#Death of Nahel Merzouk

[mask131]

Some times ago, I posted about the vandalizing of the Wall of the Justs at the Parisian Shoah memorial. The post is here if you are interested, and it got many, many notes, so I thank you very much!

But I hope this post will also get as many notes - because we found the guilty party. We know who did it and... gosh, it sounds like a fucking joke but it is not, and it just proves how complex the situation is, and how dangerous the times we are living are.

If you recalled the obvious guilty party, the first suspects, the ones that seemed to have done that were the so-called "pro-Palestinian" activists that in fact are just antisemitic people disguising their hatred under the pretense of "fighting for Palestine". It is well-known that the pro-Palestinan manifestations, events and representatives in France have all versed at one point or another into very antisemitic comments or actions, and the movement is currently being parasited by antisemitism - ranging from actual antisemites who use "Zionist" as a way to designate all Jews, including French-Jews who never saw Israel in their life ; to people who are taking back antisemitic slogans without knowing they are antisemitic in the first place.

The reason the investigation directly was aimed at them was very simple: the red hands, or red handprints, is a symbol that many pro-Palestine manifestants have been using recently. Which, in itself, sparked a whole new debate - about whether it is an antisemitic symbol or not. Because while for some it is the universal "You have blood on your hands" symbol, for others it refers to the blood of a soldier of Israel on the hands of his murderer, during the second Infifada... And while attacking the Wall of the Justs would have been a new low and a new step for these left-leaning antisemites (because so far they only attacked Jews, now they would attack those that saved Jews and assorted Nazi victims during World War II), it was in line with a new form of radicalization of the movement - see the "Block Out" phenomenon on Internet, a cancel culture aimed at those that did not support enough Palestine... As a personal note I will say: where was all this energy and effort when the it was time to defend the Uyghurs against their wiping out by the Chinese regime? It is still time today, their suffering is still going on... But as a prominent Uyghur activist said (I think it was Rebiya Kadeer, but I do not have my notes with me so I might be mistaken) - people care less about the Uyghurs than Palestinians for one simple reason "Because it isn't Israel that is killing us..." It is China, and as a result nobody really cares...

Anyway, I digress... So while it is known, confirmed and recorded that the so-called "pro-Palestine" activists in France are slowly oscillating and sinking into antisemitism, it isn't actually them who did these red handprints. No, they're not guilty this time.

In fact it is something I talked about when I made my original post: there was another very likely suspect which would have surprised nobody. Neo-Nazis. Because while the pro-Palestinian movement is currently crystallizing in France the entire antisemitism wave that has been on the rise for a decade now among the extreme-left, the extreme-right political groups have also been gaining terran and strength for quite a long time, and now, we have actual neo-Nazi parties very vocal and active today... Due to the ungodly amount of terrorist attacks France had to face, due to the frightening strenghtening of radical and extreme Islam in France, due to the whole endless debates about immigration in France, and due to the hyper-violent civil unrests that are clearly just to cause chaos and nothing else (like the riots following the death of Nahel Merzouk, which clearly were not about the Nahel case and just to cause as much destruction and steal as much things as possible)... Well of course, when these types of problem arise, who gains the upper-hand? The extreme-right.

And so now we have far-right candidates so popular they have a good chance of being elected as the representatives of France, and we have many groups of antisemitic Christian fanatics popping up everywhere, and we have neo-Nazi movements literaly returning like some perverted phoenix from their ashes... As such, it was thought that maybe these red handprints could have been the work of a neo-Nazi movement, who would use the current situation to perform their antisemitic deeds while blaming the extreme-left for it... After all, the two movements have been currently doing the exact same thing. Before the Hamas attack, far-right groups were defacing Jewish cemeteries and soiling Simone Veil's grave with Nazi swastika ; and today far-left activists are "denouncing" Israel by... tagging on Jewish temples drawings mixing the six-point stars with a swastika...

So, you know, the typical horseshoe effect. The two extremes are literaly doing the same things, and as such we have a hard time differentiatng one from another.

But no... Turns out it isn't them either! Turns out... it isn't even French people who did this.

And here's where the dark joke comes... You know who did it? FUCKING RUSSIA OF COURSE!

We forget to so easily that Putin is literaly sending his agents in every friggin' political or social event that goes on in the world right now... And in fact that's the whole point: Putin wants us to be so obsessed with the Israel-Hamas conflict and how Gaza is trapped in it all, so that we forget about how Russia is currently destroying Ukraine.

The investigation found out that the people who painted these red hands were three men that had recently arrived in Paris from Bulgaria... They were staying at an hotel and the very day following their crime, they left France for Belgium (Bruxelles to be precise). Now... You're going to say "So they're just Bulgarians? They're not Russians, nothing proves its Russia". Except for one thing... While yes the involvment of Russia has not been "confirmed", Putin's Russia is not known for its vivid imagination... And they have literaly done the same thing some times ago.

If you recall, I posted about it before... It happened last october. Right after the Hamas attacked the music festival, causing the whole madness we are into today, blue David stars were painted on buildings where Jewish people lived, echoing the dark times of the Nazi Occupation in France... Here is the post I made back in February, and I couldn't guess how far things would go back then... While everybody was getting scared about the return of French antisemitism turned out... It was a group of people from Moldavia that was paid to paint those stars everywhere. Paid by... a pro-Russian, pro-Putin Moldavian businessman, Anatoli Prizenko.

You can read more about this on my old post, but investigation concluded it was indeed an operation where Russian forces used the Moldavians as puppets. All to cause fright and chaos in France. When you consider that Bulgaria, like Moldavia, is unfortunately today one of the "screen-countries" Russia likes to use to shield themselves when doing their dirty chores... Blue stars, red handprints... This is clearly the same thing, done all over again.

And where the "joke" part comes out even more - in the sense of a perverse, venomous, fetid joke part of some putrid dark comedy... Russia has currently been truly harassing France through all sorts of operations, each more outlandish than the next, and yet all working in their own way to cause fear and chaos... More specifically two cases are regularly being brought up.

Case 1: The Doppelgänger operation

In June of 2023, the French authorities warned about what was called the "Doppelgänger operation". A massive campaign of Internet misinformation created by Russia. The purpose was simple: create mirror-websites to the official websites of French information networks, newspapers and TV channels. They were almost identical to the official news outlet of France, to the point many mistook them for the real thing - sometimes the only difference you could spot was in the URL. ".fr" became ".ltd", and ".com" became ".cam".

And all those fake websites shared articles about the Ukrainian-Russian war, articles written purposefully to spread misinformation about Russia. Some claimed that the Ukrainian population were in full distrust of their government and wanted to see it brought down... Others wrote that all the Ukrainian operations were disasters and failures. Some invented fake tragedies and disasters in Russia to try to paint Ukrainians as the villains. And others yet wrote about how the donations of Europe to Ukraine were either wasted by the Ukrainians, or would cause economic crisis in European countries...

Case 2: The bed bugs hysteria

In september of 2023, the discovery of bed bugs on several public places in Paris was shared on social media. Some were discovered in a movie theater, the presence of others was attested in some subway lines... The social media being what they are, it became a hot topic talked about by everybody, shared by everyone - and the facts were exaggerated, and rumors started spreading, and soon an entire mass hysteria started overtaking France. It wasn't just Paris anymore, but all the big cities that were supposedly infested by "bed bugs". People claimed to find them in every public places - every theater, every subway line, every hotel, even in hospitals...

Turns out, there wasn't as much bed bugs as the social media wanted us to believe. It was mostly a sanitary mass panic, echoing the fear caused by the Covid epidemic and fed by the worries about the upcoming Olympic games. And... and also fed by Russia. Investigations revealed that there was a lot of fake accounts, troll accounts and bots created by Russian servers and Russian URLs, and who spent their entire time spreading and sharing bed-bugs articles, writing fake articles twisting the facts, and spamming everybody with news of this mass hysteria..

This is the sore and infuriating conclusion. Remember, everyone, that this isn't just about Israel and Palestine... It isn't just about the Hamas or Netanyahu... And we already knew that, because already in Europe it was clear this wasn't truly about what happened in the Middle-East - it was also about the shadows of antisemitism and the wraith of the Nazi presence, it was about the extreme-left movement spreading from the USA university down to European ones, it became a fight about the Jewish and Muslim populations in Europe rather than in Palestine and Israel - and even more, a political fight between the far-right and the far-left across the continent... But it isn't just about that anymore, because now Putin is in the dance and Russia is gleefully putting oil on the fire in hope it will burn everything... This is a fucked-up chess game with many, many players... That all look the same in the end, somehow, so it becomes hard to identify which one does which move.

But at least we know who painted the blue stars, and who painted the red hands, and who pits the extreme-left against the extreme-right, and is trying to make sure the Jewish people of France are feeling scared in their own country. Putin and what he turned Russia into.

[beardedmrbean]

At 19, he was the oldest of the group of teens accused of hurling Molotov cocktails at the police station of their suburban hometown.

“Why?” the judge asked Riad, who was taken into custody after he was identified in video surveillance images of the group from June 29, the second night of nationwide unrest following the police shooting of another suburban teenager outside Paris.

“For justice for Nahel," Riad said. Slumped and slightly disheveled after five nights in jail, he said he didn't know about the peaceful march organized by Nahel Merzouk's family. He explained that the cellphone photo of him holding a Molotov cocktail was “for social media. To give an image.”

In all, more than 3,600 people, with an average age of 17, have been detained in the unrest across France since the June 27 death of Nahel, who was also 17, according to the Interior Ministry. The violence, which left more than 800 law enforcement officers injured, has largely subsided in recent days.

French courts are working overtime to process the arrests, including opening their doors through the weekend, with fast-track hearings around an hour long and same-day sentencing.

The prosecutor noted that Riad had learned where to acquire incendiary devices on Snapchat, the social network that the French government has singled out, along with TikTok, as fueling the unrest. Riad's lawyer noted that his record was clean and that the young man was not blamed for any significant damage or injuries.

By the end of Tuesday, Riad's sentence was fixed: three years in prison, with a minimum of 18 months behind bars, and a ban from his hometown of Alfortville for the duration of the term.

He collapsed on the stand. “I'm not ready to go to prison. I'm really not ready,” he said, blowing a furtive kiss to his mother as he was led away.

Outside the packed courtroom, a pair of girls asked someone exiting what sentence he'd received. “Three years? That's insane!” one exclaimed.

But the mood in France is stern after unrest that officials estimate caused more than $1 billion in damage. Nahel's fatal shooting by police came during a traffic stop, was captured on video and immediately stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people — nearly all ethnic minorities and overwhelmingly French-born — in housing projects and disadvantaged suburbs.

Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti issued an order Friday that demanded a “ strong, firm and systematic” judicial response. Hearings began the following day, as unrest continued into the night.

“This is not hasty justice. The message I want to send is that justice is functioning normally in the face of an exceptional situation," said Peimane Ghaleh-Marzban, the president of the tribunal in Bobigny.

By Tuesday night, a total of 990 people had gone before a tribunal, and about one-third received jail terms, according to government spokesman Olivier Veran. A third of those detained were minors, he said.

“You have many first-time offenders — people who are not deep in delinquency, many minors in school who don’t [engage in] habitual criminal activity,” Ghaleh-Marzban said.

Despite that, the inclination to convict with jail time appeared to prevail.

In Lyon, France's second-most populous metropolitan area, the prosecutor said Thursday that of 26 adults who have appeared before the fast-track courts so far, 22 were convicted and sentenced to jail, three requested more time to prepare a defense and only one was acquitted. According to BFM television Thursday, 76% of people in the fast-track trials were placed in detention.

The United Nations' human rights office said the unrest showed that it was time for France to reckon with its history of racism in policing, rather than just lash out in punishment. The office said the French government needed to ensure that use of force “always respects the principles of legality, necessity, proportionality, non-discrimination, precaution and accountability.”

But many French lawmakers are demanding maximum punishment — and fast.

Olivier Marleix, a lawmaker from the conservative Republicans party, called for all the cases involving the unrest to be handled within 100 days.

“Not to punish this would be an injury to all our law enforcement. Not to punish this would be a failure to understand the gravity of the threat to France," he said Tuesday in the National Assembly.

By contrast, the officer accused in Nahel's death has been charged with voluntary homicide but has yet to appear in a courtroom or even have a court date set.

Rayan, an 18-year-old detained with a group of about 30 young people, was accused of filming a 14-second video of incendiaries being hurled at his local police station in Kremlin-Bicetre. In the video, he cries out: “Light them up!”

It was the first time he has ever been arrested. He was taken to Fleury-Merogis prison, the European Union’s largest, and wept on the stand Tuesday. Prosecutors, who accused him of tripping a police officer while fleeing, asked for a 30-month sentence and for him to be barred from his hometown.

“I’m a good person. I’ve never had a problem with police. I have a family, I work,” he said, burying his face in his hands. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

His brief hearing ended with a 10-month suspended sentence. His parents picked him up the same night from prison to take him home.

[sataniccapitalist]

2,500 fires started. 2,000 people detained. France's protests by the numbers

[ultrajaphunter]

French racism is not the problem

From magazine issue:08 July 2023

Last week we learned that a woman in a park in Skegness was dragged into the bushes and raped by a 33-year-old male. The man had arrived in the UK illegally on a small boat just 40 days earlier.

If you have open borders and no checks on who is arriving, an uptick in crime will inevitably occur

Strangely, I can find little anger about this.

The story was reported in a couple of papers but there were no fulminating editorials or emergency questions in the House.

Jess Phillips hasn’t found room to grandstand about it. Nor have Yvette Cooper, Stella Creasy or any of those other Labour MPs who like to shake their heads in disgust as the Home Secretary explains that the British taxpayers can’t forever foot the hotel bills of illegal migrants.

The Conservative MP for Skegness, Matt Warman, described the rape as ‘hugely shocking’.

Which it both is and isn’t. Every-one should by now be well aware that if you allow very large numbers of young men to break into your country illegally, this sort of thing will happen (as Germany, Sweden and France can all attest).

What are you gonna do about it?

Personally, I would tear up the earth to find which officials in the Home Office, UK Border Force, NGOs and others encouraged, helped or permitted the suspect to come to this country, let him stay and later let him loose.

And I don’t just want them to lose their jobs.

I want them to serve prison time for aiding and abetting people smuggling. After all, someone let the attacker into this country, didn’t they?

And then couldn’t be bothered to deport him.

‘It goes from 0-100°C in under six seconds.’

Naturally, at this stage we have to say that not all migrants are rapists or terrorists.

But if you have open borders and no checks on who is arriving, a certain uptick in rape and other crimes will inevitably occur.

We all know this, but because politicians from every main party have presided over or actively encouraged it, the whole business becomes just one of those unacknowledged downsides of diversity.

In France in October the body of girl called Lola Daviet, aged 12, was found in a travel trunk in Paris.

She had been sexually assaulted, asphyxiated, stabbed and mutilated.

The person arrested for her killing was a woman of 24 from Algiers who was in France illegally and living with an expulsion order.

And while there was political anger around the killing, nothing happened.

As with the UK, by now everybody knows the score.

There are benefits to allowing ongoing illegal mass migration – like getting to feel all warm and good about yourself. And then there are the negatives – such as the occasional raped and mutilated 12-year-old.

Now a different killing in France actually has provoked reactions.

This is the death in Nanterre of Nahel Merzouk, 17 and of Algerian descent. Merzouk was too young to have a licence to drive, but was careering around in a Mercedes when the police tried to stop him.

He resisted arrest and was shot.

In the days afterwards there were riots, lootings, assaults and burnings across France.

From Paris and Strasbourg to Marseilles, much of urban France resembled a warzone.

Of course the media – in the Anglophone world in particular – has been keen to talk about the ‘victim’, his family and the horrors of police violence (especially ‘racism’).

All of which explains next to nothing.

It does not explain, for instance, why these millions of North African migrants and others are in France in the first place. Why would they be if it is such a terrible country?

There have been large population transfers between North Africa and France before.

If the situation is so bad, why not move again?

The answer is that France is not the problem.

A significant chunk of the non-integrated immigrant population is.

They use the country without belonging to it.

Moreover, many of them clearly know that as long as they say ‘racism’, France will be in fear of them.

All the while, the chances of them leaving the hellhole of France and returning to the garden of Algeria are near zero.

France – like Britain – is one of those countries that we are always told people ‘risk their lives’ in order to get to.

Once they arrive, we are then told how little we do for them, how terrible our housing and integration systems are.

We hear only what evil, racist countries we are.

None of this – like the other responses to the killing – makes any sense.

Let us say for a moment that you do think the police were heavy-handed, and that when they encountered a teenager tearing around a neighbourhood at the start of the school day they ought to have let him drive on, or at least approached him in a more kindly manner. But even if you do think that, why, when they failed to behave as you wished, should you set fire to libraries or other municipal buildings or smash your way into the local luxury-goods stores?

Does the society that sheltered and paid you owe you a spate of shopping with violence?

One business paper this week led with ‘Irate rioters in France looted high-end stores such as Louis Vuitton, Zara and Nike amid violent protests over the death of a 17-year-old boy’. Ah yes, those ‘irate’ people who head straight to the handbag section when they want to protest against police racism.

[paulthepoke]

This Week in Prophecy: Lawlessness; Magog's Mess; Taiwan

This Week in Prophecy: Lawlessness; Magog's Mess; Taiwan

Matthew 24:12 Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold. France: Day 5 of the riots and counting. France is on fire. 719 and counting have been arrested across France. This has been the response to the death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17 year old of Algerian descent. He was shot by the police during a traffic stop. The incident occurred in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre.…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nicole Narea at Vox:

Widespread protests appeared to ease Wednesday morning in France after police killed a 17-year-old in a Paris suburb last week when he refused to comply with a traffic stop, prompting a national reckoning on racism and excessive force in policing. The victim, who was of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was identified by police as Nahel M. In the wake of his June 27 death, protests broke out across the country, including in the cities of Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Roubaix, and Nanterre, the Paris suburb where Nahel was reportedly from. They became violent, with protesters throwing stones, bottles, and fireworks at police and setting fire to garbage bins, vehicles, and buildings, including a bank in Nanterre. Some launched fireworks at the home of the mayor of a French suburb, whose wife and one of his children were injured while they attempted to flee.

Police in turn used tear gas to try to disperse the crowds, and some municipalities in France took steps to restrict the use of fireworks and to ban protests. A 27-year-old man died after being hit with the kind of flash-ball projectile that police have used, and that is meant to be nonlethal, though the investigation into his death is ongoing. The French government has even weighed restricting social media to prevent further incitement of violence. Overnight arrests Wednesday totaled just 17 across the country, a fraction of the more than 3,000 arrests seen over the last week as the French government deployed tens of thousands of officers to quell the unrest. That seems to be a sign that the violence is abating, even if many remain outraged.

There’s been “an explosion of general anger” directed not just at police oppression, but also at economic and racial inequities, said Mathieu Rigouste, a researcher in social sciences and the author of La Domination Policière, a book examining how French policing practices are rooted in colonialism. Many in France see Nahel’s killing as a reflection of racism against Arab and Black communities in the country, given that it’s not the first time something like this has happened. In 2020, four police officers beat a Black music producer inside his studio in a viral video, just as Macron was considering legislation that would impose new restrictions on posting videos of police online. And in 2005, teens Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré — who were of Tunisian and Mauritanian origins, respectively — died after fleeing a police identity inspection and running into an electricity substation where they were accidentally electrocuted.

“You have a kind of immediate feeling among the public that this is symptomatic of more global trends in terms of police violence,” said Jacques de Maillard, a political science professor at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin who studies comparative policing. Those trends include, as the UN pointed out in 2021, “a steady increase in the use of excessive force, police brutality, and other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as well as arbitrary detention” around the world — and often reflect factors including racial tensions. The circumstances of Nahel’s killing certainly seem to mirror many deadly traffic stops in the US and elsewhere. The public prosecutor in the case said that police tried to stop the vehicle because of erratic driving and the driver was young. But Nahel refused to stop, ran a red light, committed additional traffic violations, and endangered pedestrians, they said. Police pursued him, and a video of the incident released Tuesday morning showed them approaching his car on foot, one officer pointing a gun. Nahel starts to drive away, but the officer fatally shoots him in the chest. That officer is now under formal investigation for voluntary homicide — the French equivalent of being charged with a crime in the US legal system.

France’s longstanding police brutality problem

France is seen as one of the worst offenders in Europe when it comes to police brutality. After Macron rammed through controversial reforms to raise the retirement age earlier this year, French police used tear gas and batons, as well as stun grenades and rubber bullets — which are banned in most other European countries — to disperse the mass protests that broke out. That prompted the UN’s Human Rights Council in May to criticize France’s use of excessive force in law enforcement. Members of the council also urged France to address more general “racial profiling by security forces.” The existence of racial discrimination in French policing is also well-documented. The French government’s own human rights watchdog found in a 2016 survey of over 5,000 people that men and boys perceived as Black or Arab were 20 times more likely to be stopped by police than others.

The police killing of Nahel Merzouk on June 27th has fueled protests and riots all over France. Merzouk was of Algerian and Moroccan descent.

This isn't the first police brutality incident in France involving a person of North African origin. #NahelMerzouk #JusticeForNahel