Who's <I>really</I> behind the rioting in France?
The current riots in France, the worst in nearly forty years, are of immense interest to me insofar as they must seem like manna from heaven to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarzoky, the radical neoliberal who apparently aspires to become France's Thatcher. As we all know from Chomsky and Parenti, the United States desperately fears viable alternatives to the pernicious economic model it imposes on other countries and its vast imperial apparatus disburses truly incredible sums of taxpayer money ensuring that no such alternatives survive for very long. It was only a matter of time before the U.S. and other enemies of the French model began to conduct a destabilization campaign against it, and riots are certainly one way that the French electorate might be pushed decisively to the right in a relatively short space of time - the way black rioting unhinged the liberal consensus of the 1960s. What's more, they might perhaps enlist France more decisively on the side of the neocons' war against Muslims.
I haven't yet had time to research the matter of whether the violence could possibly be being instigated by agents provocateurs, but there are certainly precedents for this, as in Iran in 1953, when Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA bribed local leaders to foment violence as a means of overthrowing Iranian prime minister Mossadegh:
'one week pro-Mossadeq riots suddenly broke out, demanding overthrow of the Shah. A few days later there were new riots protesting the previous riots. What Mossadeq didn't understand in the summer of 1953 was that the U.S. - the very country that he looked to for help - was attacking him. It was all an elaborate sham being directed by the CIA. The Mossadeq supporters and the Mossadeq protesters were exactly the same people, all hired by CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt. Besides hiring faux rioters, the CIA was liberally spending money on bribes, particularly given to top Iran's military and police officials.' (SOURCE)
Could the French riots also be an 'elaborate sham'? Certainly, there is evidence to suggest that the current rioting was triggered by the French police, who may be marching to a CIA beat. Antoine Lerougetel reports that on the Web has appeared an account of the riots by a geography and history teacher, Antoine Germa. German 'alleges that a massive police operation was deliberately designed to exacerbate the conflict with the youth on the estate after initial riots following the deaths of the two teenagers had subsided.' (SOURCE) No one can deny that hurling canisters of tear gas into a mosque on the holiest night of Ramadan qualifies as one of the most insensitive acts of provocation to take place on French soil for a very long time.
Wayne Madsen has now addressed the issue of provocation at some length. His column on the French riots is so thought-provoking that I will reproduce it here, in full - which is the first time I've ever done that on this blog:
November 6, 2005 -- Neo-con/fascist provocateurs behind French riots? As is the case with other European countries where fascist and Islamist fundamentalist forces have joined forces, there is increasing evidence that the riots that have swept France for a week and a half have been far more than spontaneous reactions to the electrocution at a Paris electrical sub-station of two Muslim teens who were escaping police. With an ailing President Jacques Chirac stepping down in 2007, the battle lines have been drawn between two conservative presidential candidates -- Interior Minister Nicolas Sarzoky (nicknamed "Sarko"), a confirmed neo-con in the tradition of fellow travelers in Italy, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Israel, and Spain, and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Sarkozy has inflamed Muslims and other minorities in France by describing ghetto youths in broad pejorative terms such as "riff-raff" and "scum." While Sarkozy has inflamed the situation with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, de Villepin has sought to mollify the situation by not wanting to overreact and create more turmoil.
However, with rioting spreading beyond Paris to the north and south of the country and extending beyond young Muslims to unemployed African, Afro-Caribbean, and white young people, the situation is being used by Sarkozy to blame "Jihadist conspiracists" for coordinating the rioting. Sarkozy has strong links to the Likud Party in Israel and the neo-cons in the Bush administration and the Blair government in London. The neo-con media conglomerates such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the Hollinger Group are blaming the violence on France's relative tolerance of its large Muslim population. The neo-con media is also playing up reports that French rioters are proclaiming that they are turning Paris into "Baghdad." The always reprehensible neo-con racist Mark Steyn, who pens his vile hate-filled garbage for the Chicago Sun Times and other neo-con rags, writes that the rioting youths are not really French but Arabs taking advantage of Jacques Chirac's "weakness" on Iraq. Funny, but this editor never met too many Arabs from Cayenne, Fort-de-France, Basse-Terre, Abidjan, Antananarivo, Porto Novo, or Brazzaville. Too bad about the neo-cons, geography and history don't seem to be their strong points. Racist talking points, on the other hand, are their stock in trade.
What is happening in France has all the signs of yet another possible neo-con "false flag" operation in the same category as the Niger fraudulent uranium documents, the provocative actions of Israeli agents in New Jersey who were dressed up as Arabs during the morning of 9-11, unexplained Spanish and British government activities surrounding the train bombings in Madrid and London, and recent deadly bombings in Delhi during Hindu and Muslim holidays attributed to a previously unknown Kashmiri group. The neo-cons have been unhappy about India's Congress government (a government the neo-cons are trying to link to the UN Oil-for-Food scandal), which unlike the previous Hindu nationalist government, is making peace overtures to neighboring Pakistan. As with France, India immediately suspected closely coordinated planning in the bombings and sought to analyze intercepts of thousands of cell phone calls placed in the Indian capital shortly before the bombings.
The French politician who benefits the most from this explosion of violence in a country where Muslim citizens constitute a significant minority is Sarkozy. The losers stand to be de Villepin's faction of the Gaullist RPR party and a newly-resurgent Socialist Party, which rejects the neo-con international agenda. It is not coincidental that the rioting is mainly plaguing cities and towns governed by Socialist and Communist mayors -- leaders who are now caught between addressing the social problems that helped spark the violence and responding to calls for a return to law and order.
The Socialists, Greens, and Communists are charging Sarkozy with inciting greater violence and then failing to respond to it adequately, thus ensuring the rioting would spread beyond mainly Muslim areas in Paris to wealthier Parisian neighborhoods and beyond Paris to Rouen, Lille, Nice, Dijon, Strasbourg, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Rennes, Pau, Orleans, and Toulouse. Later, the closely coordinated rioting spread further to Lyon, Roubaix, Avignon, Saint-Dizier, Drancy, Evreux, Nantes, Dunkirk, Montpellier, Valenciennes, Cannes, and Tourcoing.
As in Italy, Britain, Switzerland, and Germany, there are strong links in France between Islamist fundamentalist provocateurs and neo-Nazis. For example, French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is close to Achmed Huber, formerly of Al Taqwa, a Swiss and Italian financial group linked by the United States Treasury Department to Al Qaeda. Informed sources in Germany and the United States have also linked Huber to the activities of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega during the Iran-Contra covert operations conducted by the Reagan-Bush administration. Interestingly, French intelligence and law enforcement are reporting that the riots in France involve international narcotics smugglers.
The possibility that neo-cons and their fascist allies are manipulating the violence in France to their own advantage has the net result of bringing France into the neo-con's oft-stated goal of a "Clash of Civilizations" between the West and the Muslim world. The likes of Mark Steyn are already insidiously referring to the Frankish-Muslim 732 Battle of Tours between a Moorish army and the forces of Charles Martel. Reasonable political leaders in France should realize that France is being used to ratchet up tension in Europe and distract attention away from recent reports of US secret prison camps and torture centers in Eastern Europe and additional proof that the neo-cons conspired to push the United States into a disastrous war in Iraq. Already, the neo-con media is blaming the violence in France on Islamic terrorists -- a stock phrase for the neo-cons in Washington, London, Jerusalem, Rome, and the French Interior Ministry allies of Sarkozy. However, most of the rioters, mostly from North Africa and Western Africa, are not even practicing Muslims, making the possibility of "Fifth Column" provocateurs being behind the violence all the more likely. French officials are increasingly suggesting that the violence has been closely coordinated and that the primary targets -- trains, police stations, youth centers, banks, libraries, post offices, municipal buildings, schools -- have all been connected to the French government and not to ethnic or religious groups.
Muslim rioting has also spread to Arhus, Denmark and police in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods in Brussels are on full alert. The Danish rioting conveniently broke out as a parliamentary inquiry is due to get underway on the lying by the neo-con influenced government of Anders Fogh Rasmussen on bogus Iraqi WMD intelligence. Neo-con media organs in Europe and North America are suspiciously blaming the Muslim violence on Europe's "welfare state."
The National Security Agency and other signals intelligence agencies that monitor French communications are likely in possession of intercepts that would point to interesting outside interference in coordinating and promoting the French violence and the resultant counter-actions by Sarkozy. It would be interesting to read the transcripts of Sarkozy's recent telephone conversations with his co-ideologists in Washington, London, Brussels, Jerusalem, and Rome. A few years ago, a senior inspector with the French DST (FBI) told this editor that his agency's wiretaps of Richard Perle's home in the south of France had yielded some interesting information, all of which was passed to the FBI in Washington. Perhaps it is time that raw intercepts of international phone calls and e-mail among the neo-cons be leaked in order to hang them using their own past tactics. With their fingerprints beginning to appear on the French rioting, the neo-cons are proving that they will not be put down easily.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: A BBC report furnishes a defence of Sarkozy. (Did I hear you ask why the BBC is spending taxpayers' money on coming to Sarkozy's rescue?) This column, by Hugh Schofield, makes the not particularly relevant point that calling the rioters 'yobs' or 'rabble' is not the same as calling all the inhabitants of the areas from which the rioters came 'scum':
Sarkozy's 'rhetoric, while undoubtedly uncompromising and hardline, has been wilfully misinterpreted, and not just by the rioters. To describe the bands of youths rampaging through the suburbs as "yobs" or "rabble" - which he did - is not quite the same as describing all inhabitants of the suburbs as "scum", which is how it has sometimes come across in the media.' (SOURCE)
The lengths the Anglo-American neoliberal propaganda machine will go to to defend its French President-in-waiting!
Those interested in reading an accurate analysis of the sheer viciousness of Sarkozy's language - rather than a feeble attempt to explain it away - might like to look at an article by Doug Ireland, who not only knows more about the social reality behind the riots than Schofield, but would seem to have a better grasp of the French language. Ireland explains that what is deeply offensive about Sarkozy's language is not so much his nouns - let's face it, 'scum' is not all that offensive - but his choice of verbs. Go to the column to read about it!
BELOW: Prize idiot Hugh Schofield, author of 2005's most pointless point. No doubt he will be receiving his medal from MI6 in the mail very soon.
UPDATE: Damn! Only in France! It seems that unlike rioters everywhere else, who seem to just trash things, French rioters are politically-conscious - they are reportedly calling for Sarkozy's scalp. (SOURCE) Suddenly I think I like these people!
I haven't yet had time to research the matter of whether the violence could possibly be being instigated by agents provocateurs, but there are certainly precedents for this, as in Iran in 1953, when Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA bribed local leaders to foment violence as a means of overthrowing Iranian prime minister Mossadegh:
'one week pro-Mossadeq riots suddenly broke out, demanding overthrow of the Shah. A few days later there were new riots protesting the previous riots. What Mossadeq didn't understand in the summer of 1953 was that the U.S. - the very country that he looked to for help - was attacking him. It was all an elaborate sham being directed by the CIA. The Mossadeq supporters and the Mossadeq protesters were exactly the same people, all hired by CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt. Besides hiring faux rioters, the CIA was liberally spending money on bribes, particularly given to top Iran's military and police officials.' (SOURCE)
Could the French riots also be an 'elaborate sham'? Certainly, there is evidence to suggest that the current rioting was triggered by the French police, who may be marching to a CIA beat. Antoine Lerougetel reports that on the Web has appeared an account of the riots by a geography and history teacher, Antoine Germa. German 'alleges that a massive police operation was deliberately designed to exacerbate the conflict with the youth on the estate after initial riots following the deaths of the two teenagers had subsided.' (SOURCE) No one can deny that hurling canisters of tear gas into a mosque on the holiest night of Ramadan qualifies as one of the most insensitive acts of provocation to take place on French soil for a very long time.
Wayne Madsen has now addressed the issue of provocation at some length. His column on the French riots is so thought-provoking that I will reproduce it here, in full - which is the first time I've ever done that on this blog:
November 6, 2005 -- Neo-con/fascist provocateurs behind French riots? As is the case with other European countries where fascist and Islamist fundamentalist forces have joined forces, there is increasing evidence that the riots that have swept France for a week and a half have been far more than spontaneous reactions to the electrocution at a Paris electrical sub-station of two Muslim teens who were escaping police. With an ailing President Jacques Chirac stepping down in 2007, the battle lines have been drawn between two conservative presidential candidates -- Interior Minister Nicolas Sarzoky (nicknamed "Sarko"), a confirmed neo-con in the tradition of fellow travelers in Italy, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Israel, and Spain, and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Sarkozy has inflamed Muslims and other minorities in France by describing ghetto youths in broad pejorative terms such as "riff-raff" and "scum." While Sarkozy has inflamed the situation with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, de Villepin has sought to mollify the situation by not wanting to overreact and create more turmoil.
However, with rioting spreading beyond Paris to the north and south of the country and extending beyond young Muslims to unemployed African, Afro-Caribbean, and white young people, the situation is being used by Sarkozy to blame "Jihadist conspiracists" for coordinating the rioting. Sarkozy has strong links to the Likud Party in Israel and the neo-cons in the Bush administration and the Blair government in London. The neo-con media conglomerates such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the Hollinger Group are blaming the violence on France's relative tolerance of its large Muslim population. The neo-con media is also playing up reports that French rioters are proclaiming that they are turning Paris into "Baghdad." The always reprehensible neo-con racist Mark Steyn, who pens his vile hate-filled garbage for the Chicago Sun Times and other neo-con rags, writes that the rioting youths are not really French but Arabs taking advantage of Jacques Chirac's "weakness" on Iraq. Funny, but this editor never met too many Arabs from Cayenne, Fort-de-France, Basse-Terre, Abidjan, Antananarivo, Porto Novo, or Brazzaville. Too bad about the neo-cons, geography and history don't seem to be their strong points. Racist talking points, on the other hand, are their stock in trade.
What is happening in France has all the signs of yet another possible neo-con "false flag" operation in the same category as the Niger fraudulent uranium documents, the provocative actions of Israeli agents in New Jersey who were dressed up as Arabs during the morning of 9-11, unexplained Spanish and British government activities surrounding the train bombings in Madrid and London, and recent deadly bombings in Delhi during Hindu and Muslim holidays attributed to a previously unknown Kashmiri group. The neo-cons have been unhappy about India's Congress government (a government the neo-cons are trying to link to the UN Oil-for-Food scandal), which unlike the previous Hindu nationalist government, is making peace overtures to neighboring Pakistan. As with France, India immediately suspected closely coordinated planning in the bombings and sought to analyze intercepts of thousands of cell phone calls placed in the Indian capital shortly before the bombings.
The French politician who benefits the most from this explosion of violence in a country where Muslim citizens constitute a significant minority is Sarkozy. The losers stand to be de Villepin's faction of the Gaullist RPR party and a newly-resurgent Socialist Party, which rejects the neo-con international agenda. It is not coincidental that the rioting is mainly plaguing cities and towns governed by Socialist and Communist mayors -- leaders who are now caught between addressing the social problems that helped spark the violence and responding to calls for a return to law and order.
The Socialists, Greens, and Communists are charging Sarkozy with inciting greater violence and then failing to respond to it adequately, thus ensuring the rioting would spread beyond mainly Muslim areas in Paris to wealthier Parisian neighborhoods and beyond Paris to Rouen, Lille, Nice, Dijon, Strasbourg, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Rennes, Pau, Orleans, and Toulouse. Later, the closely coordinated rioting spread further to Lyon, Roubaix, Avignon, Saint-Dizier, Drancy, Evreux, Nantes, Dunkirk, Montpellier, Valenciennes, Cannes, and Tourcoing.
As in Italy, Britain, Switzerland, and Germany, there are strong links in France between Islamist fundamentalist provocateurs and neo-Nazis. For example, French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is close to Achmed Huber, formerly of Al Taqwa, a Swiss and Italian financial group linked by the United States Treasury Department to Al Qaeda. Informed sources in Germany and the United States have also linked Huber to the activities of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega during the Iran-Contra covert operations conducted by the Reagan-Bush administration. Interestingly, French intelligence and law enforcement are reporting that the riots in France involve international narcotics smugglers.
The possibility that neo-cons and their fascist allies are manipulating the violence in France to their own advantage has the net result of bringing France into the neo-con's oft-stated goal of a "Clash of Civilizations" between the West and the Muslim world. The likes of Mark Steyn are already insidiously referring to the Frankish-Muslim 732 Battle of Tours between a Moorish army and the forces of Charles Martel. Reasonable political leaders in France should realize that France is being used to ratchet up tension in Europe and distract attention away from recent reports of US secret prison camps and torture centers in Eastern Europe and additional proof that the neo-cons conspired to push the United States into a disastrous war in Iraq. Already, the neo-con media is blaming the violence in France on Islamic terrorists -- a stock phrase for the neo-cons in Washington, London, Jerusalem, Rome, and the French Interior Ministry allies of Sarkozy. However, most of the rioters, mostly from North Africa and Western Africa, are not even practicing Muslims, making the possibility of "Fifth Column" provocateurs being behind the violence all the more likely. French officials are increasingly suggesting that the violence has been closely coordinated and that the primary targets -- trains, police stations, youth centers, banks, libraries, post offices, municipal buildings, schools -- have all been connected to the French government and not to ethnic or religious groups.
Muslim rioting has also spread to Arhus, Denmark and police in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods in Brussels are on full alert. The Danish rioting conveniently broke out as a parliamentary inquiry is due to get underway on the lying by the neo-con influenced government of Anders Fogh Rasmussen on bogus Iraqi WMD intelligence. Neo-con media organs in Europe and North America are suspiciously blaming the Muslim violence on Europe's "welfare state."
The National Security Agency and other signals intelligence agencies that monitor French communications are likely in possession of intercepts that would point to interesting outside interference in coordinating and promoting the French violence and the resultant counter-actions by Sarkozy. It would be interesting to read the transcripts of Sarkozy's recent telephone conversations with his co-ideologists in Washington, London, Brussels, Jerusalem, and Rome. A few years ago, a senior inspector with the French DST (FBI) told this editor that his agency's wiretaps of Richard Perle's home in the south of France had yielded some interesting information, all of which was passed to the FBI in Washington. Perhaps it is time that raw intercepts of international phone calls and e-mail among the neo-cons be leaked in order to hang them using their own past tactics. With their fingerprints beginning to appear on the French rioting, the neo-cons are proving that they will not be put down easily.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: A BBC report furnishes a defence of Sarkozy. (Did I hear you ask why the BBC is spending taxpayers' money on coming to Sarkozy's rescue?) This column, by Hugh Schofield, makes the not particularly relevant point that calling the rioters 'yobs' or 'rabble' is not the same as calling all the inhabitants of the areas from which the rioters came 'scum':
Sarkozy's 'rhetoric, while undoubtedly uncompromising and hardline, has been wilfully misinterpreted, and not just by the rioters. To describe the bands of youths rampaging through the suburbs as "yobs" or "rabble" - which he did - is not quite the same as describing all inhabitants of the suburbs as "scum", which is how it has sometimes come across in the media.' (SOURCE)
The lengths the Anglo-American neoliberal propaganda machine will go to to defend its French President-in-waiting!
Those interested in reading an accurate analysis of the sheer viciousness of Sarkozy's language - rather than a feeble attempt to explain it away - might like to look at an article by Doug Ireland, who not only knows more about the social reality behind the riots than Schofield, but would seem to have a better grasp of the French language. Ireland explains that what is deeply offensive about Sarkozy's language is not so much his nouns - let's face it, 'scum' is not all that offensive - but his choice of verbs. Go to the column to read about it!
BELOW: Prize idiot Hugh Schofield, author of 2005's most pointless point. No doubt he will be receiving his medal from MI6 in the mail very soon.
UPDATE: Damn! Only in France! It seems that unlike rioters everywhere else, who seem to just trash things, French rioters are politically-conscious - they are reportedly calling for Sarkozy's scalp. (SOURCE) Suddenly I think I like these people!
