as a citizen
equal in rights and opportunities,” explained the Muslim apologist
Tariq Ramadan, who was denied a U.S. visa for providing material
support to a terrorist organization before the ACLU persuaded
Hillary Clinton to lift the ban.
The failure of the French domestic intelligence agency, the
DCRI, to spot Merah as a serious threat, and its subsequent efforts
at self-justification, would have been comic were we not dealing
with tragedy. Its chief called him a self-radicalized young man
with a split personality, a lone wolf who operated below the radar.
Besides, he pleaded, Merah had not followed the usual path taken by
Islamist extremists. He wasn’t visibly part of any network. He even
went to nightclubs instead of mosques, for heaven’s sake, so how
could we know he was a jihadist? “We had absolutely no reason to
believe he was commissioned by al Qaeda to carry out these
attacks.” No doubt it would have helped to have a copy of his
marching orders on an al Qaeda letterhead.
The DCRI chief and other officials tried to make light of a 2010
trip Merah made to Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, spiritual home
of the Taliban. But as information leaked out, it became clear that
this poor kid, who lived on welfare payments of about $600 a month,
had left tracks all over the Middle East, with somebody else
obviously paying the bills. Besides Afghanistan, he later visited
Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel in the space of
two years. Strangely, he was reportedly arrested by Afghan police
on his first trip and handed over to American forces there, who
returned him to France. The FBI’s counterterrorism department put
him on the no-fly list, barring entry to the U.S. The French
ignored this, either through sheer sloppiness or to avoid any
appearance of profiling.
They did, however, put him under loose surveillance. Nearly a
year after his first trip to Afghanistan, a DCRI agent in Toulouse
finally called his cell number to ask him to come in for a talk. He
didn’t bat an eye when Mohamed answered and said sorry, he
couldn’t—he was busy in Pakistan at the time. When he finally did
drop in months later, these Keystone Kops approvingly looked over
the photos he brought along as proof he was there as a tourist,
said something like très bien, mon ami, and let him go. (This
casual relationship and other aspects of the case led to
speculation that Merah was perhaps a double agent, an informer for
the DCRI who was turned by al Qaeda; a lawyer hired by his father
claims to have video proof that he was “manipulated” and
“liquidated” by the police.)
The official French version that Merah was a lone wolf inspired
by his solitary reading of the Koran looked even more foolish when
it became known that he had trained for two months in North
Waziristan on the Af-Pak border, likely with the Tehrik-e-Taliban
Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella group of Pakistani factions. He would
have been anything but alone. Pakistani intelligence officials told
the Associated Press that dozens of French Muslim militants, many
with dual French-North African nationality, are training there:
The Frenchmen operate under the name Jihad-e-Islami and are
being trained to use explosives and other weapons at camps near the
town of Miran Shah and in the Datta Khel area, the officials said.
They are led by a French commander who goes by the name Abu
Tarek.
When they return to France, all it will take to waken these
sleeping agents will be a call from Kandahar.
Merah certainly learned about firearms. Somehow, right under the
noses of French surveillance and with financial assistance from
guess who, he amassed a stash of guns, including several Colt .45
automatics with extra magazines, an automatic Sten pistol, a Colt
Python revolver, a pump-action shotgun, and an Uzi submachine gun,
along with ingredients for Molotov cocktails. With this arsenal he
was able to intimidate and toy with a 15-man French SWAT team for
all of 32 hours, wounding five and repeatedly forcing them to
retreat when they tried to enter his small, three-room apartment in
Toulouse.
Actually the effort to take Merah down was as amateurish as the
earlier intelligence failures. When the SWAT team finally did
succeed in blowing off the door and entering, they riddled him with
bullets instead of taking him alive for interrogation as they were
ordered to do. Much of France wondered along with Christian
Prouteau, the retired chief of the gendarmerie’s elite GIGN
commando unit (the SWAT team were police, not better-trained
paramilitary gendarmes), who asked, “How can a top police unit
botch the capture of a lone gunman? If they had pumped his
apartment with tear gas, he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.”
Some Israeli security experts were even harsher. Alec Ron, a former
head of the Israel police commando unit, told Israeli public radio
the operation was marked by “utter confusion and
unprofessionalism.… It was an absolute disgrace.”
One reason for this foul-up was that Sarkozy ordered the merger
of two domestic intel agencies three years ago, a fusion that has
yet to gel. Another might have been political interference, in an
election year, with police work. But the main problem is that
France is ill equipped, psychologically and politically, to deal
with a huge, unassimilated Muslim population increasingly tempted
by radicalism. France poses as a beacon of human rights and
égalité, which to the Gallic mind rules out affirmative
action (that would be unequal) or even accepting the reality of
ethnic diversity. With impeccable logic, it officially has no
minorities—everyone is by definition French and therefore equal;
the law prohibits statistics based on race or religion. There’s no
yardstick even to begin to measure the problem.
This in turn has meant that the government, ever so careful
about treading on anybody’s toes, tries to avoid any appearance of
cracking down on Muslim activism that could lead to radical
Islamicism. If, as Mao wrote, the guerrilla must swim in the people
as a fish swims in the sea, jihadist guerrillas must find good
swimming in French Muslim waters. It might get even easier for them
to disappear from police view if Socialist François Hollande
becomes president. He has made the ultimate politically correct
campaign promise: if elected he would ask parliament to remove the
word “race” from the constitution.
Whatever the outcome of this month’s election, the slaughter of
the innocents in Toulouse is a wake-up call that France ignores at
its considerable peril. As an adviser to Sarkozy said, sotto voce,
“This is going to raise questions about our system of integration,
our approach to fundamentalism, and our tolerance of certain
practices here.” For sure. Meanwhile, no one knows when or where
the French Islamist powder keg will blow next.
