To break up the unrelenting misery of winter the ancient inhabitants of the northern hemisphere used to celebrate the winter solstice (when the earth is at maximum tilt) by dancing, feasting and generally setting fire to things in an effort to chase away the darkness. Being an army of occupation the Romans decided to hijack this Pagan festival by pretending Jesus Christ was born close to the winter solstice thus turning it into a Christian festival in an effort to better control the natives. Similarly they also decided to pretend that the much more important death and resurrection of Christ (Easter) occurred during the spring equinox which is the mid-way point between the winter and summer solstices. I'm pretty sure this was all being covered in the closing ceremony for the 2012 Para-Olympic games up until the point Jay-Z turned up ruining it for everyone.
Regardless of what you call it in the run-up to this big winter festival the darkness, the cold and the stress of preparing makes everyone a bit depressed causing them to become a little crazy. This year the mayhem began in the US because their November Thanksgiving festival seems designed to make the insanity begin that little bit earlier every year.
The first such incident occurred in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra on December 15th (15/12/14) when a car smashed into a crowd gathered to watch a light display injuring 11. Three days later (18/12/14) another car smashed into a crowd that was leaving a Christmas Church service in Redondo Beach just outside Los Angeles killing three and injuring nine. In the run up to the winter festival celebrations people tend to drink heavily and then some of them choose to drive. Due to the number of accidents it causes this drink driving has been subject to massive public education campaigns in the UK and Europe so has become totally unacceptable in the public opinion. However in the US which is a much more car dependent society the message still hasn't got through. As a result everyone was happy to put these incidents in America down to simply human stupidity rather then anything more organised.
Unfortunately France then started experience problems. The first of these occurred on the solstice itself (21/12/14) when a man walked into a police station in Tours and stabbed three police officers before being shot and killed by the police. Despite the fact the man shouted "God is Great" in Arabic (Allah Akbar) during the attack and is a recent convert to Islam I pretty much assumed this was just a suicide by cop. After all if you don't understand its ecological origins and don't drink alcohol it can be quite hard to get into the spirit of the winter festival magnifying the depressing effects of winter. I think this effect was also a trigger in the shooting of two police officers in New York City, US on the same day but in that case there were also substantially larger contributing factors. It has though since emerged that the Tours attacker was a keen online follower of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) so I might have to look at that again although there is a huge overlap between people with severe mental health problems and supporters of ISIL. In fact you could go so far as to say that around 98-99% of ISIL supporters have severe mental health problems.
The following day (22/12/14) a driver rammed his van into pedestrians in the French city of Dijon injuring 11. On a technical level this is very similar to the type of run-over terror attacks that have become frequent in Israel in the latter half of 2014 and we saw in Canada on October 20th (20/10/14) However despite the fact the driver also shouted Allah Akbar and claimed he was acting in support of the children of Palestine as far as I can tell he had no links to either Islam nor ISIL. However he has got very strong links with mental health services in France. Therefore his motivations could be something as incomprehensible as simply seeing news of the Tours incident on TV and deciding that it was a coded message from the lizard people that secretly control the world that he should also act.
Sadly though someone in the UK clearly got paranoid that the French had spotted something about the similar incidents in the US and had put on the Tours and Dijon incidents in order to have a coded discussion with the US. So the UK decided to try and muscle in on this imagined conversation by smashing a garbage truck ("bin lorry" locally) into pedestrians in and around Saint George's (A Turkish Crusader) Square in Glasgow, Scotland killing 6 and injuring 10.
Again on a technical level the St George's crash is exactly the same as a run-over terror attack. Added to that when I talk about Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIED's) being used by ISIL in Kobane I'm talking about a truck of that size packed with explosives. The route the truck took is very similar to the route a VBIED took from Turkey into Kobane on November 29th (29/11/14) along a road that is usually closed by the Turkish military. Also "bin" is commonly used in Arabic names to indicate "son of" or "originating from" - "Osama bin Laden" being probably the most famous example. Not being very good at Arabic many foreign fighters who have joined ISIL give themselves ridiculous Arab names. Therefore hearing about "Glasgow bin Lorry" you couldn't help but wonder if an ISIL moron was involved. Finally I strongly suspect that the UK intelligence services refer to the mechanism they set up to send no hopers to fight for ISIL as; "The Garbage Truck." If we're looking for suspects I would look closely at the drivers work colleagues particularly his shift supervisor because if you're dealing with someone whose obese, smokes and drinks too much inducing a cardiac arrest is just a matter of picking the right words at the right moment.
Shortly after the St George's crash another French driver smashed into a crowd of pedestrians in Nantes killing we now know 1 and injuring 9. On this occasion the driver also shouted Allah Akbar and not only appears to have attacked a Christmas market but also specifically targeted a stall selling mulled wine which is obvious haram in Islam. However it is not yet clear whether he was simply someone who was made very angry about the darkness and his own confusion over Christmas or whether he was a fully fledged supporter of ISIL who was angered by France's role in the US-led coalition which along with the Kurds is currently giving ISIL a very hard time of it.
This though is the problem with this type of lone-wolf, run-over attack. Even within Palestine no-one plans them or orders them instead they simply put the idea out there into the public consciousness in the hope something will happen. This is exactly what Al Sharpton was doing during his speech to the "Justice For All" march on December 13th (13/12/14) in which he smirked about different parts of the 'movement' embracing different methods while protesters in the New York City "Justice For All" march chanted; "What do we want?! Dead Cops! When do we want it?! Now!"
France is particularly vulnerable to this type of lone-wolf attack for a number of reasons. The main one of these is a lack of social cohesion caused by a lack of an effective urban development policy. Basically French city centres are occupied only by the rich with the poor being forced to live in suburbs on the outskirts. Pretty much every year these poor suburbs whose inhabitants are overwhelmingly black and often Muslims explode into violence and rioting. This problem has been made worse by some awful economic policies of French President Hollande which has sent unemployment and poverty soaring further damaging social cohesion and leading to the rise of the fascist National Front (FN) Party. Sadly just as Hollande realised his mistake and reversed his damaging economic policies the European Union (EU) decided that it wanted to go along with the US' plan to destroy the EU economy, sorry er, "Punish Russia for its aggression in Ukraine."
Added to these serious structural problems and FN's rampant Islamophobia France's involvement in fighting the new breed of Islamist in Mali and now Iraq has led to many of France's young, black Muslims to feel that their country doesn't want them and it at war with them. Seeing everyone busy sinning and celebrating an ostensibly Christian festival only adds to that feeling of isolation. It must be said though that France hasn't done itself any favours by being overly dramatic about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in an effort to muscle it's way into peace negotiations. For example France has sponsered the Palestinians ill-concieved bid for statehood that it wants to bring before the United Nations Secuirty Council (UNSC) on Christmas Eve of all days.
I wish I could be more reassuring to the people of France but this seems set to continue with the French police today stopping a man armed with two shotguns from mounting another attack and the army being deployed to help maintain security. So basically what everyone's hoping for from Christmas this year is for US President Obama to finally grow the f*ck up and get his a*se into gear because ISIL should have already been defeated by now.
17:20 on 23/12/14 (UK date).
"What
do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!" - See more at:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2014/12/15/nyt-corrects-saturday-march-coverage-twice-ignores-nyc-we-want-dead-cops#sthash.OqJ4DIYS.dpuf
"What
do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!" - See more at:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2014/12/15/nyt-corrects-saturday-march-coverage-twice-ignores-nyc-we-want-dead-cops#sthash.OqJ4DIYS.dpuf
"What
do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!" - See more at:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2014/12/15/nyt-corrects-saturday-march-coverage-twice-ignores-nyc-we-want-dead-cops#sthash.OqJ4DIYS.dpuf
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