Open letter of the members of the French Resistance to President Hollande

The voice of France, the UN and Russia, an open letter to Monsieur le Président de la République

Monsieur le Président de la République

Fascisme is reemerging everywhere in Europe, singularly in countries which have been freed from the USSR where powerful and dark forces are using NéoNazism as an ideological vector for their national emancipation and their territorial sovereignty .In these circles and beyond them, the Ukrainian crisis, which is politically and diplomatically overexploited to undermine the Russian Federation is used as a pretext for multiple attempts to rehabilitate the Third Reich, especially in the Baltic Countries, where monuments commemorating the 1945 victory are often desecrated with the covert or overt complicity of the concerned governments.

The Western world is in no way immune from these dangerous overflows. In defiance of it's historical status, the European Union tolerates within itself, political movements which have been able, with impunity, to send to the EU Parliament, legally elected deputies, although self styled Nazis.

In face of this situation, which is fed and worsened by a never ending economical crisis on the old continent, Russia submit every year to the general assembly of the United Nations, a resolution calling for the refusal of « this glorification of Nazis and their collaborators who, waiving Swastika banners and marching with their right arms held up, are overtly promoting xenophobia and racial superiority.

Unfortunately, The United States of America, Canada and the Marshall Islands, systematically oppose this text and the European Union - among which is France-, choosing in that respect to renew with the disastrous spirit of Munich, chose to refrain.Opponants and abstentions, put forward as an excuse... Respect for freedom of expression, to justify their decisions. Under the same pretext, they block the passing of similar decisions within the OSCE. This attitude is pitiful and dangerous and can be considered as a signed blank paper for the Fascists to keep on with their criminal activities.

This year, the pretext put forward for a 'no' vote or abstention to the resolution, is the Ukrainian crisis and the « annexation » of Crimea. Putin should be made to understand that the West won't tolerate an expansionist Russia. This is of course only a pretext because in November of 2013, as the Ukrainian crisis was just unfolding, their was no separatists claims of any sort in Eastern Ukraine or in Crimea. The vote had been the same. Most noticeable is the 2010 vote, during which the Russian President was Medvedev, known to be closer to the West than the actual President.

The fact that the Russian diplomatic initiatives are thus subjected to contempt is unacceptable. The tremendous death toll paid by the USSR during the second world war, morally forbid it. Resistants in Europe and especially in France, know what they owe to the Red Army. Without the decisive victories over Hitler, the world battle for liberty wouldn't have been possible and the allies would have never landed in Italy nor on the Coast of Normandie. Must it be reminded, that on the D Day, June the 6^th of 1944, the Werhmacht was collapsing everywhere on the East front and that Hitler had thus already lost the war ? Must it be reminded that, without the Soviets sacrifices, France would have never recovered it's freedom ? Must it be reminded that without Moscow, Stalingrad and Koursk's victories – the mains Nazis military defeats- the world could never have freed itself from fascism and the United Nations Organisation would have never existed ?

We would also want to remind you, mister President, that during the spring and summer of 1942, the General De Gaulle had, in vain, tried to persuade the allies to open a « second front ». If the General De Gaulle had been heard, millions of people in the Soviet Union and in the concentration camps, wouldn't have lost their lives. Must we remind you that the landing in France as suggested by the General de Gaulle, was replaced by a landing in North Africa and that the first version of the now famous American « regime change » took place at that time, the Americans having chosen the General Giraud instead of De Gaulle.

France, which as a member of the Security Council, have a right of veto, must not forget history and the lessons it teaches. France must not forget the responsibilities which have been bestowed to her by the fact of having been able to sit at the winners table. France must not forget that without the resistance movement, without the commitment of the General De Gaulle saving the honor of our country from London, France wouldn't enjoy the diplomatic weight and prestige which it has acquired. Consequently, it's voice, which is heard, when relying on historical principles, used and exalted by the National Resistance Council, it's voice must be heard in the fight against the rebirth of Nazism, which is to say, in fact, it's own values. Values that you invoked during your multiple public interventions, especially during the commemorations of the landings in Normandie and Provence.

As a Head of the State, it thus belongs to you to break the guilty and spineless caution of a Europe which flimsiness in foreign affairs never stops to tarnish the brilliance.

Consequently, the signatories request from you, that next year, the signature of France be added to those of the nations having already backed the resolution of the Federation of Russia.

Armand Conan, Résistant, membre du Comité Départemental du Morbihan

René Jassaud, Résistant, ravitailleur du maquis « camp Robert » dans le Var

Colette Lacroix, Résistante, membre du réseau SOE « pimento » dans l'Ain

Antoine Payet, Résistant, membre du groupe de St Fons dans le Rhône

Paul Raybaud, membre du réseau Camp Robert dans le Var

Glorification of terrorism: a teenager prosecuted in France because of a cartoon on Facebook

by numerama, 17/1/2015
Translated by Jenny Bright for Tlaxcala

A 16 year-old teenager in France was indicted for glorifying terrorism after he published a cartoon representing a character with the Charlie Hebdo journal, hit by bullets, with an accompanying ironic comment.

The current situation is, to say the least, paradoxical. Last weekend, following the terrible attacks that took place right in the middle of Paris, large rallies were held throughout the country to denounce terrorism and to remind the world of France's commitment to the fundamental principles of freedom of expression and freedom of the press.
But since last week, it has become clear that a stiffening is taking place in France with the appearance of dozens of lawsuits based on the “defense or glorification of terrorism” offense, which carries a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros (or 7 years in prison and 100,000 euros fine if the Internet is involved, because the latter is now an aggravating circumstance).

For example, midweek, the Associated Press identified 54 legal proceedings running on that ground, sometimes with other grievances held against those arrested. In some cases, the judgment has already been made: fifteen months imprisonment for this Ardennes inhabitant, three months imprisonment for this one living in Toulon or a year imprisonment for this Nanterre inhabitant.

The number of cases has since increased. Le Monde listed 70 in an article published a few hours after that of the AP.

A CARTOON ON FACEBOOK

Lately, a young man of 16 was arrested and placed in custody. France 3 indicates that on Thursday, the teenager was presented before a juvenile judge to decide if he should be indicted for glorifying terrorism. For its part, the Public Prosecutor’s Department for minors of the city of Nantes asked the next day for his release on bail until the Court hearing.

His fault? Having published on his Facebook profile "a cartoon representing a character with the Charlie Hebdo journal, hit by bullets, accompanied by an ironic commentary" the TV channel explained.

[Here is the cartoon, as published by Norman Finkelstein, and which was widely pubished on the Net]



FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND ITS LIMITS

The multiplication of procedures for glorification of terrorism poses the question of the limits of freedom of expression, which seems to be getting cracked down on since the attacks. A situation that alarms many non-governmental organisations such as the League of Human Rights, which fears the reflex of drastic security measures, and Amnesty International.

“Freedom of expression does not have favourites. Now is not the time for knee-jerk prosecutions, but measured responses that protect lives and respect the rights of all” explains the NGO, which fears that some arrests made ​​in the heat of emotion and firmness in fact violate freedom of expression.

Because although everyone may agree to defend freedom of expression when it's all plain sailing into the wind, we should not forget that it also applies to messages that may be unpleasant or revolting. “If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all[1]” explains philosopher Noam Chomsky.
Does this mean that we must stand idly by? No, of course not. Some cases likely deserve legal punishment if there is anything to punish (especially if other grievances are included in the procedure). But the emotion aroused by the attacks raises fears of a general lack of discernment that does not contribute to the administration of justice in good conditions

[1] Interview by John Pilger on BBC's The Late Show, November 25, 1992. See also : “If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.” Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992.

The Empire on the offensive in France and Russia

The latest issues of Charlie Hebdo has been printed at 3 million copies (some sources said 5 million). They go on ebay for up to 300 Euros. RT reports that "Sunni Islam's most renowned center of learning, Al-Azhar in Cairo, said that the cartoons "stir up hatred" and "do not serve the peaceful coexistence between peoples." Tabnak, a conservative online outlet in Iran, wrote that "Charlie Hebdo has again insulted the Prophet."

French comedian Dieudonne was arrested for "apology for terrorism".  He had tweeted “Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly” (combining Charlie and the last name of one of the terrorists involved in the attacks. Millions will not take to the streets to protect his freedom of speech.  They are Charlie, but they are not Dieudonne.

A source of mine with links to French police services has told me that the French Ministry of Internal Affairs had created a hotline to report terrorist.  About 50% of the messages they got were "Allahu Akbar!".

Another of my sources in Europe tells me that the European Commission will meet to decide if the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics will be declared "terrorist organizations" following the bombing of a bus filled with civilians in the Ukraine.  Apparently, the bus exploded out of reach of Novorussian artillery and probably on a landmine.

One more thing. Dmitri Orlov has written an absolutely fantastic piece entitled "Peculiarities of Russian National Character" every word of which I fully subscribe to and which I highly recommend to everybody.

The Saker

Jacob Cohen "Documenterview": the Sayanim, Dieudonné and the French dissident movement

I have been contacted today by the producers of a most interesting and unique documentary entitled Jacob Cohen "Documenterview" who informed me that their video was now available on YouTube in a seven-part series you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzHtFW-mC6vGh07g8RK7sUITTYsQYBlN0

When I asked them to make the video available in one file, they told me that they would do that, but that in the meantime I could use a special embed code which makes all the seven series available in one window.  Since I do not want to wait, this is what I will do today, but I will let you know when the full documentary becomes available in one file.

Jacob Cohen is an extremely interesting person.  This French Jew, born in Morocco, is the author of several very interesting books.  This ex-Freemason and ex-Zionist, Cohen is the first person to write a full book dedicated to the topic of the voluntary Jewish collaborators of Israel known as "Sayan" (plural: "Sayanim"): Le Printemps des Sayanim which, needless to say, is not available in English.  And since the English language Wikipedia does not offer any info about Cohen, the best I can do is to give you a link to a Google-translation of his French Wikipedia entry.  Here is a link to his blog (in French): http://jacobdemeknes.blogspot.com/

This documentary also discusses the "Dieudonné" phenomenon and the general problem of the struggle of the French people against the Zionist-controlled nomenklatura.  At a time when Berhard-Henri Levi travels to Kiev to declare his full support for the Nazi junta in power, it is very timely to get an insight into what is really happening in France as told by a extremely well-informed ex-insider.

The full series is long (4,5 hours) but I nevertheless highly recommend it to everybody.

The Saker

PS: for my previous articles about Dieudonné, Soral and the French anti-Zionist dissident movement please see here:

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2009/05/israel-lobby-commits-maje-blunder-in.html
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2009/06/dieudonnes-anti-zionist-campaign-in.html
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2013/11/is-new-revolution-quietly-brewing-in.html
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/01/state-repression-in-france-only-makes.html
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/01/quenelle-warfare-in-france-report-from.html

State repression in France only makes the Resistance grow stronger

Last November I wrote a piece entitled "Is a new revolution quietly brewing in France?" in which I described struggle which was taking place between the French people and the Zionist plutocracy which has ruled France over the past decades (roughly since 1969) and today I am returning to this topic as events have rapidly accelerated and taken a sharp turn for the worse.  A number of most interesting things have happened and the French "Resistance" (I will use this collective designator when speaking of the entire Dieudonne/Soral movement) is now being attacked on three levels.

Intellectual level:

Eric Naulleau

This is, by far, the most interesting "counter-attack".  A well-known French commentator, Eric Naulleau, agreed to a "written debate" with Alain Soral in which both sides would discuss their differences and the transcript would be published in a book entitled "Dialogues Désaccordés" (which can roughly be translated as "detuned dialogs" or "dialogs out of tune" or even "disagreeing dialogs").  To explain the importance of this publication I have to say a few words about Naulleau himself.

Everybody in France knows Eric Naulleau as one of the two partners of a "journalistic tag team" called "Naulleau and Zemmour" in which one of the partners - Eric Naulleau - is a Left-leaning progressive and the other - Eric Zemmour - is a Right-leaning conservative.  Together they form a formidable and, sometimes, feared team of very sharp and outspoken critics and commentators which was featured on various shows on French TV.  Zemmour, in particular, is an extremely intelligent and very charming person whose wonderful sense of humor combined with a outspoken attitude often got him in trouble.  He is one of the few French Jews who actually got sued by the notorious LICRA (rabid Zionist organization formed by Trotskists to attack those opposing them) for daring to say "French people with an immigrant background were profiled because most traffickers are blacks and Arabs... it's a fact" on TV.  Together, Naulleaua and Zemmour are known for being formidable debaters and very tough and even blunt critics who can take on pretty much anybody.

Naulleau explained that, according to him, it made no sense at all to ban Soral from the mass media because that still gave the option for Soral to record his shown on the Internet were they would be viewed by million of people (that is not an exaggeration, by the way, Soral's videos do score more views that some national TV channels!).  Naulleau explained that in his videos Soral was always alone, free to say whatever he wanted, without anybody contradicting or challenging him and that his goal was precisely that - to unmask, challenge and defeat Soral in an open debate in which he would show all the fallacies and mistakes of Soral's theses.  To say that Naulleau failed in his goal would be an understatement.  Soral absolutely crushed every single one of Naulleau's arguments to the point where I personally felt sorry for Naulleau (whom I like a lot as a person).  Worse, not only did Soral absolutely obliterate Naulleau, he also made a prediction and said: "you will see the shitstorm which will hit you for agreeing to make this book with me!".  And that is the crux of the disagreement between Soral and Naulleau: do the Zionists control the French media yes or not? Can they blacklist somebody or not?  Is there a shadow "Zionist censorship" in France or is public speech still free?  Soral's thesis is that France is in the iron grip of a "behind the scenes" Zionist mafia which is exactly Naulleau vehemently denies.  The problem for Naulleau is that he proved Soral to be right.

The French media immediately attacked Naulleau for "providing Soral with a platform to spew his hateful theories" to which Naulleu logically replied that Soral was already doing so on the Internet and that, besides, he - Naulleau - did not believe in censorship but in a strong and free debate.  Naulleau also got attacked for not saying this or not saying that - in reality for getting so totally defeated by Soral in the debate. The book, by the way, became an instant bestseller with, indeed, made it possible for even more French people to think through Soral's arguments and make up their own mind.  So, ironically, and even though Naulleau clearly wanted to challenge Soral, he did him a huge favor by allowing him to break the media blockade around his name - Soral is never ever invited on a talkshow - and by allowing the ideas of Soral to come right back into the public debate via this book, Naulleau de facto helped Soral.  Some have even speculated that Naulleau might be a secret sympathizer of Soral and that he did all of this deliberately.  I don't believe that at all - Naulleau is sincere, and Naulleau is also naive: he is now only slowly coming to grips with the fact that Soral's core thesis - that the Zionists completely control the French media - is a fact and that Soral's prediction about Naulleau getting in trouble for this book was spot on.  Right now, Naulleau and his friend Zemmour still have a show on a small local TV station, but clearly Naulleau has now deeply alienated the French plutocracy.  As far as I know, nobody has dared to speak in Naulleau's defense.  The funniest thing of all is that even though both Soral and Naulleau are officially coauthors of this book and even though Naulleau attempts to deny that Soral is blacklisted, only Naulleau got interviewed on the French talkshows, never Soral.  Not once.  What better way could there be to prove Soral right?

"Personalities lynch mob" level:

While Naulleau was trying to defend himself against attacks from all sides for daring to coauthor a book with Soral, something absolutely unprecedented took place: day after day after day, media personalities were shown on TV trashing Dieudonne and his "quenelle" gesture.  This really looked like a "virtual lynching" or a Stalinist trial - politicians, journalists, comedians, commentators, actors - you name it - all took turns to ridicule, insult, denounce and otherwise express their hatred for Dieudonne.  This truly became an orwellian "two minutes of hate" in which Dieudonne was designated as the target of an absolutely vicious hate campaign.

Bedos as "Dieudo Hitler Bin Laden"

A mediocre comedian named Nicolas Bedos was even given 12 minutes of uninterrupted air time to compare Dieudonne to both Hitler and Osama Bin Laden and his shows to a Gestapo interrogation room.  It was surreal, really.  If an extraterrestrial had just tuned in and watch this display of vicious hatred he would have imagined that Dieudonne was a 2nd Hitler about to invade France with a huge army of bloodthirsty Nazis.  For me, it was clear that the reason why all these different personalities were standing in line for the chance to outdo each other in taking a shot at Dieudonne was to prove their loyalty to the Zionist "deep-state".  This was as transparent as it was sickening.  And again, it proved that Soral was right and that, if anything, he was under-standing the degree of control of the Zionist plutocracy over France.

State level:

Finally, from more or less covert, the persecution of Dieudonne and Soral by the French state became completely overt.  I already mentioned how in early January the French Minister of the Interior, Manuel Valls, used his powers to ban the latest show of Dieudonne (see here and here).  Over the last weeks, this repression has reached a new level with even more lawsuits against Soral (12 simultaneous lawsuits, see Google-translated list here) and administrative harassments (evening "visits" by bailiffs, abusive arrests, threats, police search of his small theatre in Paris) against Dieudonne.  All these events taken together - and it is really not hard at all to connect the dots - for a very clear picture: the power of the state is used to persecute, harass and repress Dieudonne and Soral.  And that, of course, just goes even further in proving that Soral is right in his central thesis about France being run by a shadow occupation "deep government" whose loyalties are not to the French people, but to the Zionist plutocracy and Israel.

The reaction against this state of affairs is also becoming stronger and the amount of people supporting Dieudonne and Soral has literally skyrocketed.  The reason for that is not only that a lot of French people share the same views as Soral and Dieudonne, but also a deep running French cultural tradition of admiring rebels and disliking the state.  Add to this that Hollande is the most hated President in French history and that the French economy is doing down the tubes triggering untold suffering and rage in the people suffering form the crisis, and you get a very explosive mix: the so-called "Day of Rage".

Check out these videos before they are removed form YouTube (like this one):



Anybody who knows France well will tell you that this is very serious stuff because unlike other demonstrations which typically oppose a law, or a policy or a specific event, these demonstrators clearly are rejecting the legitimacy of the entire political system: they want regime change.  So far, the French media has tried to minimize the coverage of this event and the French elites are trying hard to pretend like this is some small, fringe, extremist group, which is utter nonsense.  France is bubbling with rage.

Zionist panic:

The Zionists are actually aware of that, and they are now in the panic mode.  Just take a look at the headlines of this Israeli-French website:

On the top right, you can see the Israeli founder of this website - Jonathan-Simon Sellem and on the top left you see Arno Klarsfeld, a well-known "French" (Israeli/German/French) lawyer and rabid Zionist.  Here is what they are quoted saying:

Jonathan-Simon Sellem: "Dieudonne, you will never be a martyr.  You will not a hero.  Your name will be cursed in history, by history".

Arno Klarsfeld: "They is a crucial moment in history: Jews are already beginning to leave France".

Clearly, these two gentlemen see Dieudonne as some modern mix of Agag, Hamman, Titus, Hitler and Bin Laden - a terrifying, bloodthirsty and infinitely dangerous and evil man who threatens the survival of the Jewish race (nevermind that Jews are not a race).  

Could that be a little bit of an over-reaction?

What are these folks so terrified of?

I think that the answer is obvious: what they are so terrified of is not that Dieudonne and Soral will reopen Auschwitz somewhere near Paris, or that French Jews will be expelled from France.  They know that this is paranoia (which Gilad Atzmon calls "Pre-Traumatic Stree Disorder") is absolute crap: French Jews are safe, happy and welcome in France and nobody is seriously out there to do them any harm.  No, what this small clique of  Zionist Jews (representing a tiny fraction of the much more diverse French Jewry) really fears is that the truth about them and their power over the French deep-state will come out.  And this is not only about Jews.  There is a non-Jewish plutocracy formed around the Jewish core of French bankers and financiers which is also completely in bed with the Zionists and whose future depends on maintaining the Zionist control over France: politicians, of course, but also actors, journalists, academics, etc. - a full constellation of Shabbos Goyim willing to do Israel's Sayanim's dirty job for them.  It is this entire elite and the system which it built which is threatened by Soral and Dieudonne and by what the movement "Equality and Reconciliation" stands for: a union of all the French people (native or immigrants) which together are determined to resist the Zionist oppression of France and who, just as in WWII, will resist the occupier until the Liberation.

When and how could such a "Liberation" occur?

I don't know.  These events are very complex and multi-dimensional and it is, I believe, impossible to predict what could happen.  What I am sure of, is that this movement, this Resistance, will not be crushed, nor will it somehow magically disappear.  To paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, the French people "have nothing to lose but their chains": their country is ruined and they are ruled by an evil foreign occupier.  In terms of dynamics, every move which is made against Soral and Dieudonne only makes things worse for the occupation regime - the harder the strike, the harder the blowback.  The legitimacy of the regime, in particular, is greatly affected by such absolutely ridiculous actions like the "overkill" of a Minister of Internal Affairs using the highest court in the country (the State Council) in an emergency session to ban a single comedian's stand up show.

Sure, for the time being most people in France comply, obey, or look the other way.  But everybody know, everybody understands and very few believe in the official lies, especially in the younger generation.

This all reminds me of the Soviet Union of the 1980s were externally nothing much was happening and where the system itself look ugly but safe.  Russians were making anti-Brezhnev jokes at private parties while the KGB from time to time attested dissidents.  But nobody - not even the KGB officers - had any respect for the system, the regime, the official ideology and its propaganda.  Everybody did what they were told, but nobody believed in what they were doing.  That is the exact situation not only for the French cops who are constantly used to ban, harass and arrest Dieudo and his supporters, but also of an increasing percentage of the general public.

Right now the pressure on the dam is getting stronger and stronger, and the cracks more and more visible.  So far, the elites have had enough fingers to stick into the cracks, but this is clearly a futile attempt to delay the inevitable.  And when the French dam will burst, it will impact on only France, but also a good segment of western Europe.  So while the pro-US Ukrainian nationalists want to subordinate their country to the EU, the EU is threatened with an inevitable and violent explosion.  But, like on the sinking Titanic, the media's "orchestra" will be playing its music until the last second.

The Saker

Is a new revolution quietly brewing in France?

Today I am beginning a series of articles about what I believe is the extremely deep crisis taking place in Europe and about the potential of this crisis to result in some cataclysmic events.  I will begin by taking a look at what has been going on in France, probably the country in Europe I know best, and also one which I think has be biggest potential to generate an explosion with far reaching consequences.

One could look at France's economic and financial situation (catastrophic) or at the many social problems plaguing an already very frustrated population, but I want to focus on one specific aspect of the current French crisis: the complete alienation of the majority of the people from the ruling elites which I will illustrate by one very telling example: the growing hysteria of the French elites about a brilliant philosopher - Alain Soral - and one stand-up comedian - Dieudonne M'bala M'bala.

I have already written about these to remarkable people (here, here and here) and I urge you to read these past articles to get a better picture of what is taking place now.  For those who are really not willing to read a few background pages, I will begin by the following mini-introduction.

Diendonne M'bala M'bala is a French-Cameroonian comedian which was by far the most popular comic in France until he made one short sketch about a religious Israeli Settler on French TV.  The sketch was not particularly funny, but it really enraged the French equivalent of the US AIPAC - called CRIF in France - which began a systematic campaign to smear, ban and silence "Dieudo" as he is known in France.  Dieudo refused to roll over and retaliated by making fun of those persecuting him which made him the darling of many of those who hated the financial elites running France since 1969.  Now completely banned from any public media, Dieudo is still the most popular comic in France.

Alain Soral is a French author and philosopher whose political career included a membership in the French Communist Party and the National Front.  He is credited with developing the concept of "gauche du travail - droite des valeurs" (literally "left of labor - right of values") which can be summarized as the simultaneous advocacy of  socialist/social ideas and measures in economic and social issues combined with conservative moral, ethical and religious values in ideological, ethical and cultural issues.  He is the founder of an extremely interesting movement called "Egalite et Reconciliation" which aims at reconciling native French people (called "Francais de souche" or "root French") with those French people who recently immigrated to France (called "Francais de branche" or "branch French") and to make them co-exist in complete equality.  Because of his numerous "politically incorrect" ideas and very overt statements, Soral is absolutely hated and feared by the French ruling class.  Even though Soral has also been completely banned from any public media,  He remains immensely popular with the general public and his books are all best-sellers.

Soral and Dieudo are very different people, they have very different backgrounds and they have very different personalities.  There even used to be a time when they were sharply critical of each other.  But when the French elites decided to basically destroy them they became closer together and now they are good friends, and they openly support each other, as a result we have this truly bizarre phenomenon: a White philosopher and a Black comedian have jointly become a kind of "two-headed Emmanuel Goldstein" of modern France: the elites absolutely hate them and the media as gone into a completely Orwellian "two minute of hate" frenzy mode trying to convince the French people that Soral and/or Dieudo are almost a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.  Needless to say, this thesis is so stupid that Dieudo makes fun of it in his shows while Soral ridicules it in his books and uses it to show that France is run by a tiny elite of vicious and arrogant SOBs.

In truth, one has to admit that the French elites are facing two formidable enemies.  Dieudonne is truly one of the most talented French comedian ever while Soral is without any doubt the most original and brilliant philosopher France has seen since WWII.  Furthermore, French law makes it rather difficult to completely ban a show or a book.  God knows, the French elites have tried, and both Dieudo and Soral have been taken to court numerous times for "racism" and "anti-Semitism", both of them have been physically assaulted several times by the thugs of the "LDJ" (Jewish Defense League) and both of them are constantly harassed by the authorities (the French version of the IRS and the FBI).  Yet, this systematic campaign of persecutions has clearly backfired against its authors and given Dieudo and Soral a (well-deserved) martyr status.  Finally, Dieudo and Soral have shown that they are extremely sophisticated users of the Internet where their shows, special events, interviews, books, monthly news roundups have been extremely popular and are seen by many millions of people in France and abroad.

Gradually, Soral and Dieudo have built a real political movement which is active both on the internal front and on international issues.

As I mentioned, "Egalite et Reconciliation" or "E&R" stands for a full acceptance and integration of Muslim immigrants into the French society.  This is crucial because unlike the French National Front, E&R does not advocate the expulsion of immigrants out of France.  Not only that, but E&R even denies that immigrants are the real problem.  Of course, E&R does not deny that unemployment is huge in France, nor does it deny that a large percentage of crime and violence in France are committed by immigrants, but they see that as an effect of previous political mistakes and not as a cause of the problems of France.

Likewise, E&R is very openly pro-Muslim.  Not in a truly religious sense, most members of E&R are not deeply religious people, but rather in the cultural sense.  E&R primarily see Islam and French Roman-Catholicism as two sources of ethnics, morality and civilization as for whether one is religious or not and accepts the theology of these religions is left to the individual member.  This is quit different from the utterly sterile "ecumenical dialog" which seeks to find common teachings to Jesus Christ and the Prophet Mohammad while desperately trying to overlook the very real and deep theological disagreements between these two religions.  Instead, E&R advocates a common stance on most, if not all, issues faced by French Muslims and Christians.  And that makes sense.

Think about it: both Islam and Christianity are clearly opposed to the values of capitalism, profit maximization, speculation, usury, sexual immorality, the destruction of the traditional family, imperialism, etc.  While the theological roots of Islam and Christianity are different, most of their ethical philosophical teachings are very similar.  Frankly, I can think of only one big difference and that is the fundamentally different views Muslims and Christians have on the death penalty, but since the death penalty has been abolished in France in 1981 this hardly matters today.

Of course, both Christianity and Islam have their crazy perverted deviations such as the plutocratic and genocidal policies of the Papacy in the past or the liver-eating Wahabis the world is facing today, but E&R has no problems rejecting and condemning them.  On the Christian side, E&R advocates a type of popular Roman-Catholicism seen in the pre-1789 France which has little to do with some of the worst excesses of the Papacy. On the Muslim side, E&R is especially close to the teachings Sheikh Imran Hosein and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.  They are also close to the Iranian supported Centre Zahra in Paris.  I would say that the type of Muslims attracted to E&R are exactly the same as the type Christians attracted to it: politically progressive, religiously strict, observant, but tolerant.  Needless to say, the potential of this radically new movement is absolutely huge because it unites Left and Right, Christian and Muslim, religious and secular (as long as they are not anti-religious), native and immigrant, White and Black, rich and poor.  But what seems to really trigger the panic of the French elites is the deep penetration of this movement into the notorious French "banlieues", the destitute suburbs which over the past decades were filled with immigrants from Africa and which have turned into no-go zones of lawlessness and crime.

To understand this phenomenon it It is crucial to understand the following: crime in France is not, repeat *not*, the product of recent immigrants or religious Muslims.  Recent immigrants and religious Muslims have strong roots in their culture, families and lifestyles which categorically prevent them form being criminal.  And poverty has nothing to do with this either.  I personally have lived for 20 years right next to a big mosque attended by huge crowds of dirt-poor Muslims from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Balkans and the Middle-East I can attest that never, I mean that literally, never, was any crime committed in my neighborhood by the folks who came to this mosque.  Quite to the contrary, these mosque attending Muslims were far better behaved, and more courteous, than the locals.  In fact, it was clear that these people were going out of their way to show the (initially rather frightened locals) that they had no cause to fear them.  The worst "crime" these Muslims regularly committed was to park their cars on the curb and that was because there were not enough parking places available.  Finally, at the end of each Holy Month of Ramadan, the Muslims invited the entire neighborhood to join in the celebrations, to sample the many delicious dishes offered, and to visit the mosque.  To say that these Muslims were perfect citizens would be an understatement.

The so-called "Muslim crime" in France is always linked second generation youth gangs who have lost their cultural and religious roots and who know little or nothing about them but who are also rejected by the local, native, population.  As Soral likes to say "nobody goes from the mosque straight into a gang-raping spree".  It's really either/or - but not both.  Soral calls these thugs "Islamo-racaille" which can be loosely translated as "Islamo-thugs" - a very nasty and dangerous type with no sense of right and wrong and who exteriorizes his alienation by abusing the natives whom he hates.  These are exactly the types who feel a deep attraction for the crude brutality of Wahabism and who end up killing cops in France or joining the liver-eaters in Syria.  Their "Islam" is really only a pretext, a pious justification, for their psychopathic thuggery.  I suspect most crusaders were exactly of the same psychological makeup.

Most young immigrants are, of course, somewhere in between the family-educated and observant type and the out of control lawless thugs.  And for the very first time a relevant political movement offers them a very attractive option: E&R.

In essence E&R tells them "instead of being neither, be both - be Muslim and be French, don't hate the natives who have the same oppressors as you do and who are your best friends and allies, our enemies are trying to turn us against each other to better rule over all of us, let us therefore unite and stand together".  This is an absolutely new and original message.

In the past, only two movements openly dealt with the immigration issue.  On one hand you had the National Front who advocated policies such as the "national preference" (better social and labor laws from the natives), the crackdown on crime (more police, stricter laws, more and bigger jails) and the expulsion of all immigrants (except, possibly, those with a French passport - and even that was debated).  On the other hand, you had an organization created by the Socialist Party called "SOS Racisme" which openly advocated the rejection of the native French culture by the immigrants who, under the nice-sounding slogan of "right to be different", were encouraged to hate the natives and demand a full acceptance of their cultures of origin by the French society.  Over the past twenty years the "tag-team" of the National Front and SOS Racisme has only served to make the issue of immigration in France infinitely worse.  The latest, and particularly ugly, development on this front has been the new political line  promoted by the French elites.

The very same elites who 20 years ago created and covertly financed SOS Racisme and its moronic slogan "Touche pas a mon pote" (don't touch my buddy) have now declared that Muslims are, after all, a serious problem.  While in the past these elites were systematically ridiculing Christianity, they are now saying that "Islam is not compatible with the Republic".  As for the youth in the "banlieues", they are now presented as potential terrorist or al-Qaeda sleepers.  As a result, when the French elites are not legalizing homosexual marriages they are busy banning the hijab in schools and complaining about too much halal meats in the stores.  And while only a tiny percentage of Muslim woman in France cover their faces, the French elites have now officially banned the burqa and the niqab in public places. Clearly, Muslim immigrants in France have now been downgraded from "buddies" to enemies.

It is against this background that more and more young immigrants are flocking to Soral, Dieudonne and E&R whose popularity is rapidly growing.  Recently, an absolutely incredible event took place, something unthinkable just a few years ago.

In one of his sketches Dieudo sang a song called "Shoananas" a rather basic play on the words 'Shoah' (from the Hebrew 'HaShoah' or 'disaster' - name by which the French Jews often refer to the "Holocaust") and  'ananas' (pineapple).  Sure enough, the CRIF, SOS Racisme and other organization sued Dieudo for "incitement to hatred".  Dieudo was sentenced to a 20'000 Euros fine and he appealed the decision.  On the day Dieudo's appeal was heard by the court, something absolutely extraordinary happened.  I found two YouTube videos which show the event and which I will both show because of the high probability that one, or both, of these videos will be banned (guys - download them now while you can!).  Here they are:

Short version:


Longer version:


For those of you who do not understand French, let me summarize what we see.

Members of the Jewish Defense League (LDJ) show up to scream insults at Dieudo and his supporters who, in turn, shout all types of abuse at the LDJ members and wave pineapples at them while sining "Shoananas".  The cops keep the two sides apart as best they can.  Then the supporters of Dieudo begin to chant "liberte d'expression" (freedom of speech) to which the LDJ members reply "am Israel hai" ("Israel is alive" in Hebrew) and begin to sing the Israeli national anthem.  At this point the supporters being to sing the French "La Marseillaise" from the top of their lungs totally drowning out the completely overwhelmed LDJ activists.  Now take a close look at the faces singing "La Marseillaise" - do you see that a lot of the people singing it are clearly Brown and Black?  These are precisely the type young people taken mostly, but not only, from the notorious 'banlieues'.  These could be the same people who in 2001 and 2002 booed the French national anthem during soccer matches (a big scandal at the time).

The Marseillaise is first and foremost a revolutionary song, and when it is not so much sung as it is shouted by a large crowd waving fists, this is a very very serious development.  Needless to say, none of that was ever shown on the French media.  But you can bet that the elites saw it all and one can only imagine the fear they felt as these images.

Coincidence or not, but the fact is that when the cops heard the crowd behind them singing the Marseillaise, they began pushing the LDJ activist out of the court-building.  This is not very surprising considering the immense popularity Dieudo and Soral enjoy in the various uniformed services (more about that below).

Something very important and very new is happening in France.  The traditional political paradigm of Right versus Left is falling apart if only because the official "Right" and the official "Left" have become indistinguishable from each other.  And in the meantime, the E&R phenomenon is becoming not only bigger, but deeper.  More and more young Frenchmen are looking back at the history of France since 1945 and they are gradually coming to the realization that the country has been rule by a arrogant cabal of plutocrats who overthrew de Gaulle in 1968 and who replaced this remarkable national leader with a protégé of the Rothschild family, Georges Pompidou, who began is career as a director of the Banque Rothschild and who was later by the French elites to replace de Gaulle.  The French plutocracy which, together with the CIA, had covertly orchestrated the "May 68" riots to achieve "regime change" in France, now had free reign to radically change the "sovereignist" political course chartered by de Gaulle.  Can you guess when the policy of mindless import of cheap foreign labor into France began? Under Pompidou, of course!  Now, thanks for E&R both native and immigrant French people are re-discovering their common history and are beginning to understand that they both were victims of the same politicians.

In the meantime, the regime in power commits one blunder after the other.  The latest one is both very funny and very serious.  This is the huge scandal surrounding the "quenelle".

Originally, the ""quenelle"" was a French dish which, if well prepared, could be quite delicious.  This is what a "quenelle" made with pike looks like:

The elongated shape of the "quenelle" has also given a 2nd, slang, meaning to this word.  Let's just say that the French expression to "put you a "quenelle"" would have a very similar meaning to the English "up yours!".

Dieudonne did probably not realize the far reaching consequences of his words when he began referring to each of his jokes mocking of the regime in power as a "quenelle".  To add some emphasis, Dieudo than began to show, with his arms, the various sizes of ""quenelle"s" which he, or his supporters, were "putting" to the elites.  The small ones were shown has having the length of about a hand, while the big ones, the really successful ones, where shown as having the full length of an outstretched arm.  This is a typical image of Dieudo showing a "big "quenelle"":

This gesture rapidly went viral and became an Internet meme and more and more people began making this gesture as  sign of something like "f*ck the system" , "screw the government" or "here is for you, Mr. President!".

To make things worse, it became something of a sport to approach well-known personalities and to have a photo taken next to them while flashing the "quenelle".  People were making "quenelle"s everywhere, especially when photographed next to regime officials.

Check this photo of the French Minister of the Interior, Manuel Valls, a rabid Zionist who has openly called for the repression of Dieudonne and Soral in a major speech in from the a congress of the Socialist Party:

Valls is the clueless grinning idiot in the middle, surrounded by a group of young Frenchmen flashing the "quenelle".  Needless to say, when this photo was published the entire country exploded in laughter, making the "quenelle" even more famous.

In the meantime, the League against Racism and anti-Semitism (the equivalent of the US ADL in France)  declared that the "quenelle" was an "inverted Nazi salute and a symbol of the sodomization of the victims of the Shoah", I kid you not!  Predictably, the French Internet exploded in laughter.  The regime did not find that funny at all and it reacted with the kind of paranoia which one would expect from dictators like Stalin or Saddam Hussein: it literally launched a witch-hunt to try to detect more or less overt ""quenelle"s" and when such a gesture was detected, it attempted to punish those responsible if they were civil servants, especially in the police and military.  And, sure enough, the Internet was flooded with all types of folks flashing the "quenelle" in defiance of the regime's wrath.

Dieudo, of course, invited uniformed officials to come to his theater in Paris to perform a "quenelle" onstage, with him.  He also created a website solely dedicated to photos of uniformed people defiantly flashing the sign: http://www.dieudosphere.com/les-"quenelle"s.html

Now the regime is completely lost and confused.  On one hand, it is simply impossible to sanction all the people who flash such signs, even disciplining only those in uniform is impossible.  Initially, the French Chief of Staff had demanded "exemplary sanctions" against the first two soldiers who flashed a "quenelle" (in front of a synagogue they were ordered to guard), but now he have to punished entire crowds of defiant soldiers, most of whom hate the regime anyway.  On the other hand, how can the regime ignore the fact that it is being openly defied, mocked and ridiculed?

Here we are reaching a topic whose importance cannot be overstated: how can one achieve regime change in a democracy who has been completely bought and paid for by a plutocracy?  This is question which is as absolutely crucial for France, as it is for the USA, the UK or any other EU country and the reply to this crucial seems to have eluded most of the million of people in the West who are completely disgusted with the regime in power but who see absolutely no realistic way to change it.

Violence is clearly not an option.  The regime has been very clever to label any form of "direct action" as "terrorism" while creating a monstrous spy-state which would dwarf Ceausescu's Securitate.  If you try as much as throwing a brick at a politician, they will call you a terrorist and lock you up for many decades.

Playing the electoral game is futile.  The plutocrats own the media which, standing on the shoulders of folks like Edward Bernays has learned how to brainwash a population far more effectively that Hitler or Kim Il-Sung ever could.  Basically, as shown by yesterday's vote in the US state of Washington, elections are bought.  Period.  "One man one vote" has long been replaced by "one dollar one vote".

Trying to convince people by regular information campaigns has proven useless too.  If anything the double facts that the 9/11 Truth movement has proven far beyond reasonable doubt that the Twin Towers and WTC7 have been brought down by controlled demolition AND the fact that his has had exactly zero impact on the political process in the USA proves that most people have been either zombified beyond rescue or have given up hope in complete disgust and despair.

And yet we, the common folk, do have one formidable weapon left: we can demonstratively show our total lack of respect for this regime and its values.  Like Dieudo, we can do that through humor and laughter.  God knows we all need a reason to laugh nowadays!  And we can do it by showing our complete contempt for all the institutions the regime tries so hard to make us respect.  First and foremost, we need to "diss" the voice of the regime - the corporate media - and we need to "diss" the holy liturgy of the regime - the elections.  But we cannot do just that as this is only a first step.  Next, we need to follow the example of  Dieudo and Soral and use each opportunity to openly express our absolute contempt for every shill showing respect of this regime and its values.  Not only that, but we need to denounce these propagandists as "paid regime stooges" (which, of course, they are).  Lastly, we need to force the regime to show its true face by forcing it to take action against us.

Humor plays a crucial role here because - at least for the time being - it has not been declared illegal.  Humor is also a formidable weapon to attack a regime's legitimacy.  Here I think of the many sketches which the late George Carlin made about the regime in the USA, like these:




Carlin was brilliant, but he did not have the immense opportunity which Dieudo and Soral are now using with devastating effectiveness: a large percentage of the population which is already not only deeply alienated by the regime in power, but which has the cultural, religious and historical roots to dare look at another model: I am talking about the Muslim immigrants in France.

Sure, the USA has the Nation of Islam lead by a pretty interesting leader, Louis Farrakhan, but the problem with the NOI is that its teachings are not truly Islamic and that cuts them off from the rest of the much larger Islamic world.  Besides, ever since the murder of Malcolm X by two NOI activists I suspect that the NOI has been thoroughly infiltrated by FBI plants.

In France, however, the Islamic community has a much more organic link to the Islamic world, including to countries like Iran which fosters a far more refined and sophisticated look at the flaws of modern society than either the pro-regime mosques in France and abroad or the Wahabis.

It is, of course, ironical that the French who for many years have seen the Muslim immigration to their country as a curse are now coming to slowly realize that this might well have been a blessing.  I do not mean to paint a rosy picture of Islam in France: there are plenty of unsolved problems to tackle both for the natives and the immigrants, and certain forms of Islam are probably really not compatible with the original French traditions and culture.  And yes, there are many signs that the current social brew might explode sooner or later.  But the phenomenon of Dieudo, Soral and E&R gives me the hope that this explosion does not have to be a destructive one, that it could also be a liberating one.

What I am sure of is that some form of explosion will happen.  Not only if France ruined economically, but the regime in power is loosing its legitimacy literally day by day.  Should it come to a confrontation, and that is a very real possibility in France, it is by no means certain that the police and security forces will continue to remain loyal to the plutocracy in power which, after all, has only made the life of the regular cop much worse.  I can easily imagine a "bank holiday" turning into a violent uprising and after that, anything could happen.  One of the most knowledgeable observer of the French political scene - economist and author Pierre Jovanovic - believes that President Francois Hollande will not even be able to finish his current term in office.

Of course, I do not expect Dieudo or Soral to become President or Prime Minister, neither will E&R become a big political party anytime soon (not to mention that it's creators did not register it as a party).  That is not the point.  What I do hope for is that this movement will trigger a re-definition of the French political scene and create a force bold enough to take on the current power establishment head-on, something which has not happened since May of 1968 (the National Front, whose rise was secretly aided by the French Socialists in order to split the French right has long been fully co-opted into the system). Considering the many deep systemic and structural crises currently plaguing Europe, France could lead by example, if only because France's problems are not much different from those facing the rest of western Europe.

The Saker

Interesting speech by Belgian MP Laurent Louis

 
Click on the 'cc' icon to get English subtitles.

Alain Soral and Pierre Jovanovic at a joint conference in Lyon, France

Alain Soral and Pierre Jovanovic are most definitely the two most brilliant French intellectuals alive. They both have therefore been totally banned from ever appearing in the French corporate media. Even though they both publicly exist only through the Internet and through public meetings, they are very popular in France and I encourage all of you who understand French to listen to this very interesting conference.

 Enjoy!

 The Saker
 -------

Burn, burn - Africa's Afghanistan

by Pepe Escobar for the Asia Times

One's got to love the sound of a Frenchman's Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like... a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce.

Apparently, it's a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people - with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years - in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponized Islamist outfits. What next? Bomb, baby, bomb.

So welcome to the latest African war; Chad-based French Mirages and Gazelle helicopters, plus a smatter of France-based Rafales bombing evil Islamist jihadis in northern Mali. Business is good; French president Francois Hollande spent this past Tuesday in Abu Dhabi clinching the sale of up to 60 Rafales to that Gulf paragon of democracy, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The formerly wimpy Hollande - now enjoying his "resolute", "determined", tough guy image reconversion - has cleverly sold all this as incinerating Islamists in the savannah before they take a one-way Bamako-Paris flight to bomb the Eiffel Tower.

French Special Forces have been on the ground in Mali since early 2012.

The Tuareg-led NMLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad), via one of its leaders, now says it's "ready to help" the former colonial power, billing itself as more knowledgeable about the culture and the terrain than future intervening forces from the CEDEAO (the acronym in French for the Economic Community of Western African States).

Salafi-jihadis in Mali have got a huge problem: they chose the wrong battlefield. If this was Syria, they would have been showered by now with weapons, logistical bases, a London-based "observatory", hours of YouTube videos and all-out diplomatic support by the usual suspects of US, Britain, Turkey, the Gulf petromonarchies and - oui, monsieur - France itself.

Instead, they were slammed by the UN Security Council - faster than a collection of Marvel heroes - duly authorizing a war against them. Their West African neighbors - part of the ECOWAS regional bloc - were given a deadline (late November) to come up with a war plan. This being Africa, nothing happened - and the Islamists kept advancing until a week ago Paris decided to apply some Hollandaise sauce.

Not even a football stadium filled with the best West African shamans can conjure a bunch of disparate - and impoverished - countries to organize an intervening army in short notice, even if the adventure will be fully paid by the West just like the Uganda-led army fighting al-Shabaab in Somalia.

To top it all, this is no cakewalk. The Salafi-jihadis are flush, courtesy of booming cocaine smuggling from South America to Europe via Mali, plus human trafficking. According to the UN Office of Drugs Control, 60% of Europe's cocaine transits Mali. At Paris street prices, that is worth over $11 billion.

Turbulence ahead

General Carter Ham, the commander of the Pentagon's AFRICOM, has been warning about a major crisis for months. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what's really going on in what the New York Times quaintly describes as those "vast and turbulent stretches of the Sahara"?

It all started with a military coup in March 2012, only one month before Mali would hold a presidential election, ousting then president Amadou Toumani Toure. The coup plotters justified it as a response to the government's incompetence in fighting the Tuareg.

The coup leader was one Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, who happened to have been very cozy with the Pentagon; that included his four-month infantry officer basic training course in Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2010. Essentially, Sanogo was also groomed by AFRICOM, under a regional scheme mixing the State Department's Trans Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership program and the Pentagon's Operation Enduring Freedom. It goes without saying that in all this "freedom" business Mali has been the proverbial "steady ally" - as in counterterrorism partner - fighting (at least in thesis) al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Over the last few years, Washington's game has elevated flip-flopping to high art. During the second George W Bush administration, Special Forces were very active side by side with the Tuaregs and the Algerians. During the first Obama administration, they started backing the Mali government against the Tuareg.

An unsuspecting public may pore over Rupert Murdoch's papers - for instance, The Times of London - and its so-called defense correspondent will be pontificating at will on Mali without ever talking about blowback from the Libya war.

Muammar Gaddafi always supported the Tuaregs' independence drive; since the 1960s the NMLA agenda has been to liberate Azawad (North Mali) from the central government in Bamako.

After the March 2012 coup, the NMLA seemed to be on top. They planted their own flag on quite a few government buildings, and on April 5 announced the creation of a new, independent Tuareg country. The "international community" spurned them, only for a few months later to have the NMLA for all practical purposes marginalized, even in their own region, by three other - Islamist - groups; Ansar ed-Dine ("Defenders of the Faith"); the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO); and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Meet the players

The NMLA is a secular Tuareg movement, created in October 2011. It claims that the liberation of Azawad will allow better integration - and development - for all the peoples in the region. Its hardcore fighters are Tuaregs who were former members of Gaddafi's army. But there are also rebels who had not laid down their arms after the 2007-2008 Tuareg rebellion, and some that defected from the Malian army. Those who came back to Mali after Gaddafi was executed by the NATO rebels in Libya carried plenty of weapons. Yet most heavy weapons actually ended up with the NATO rebels themselves, the Islamists supported by the West.

AQIM is the Northern African branch of al-Qaeda, pledging allegiance to "The Doctor", Ayman al-Zawahiri. Its two crucial characters are Abu Zaid and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, former members of the ultra-hardcore Algerian Islamist outfit Salafist Group for Predication and Combat (SGPC). Belmokhtar was already a jihadi in 1980s Afghanistan.

Abu Zaid poses as a sort of North African "Geronimo", aka Osama bin Laden, with the requisite black flag and a strategically positioned Kalashnikov featuring prominently in his videos. The historical leader, though, is Belmokhtar. The problem is that Belmokhtar, known by French intelligence as "The Uncatchable", has recently joined MUJAO.

MUJAO fighters are all former AQIM. In June 2012, MUJAO expelled the NMLA and took over the city of Gao, when it immediately applied the worst aspects of Sharia law. It's the MUJAO base that has been bombed by the French Rafales this week. One of its spokesmen has duly threatened, "in the name of Allah", to respond by attacking "the heart of France".

Finally, Ansar ed-Dine is an Islamist Tuareg outfit, set up last year and directed by Iyad ag Ghali, a former leader of the NMLA who exiled himself in Libya. He turned to Salafism because of - inevitably - Pakistani proselytizers let loose in Northern Africa, then engaged in valuable face time with plenty of AQIM emirs. It's interesting to note in 2007 Mali President Toure appointed Ghali as consul in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. He was then duly expelled in 2010 because he got too close to radical Islamists.

Gimme 'a little more terrorism'

No one in the West is asking why the Pentagon-friendly Sanogo's military coup in the capital ended up with almost two-thirds of Mali in the hands of Islamists who imposed hardcore Sharia law in Azawad - especially in Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal, a gruesome catalogue of summary executions, amputations, stonings and the destruction of holy shrines in Timbuktu. How come the latest Tuareg rebellion ended up hijacked by a few hundred hardcore Islamists? It's useless to ask the question to US drones.

The official "leading from behind" Obama 2.0 administration rhetoric is, in a sense, futuristic; the French bombing "could rally jihadis" around the world and lead to - what else - attacks on the West. Once again the good ol' Global War on Terror (GWOT) remains the serpent biting its own tail.

There's no way to understand Mali without examining what Algeria has been up to. The Algerian newspaper El Khabar only scratched the surface, noting that "from categorically refusing an intervention - saying to the people in the region it would be dangerous", Algiers went to "open Algerian skies to the French Mirages".

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Algeria last October, trying to organize some semblance of an intervening West African army. Hollande was there in December. Oh yes, this gets juicier by the month.

So let's turn to Professor Jeremy Keenan, from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University, and author of The Dark Sahara (Pluto Press, 2009) and the upcoming The Dying Sahara (Pluto Press, 2013).

Writing in the January edition of New African, Keenan stresses, "Libya was the catalyst of the Azawad rebellion, not its underlying cause. Rather, the catastrophe now being played out in Mali is the inevitable outcome of the way in which the 'Global War on Terror' has been inserted into the Sahara-Sahel by the US, in concert with Algerian intelligence operatives, since 2002."

In a nutshell, Bush and the regime in Algiers both needed, as Keenan points out, "a little more terrorism" in the region. Algiers wanted it as the means to get more high-tech weapons. And Bush - or the neo-cons behind him - wanted it to launch the Saharan front of the GWOT, as in the militarization of Africa as the top strategy to control more energy resources, especially oil, thus wining the competition against massive Chinese investment. This is the underlying logic that led to the creation of AFRICOM in 2008.

Algerian intelligence, Washington and the Europeans duly used AQIM, infiltrating its leadership to extract that "little more terrorism". Meanwhile, Algerian intelligence effectively configured the Tuaregs as "terrorists"; the perfect pretext for Bush's Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative, as well as the Pentagon's Operation Flintlock - a trans-Sahara military exercise.

The Tuaregs always scared the hell out of Algerians, who could not even imagine the success of a Tuareg nationalist movement in northern Mali. After all, Algeria always viewed the whole region as its own backyard.

The Tuaregs - the indigenous population of the central Sahara and the Sahel - number up to 3 million. Over 800,000 live in Mali, followed by Niger, with smaller concentrations in Algeria, Burkina Faso and Libya. There have been no less than five Tuareg rebellions in Mali since independence in 1960, plus three others in Niger, and a lot of turbulence in Algeria.

Keenan's analysis is absolutely correct in identifying what happened all along 2012 as the Algerians meticulously destroying the credibility and the political drive of the NMLA. Follow the money: both Ansar ed-Dine's Iyad ag Ghaly and MUJAO's Sultan Ould Badi are very cozy with the DRS, the Algerian intelligence agency. Both groups in the beginning had only a few members.

Then came a tsunami of AQIM fighters. That's the only explanation for why the NMLA was, after only a few months, neutralized both politically and militarily in their own backyard.

Round up the usual freedom fighters

Washington's "leading from behind" position is illustrated by this State Department press conference. Essentially, the government in Bamako asked for the French to get down and dirty.

And that's it.

Not really. Anyone who thinks "bomb al-Qaeda" is all there is to Mali must be living in Oz. To start with, using hardcore Islamists to suffocate an indigenous independence movement comes straight from the historic CIA/Pentagon playbook.

Moreover, Mali is crucial to AFRICOM and to the Pentagon's overall MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) outlook. Months before 9/11 I had the privilege to crisscross Mali on the road - and by the (Niger) river - and hang out, especially in Mopti and Timbuktu, with the awesome Tuaregs, who gave me a crash course in Northwest Africa. I saw Wahhabi and Pakistani preachers all over the place. I saw the Tuaregs progressively squeezed out. I saw an Afghanistan in the making. And it was not very hard to follow the money sipping tea in the Sahara. Mali borders Algeria, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Guinea. The spectacular Inner Niger delta is in central Mali - just south of the Sahara. Mali overflows with gold, uranium, bauxite, iron, manganese, tin and copper. And - Pipelineistan beckons! - there's plenty of unexplored oil in northern Mali.

As early as February 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T Moeller was saying that AFRICOM's mission was to protect "the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market"; yes, he did make the crucial connection to China, pronounced guilty of " challenging US interests".

AFRICOM's spy planes have been "observing" Mali, Mauritania and the Sahara for months, in thesis looking for AQIM fighters; the whole thing is overseen by US Special Forces, part of the classified, code-named Creek Sand operation, based in next-door Burkina Faso. Forget about spotting any Americans; these are - what else - contractors who do not wear military uniforms.

Last month, at Brown University, General Carter Ham, AFRICOM's commander, once more gave a big push to the "mission to advance US security interests across Africa". Now it's all about the - updated - US National Security Strategy in Africa, signed by Obama in June 2012. The (conveniently vague) objectives of this strategy are to "strengthen democratic institutions"; encourage "economic growth, trade and investment"; "advance peace and security"; and "promote opportunity and development."

In practice, it's Western militarization (with Washington "leading from behind") versus the ongoing Chinese seduction/investment drive in Africa. In Mali, the ideal Washington scenario would be a Sudan remix; just like the recent partition of North and South Sudan, which created an extra logistical headache for Beijing, why not a partition of Mali to better exploit its natural wealth? By the way, Mali was known as Western Sudan until independence in 1960.

Already in early December a "multinational" war in Mali was on the Pentagon cards.

The beauty of it is that even with a Western-financed, Pentagon-supported, "multinational" proxy army about to get into the action, it's the French who are pouring the lethal Hollandaise sauce (nothing like an ex-colony "in trouble" to whet the appetite of its former masters). The Pentagon can always keep using its discreet P-3 spy planes and Global Hawk drones based in Europe, and later on transport West African troops and give them aerial cover. But all secret, and very hush hush.

Mr Quagmire has already reared its ugly head in record time, even before the 1,400 (and counting) French boots on the ground went into offense.

A MUJAO commando team (and not AQIM, as it's been reported), led by who else but the "uncatchable" Belmokhtar, hit a gas field in the middle of the Algerian Sahara desert, over 1,000 km south of Algiers but only 100 km from the Libyan border, where they captured a bunch of Western (and some Japanese) hostages; a rescue operation launched on Wednesday by Algerian Special Forces was, to put it mildly, a giant mess, with at least seven foreign hostages and 23 Algerians so far confirmed killed.

The gas field is being exploited by BP, Statoil and Sonatrach. MUJAO has denounced - what else - the new French "crusade" and the fact that French fighter jets now own Algerian airspace.

As blowback goes, this is just the hors d'oeuvres. And it won't be confined to Mali. It will convulse Algeria and soon Niger, the source of over a third of the uranium in French nuclear power plants, and the whole Sahara-Sahel.

So this new, brewing mega-Afghanistan in Africa will be good for French neoloconial interests (even though Hollande insists this is all about "peace"); good for AFRICOM; a boost for those Jihadis Formerly Known as NATO Rebels; and certainly good for the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT), duly renamed "kinetic military operations".

Django, unchained, would be totally at home. As for the Oscar for Best Song, it goes to the Bush-Obama continuum: There's no business like terror business. With French subtitles, bien sur.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com