Paris Siege Ends
Two hostage crises in Paris were resolved today. Cherif and Said Kouachi, the two jihadists responsible for Wednesday's slaughter at Charlie Hebdo, seized a hostage and entered a printing plant outside of Paris. They told police that they wanted to die as martyrs. They got their wish.
Not long after the police cornered the Kouachi brothers, a second jihadist attack erupted at a kosher market in Paris. Four hostages were reportedly killed. Amedy Coulibaly, the radical Islamist responsible for that incident, murdered a French policewoman yesterday. He is also dead.
Out of an abundance of caution, French authorities immediately ordered all shops in Paris' Jewish district to be closed. While I understand the concern, it is a sad echo of events in the 1930s when Jewish stores were closed for their own safety and that decade ended with Jews in cattle cars.
French Jews have been the targets of increasing jihadist violence for years now. In 2012, a rabbi and three children were shot at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France. Last summer French synagogues were attacked by Muslim mobs. The list goes on.
Anti-Semitism in France has gotten so bad that Natan Sharansky of the Jewish Agency said recently that 50,000 French Jews requested information about emigrating to Israel last year.
Somewhere in hell, Hitler is smiling.
A Fifth Column?
These were not isolated events. Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers were part of a radical Islamist group in France called the "Buttes Chaumont" cell, named after a Paris park. The men had extensive criminal histories, and their desire to wage jihad was known to intelligence officials.
The larger reality is that there are an unknown number of such cells throughout Western Europe and here in the United States. Some may be affiliated with Al Qaeda, some with ISIS, some with Hezbollah or Hamas. (By the way Hezbollah is very active throughout South America, something that we have often noted during debates involving our porous borders.)
Nigel Farage, leader of a populist party in Great Britain called the UK Independence Party (UKIP), warned that the Paris attacks are the bitter fruit of the left's devotion to political correctness and multiculturalism. Farage said:
"We now have within many European countries, and dare I say it, within the U.S.A. too, a fifth column living within our own countries. . . people who are out to destroy a whole civilization and our way of life. . . So let's recognize the mistakes we've made. . . .
"We have promoted multiculturalism. We have promoted division within our societies. We have said to large numbers of people, 'You can come here from any part of the world. Oh, by the way, please don't bother to learn our language, don't integrate in any way at all. You can take over whole parts of our towns and cities and we'll say it's made us a wonderful diverse nation.' That hasn't worked."
The West's Response
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration continues its policy of releasing radical Islamists from Guantanamo Bay. We know that a significant percentage of them will rejoin the jihadi war against the West.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose anti-police rhetoric has come back to haunt him as cops are being buried, shutdown surveillance of mosques last year, citing all the left-wing canards about racial profiling.
As the war quickens, the last thing we should be doing is freeing captured jihadists and stopping surveillance in communities where cells, like the one in Paris, hide and launch their attacks.
By the way, the head of Britain's intelligence agency, MI5, warned yesterday that Al Qaeda is planning mass casualty attacks in the West. He had planned to deliver these remarks prior to Wednesday'sslaughter at Charlie Hebdo. While this battle in Paris may be over, more jihadi assaults are coming.
And as more men, women and children are slaughtered, people from Paris to London, Berlin to Washington and Sydney to Toronto will be forced to decide how they will respond. Will the West follow the current philosophy of barely disguised appeasement, denial of who the enemy is and what motivates it, while surrendering more of our liberty?
Or will we do what we eventually did with German Nazism and Soviet communism -- rally the forces of freedom and, with every ounce of courage we can muster, defeat this threat to our civilization?
The Left's Surrender
Listening to many talking heads over the past few days, it seems that some on the left have already surrendered. For example, former Carter advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to "The Prophet" this morning, while noting how terribly offensive those cartoons were. It reminded me of Obama's remark before the United Nations in 2012 when he said, "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."
It struck me that Brzezinki wasn't the only person I have heard in the last 48 hours who referred to Muhammad as "The Prophet." I don't recall any commentator in recent weeks referring to "Jesus, the son of God" or "Jesus, the Messiah."
Is the fact that some reporters feel compelled to refer to Muhammad as "The Prophet" a sign that Islamism is winning as the corpses pile up?
The media have an obvious double standard. Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, decided that his paper would not publish the cartoons run by Charlie Hebdo. Baquet did not want to offend the "sensibilities of Times readers, especially its Muslim readers." Yet, it has no qualms about offending Christians and Jews.
Here's another disturbing example of self-censorship. A female journalist at Charlie Hebdo was told by one of the attackers, "I'm not going to kill you because you're a woman, we don't kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself."
That quote directly tying the attack to Islam was removed from a New York Times column.
Imagine a different scenario. Suppose a gunman burst into an abortion clinic and told a woman there just before shooting the abortionist, "I'm not going to kill you because you're a woman, we don't kill women, but you must convert to Christianity, read the Bible and submit to your husband."
Does anyone think for a second that the New York Times would drop that quote out of concern for the sensibilities of its Christian readers? Of course not!
That exchange would be on the front page, held up as Exhibit A for why every pastor must denounce the "radical pro-life movement."