September 9, 2019

A French soldier's view of US soldiers in Afghanistan

By Thomas Lifson

A reader who, in this day of blacklists, must remain anonymous, sends this observation about our soldiers in Afghanistan:

It's not unusual for the French to comment on anything American and normally in the negative.  What is rare is a Frenchman saying something positive about Americans; in this case heaping praise on our soldiers in Afghanistan.

Blogger and veteran Wes O'Donnell has translated an editorial in a French newspaper from a French soldier serving with a prestigious U.S. infantry battalion.  I recommend reading the whole thing.  Here are some excerpts:

US soldiers are in top physical shape compared to the French, and it appears much better in infantry tactics.  The soldier notes:

Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins, and creatine — they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo.  Our frames are amusingly skinny to them — we are wimps, even the strongest of us — and because of that they often mistake us [the French] for Afghans. [snip] Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how.  Beyond the wearing of a combat kit that never seems to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.) the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to annoy them in the slightest.

In combat, US soldiers go on the offense in every encounter with the enemy in contrast to soldiers of other nations who have been taught to first defend and await orders:

And combat? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all — always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks: they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting: they just charge! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later — which cuts any pussyfooting short.

And finally:

To those who bestow us with the honor of sharing their combat outposts and who everyday give proof of their military excellence, to those who pay the daily tribute of America's army's deployment on Afghan soil, to those we owned this article, ourselves hoping that we will always remain worthy of them and to always continue hearing them say that we are all the same band of brothers.

Maybe the socialist candidates for president should be given a copy of this editorial, but they likely wouldn't read it, and if they did, they wouldn't acknowledge our brave warriors in the field.

The EU made this happen and now they want someone else to deal with it. The Brits were right to leave this cesspool of tyranny.

'MOVE JUNGLE TO UK' Calais mayor sparks furious row after demanding that squalid migrant camp be moved to Britain

French politicians say if we want to take back our freedom then we have to take back our border

BY ROBERT FISK

 

25th June 2016, 12:56 pm

THE mayor of Calais says migrants living in the Jungle camp and others in France should be moved to Britain so Brits “take the consequences” of Brexit.

Natacha Bouchart wants a revision of the border deal between France and the UK, which at the moment sees border checks carried out in Calais to stop those trying to get to Britain illegally.

REUTERS

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Migrant camps are becoming a political issue in France again after Britain voted to leave the EU

GETTY IMAGES

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Natacha Bouchart says the migrant camps should be moved to Britain because we voted to leave the EU

AP

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Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart is pushing for Britain to take back its border

Speaking on French TV station BFM, she said: “The British must take the consequences of their choice.

“We are in a strong position to push, to press this request for a review and we are asking the president [Francois Hollande] to bring his weight [to the issue].”

“It is we who accept the hot potato.”

The mayor says Britain voting for Brexit undermines the so-called Bouquet deal reached between the two countries in 2003 which defined the rules of border control between France and Britain.

Ms Bouchart said the deal requires renegotiation and said: “there must be an element of division, of sharing.”

Her view is backed up by the president of the Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand, who said: “The English wanted to take back their freedom, they must take back their border.”

GETTY IMAGES

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President of the Hauts-de-France region Xavier Bertrand backs the Calais mayor’s view about what should happen to the camps

Earlier this year he referred to the Touquet treaty as “obsolete and outdated”.

But a French government spokeswoman said Brexit would not affect bilateral immigration agreements.

She said: “On the question of immigration, to be clear, British exit from the European Union will not lead to changes in terms of immigration treaties with United Kingdom.

“These are bilateral treaties.”

Have the French unions become terrorists in their own right?

Protesters' damage at children's hospital 'intolerable,' says French PM

France's prime minister has condemned violence stemming from a labor protest that saw windows at a children's hospital smashed. He called on labor unions to put an end to the protests that have hit France for weeks.

A day after a small group of people on the fringe of an otherwise peaceful labor protest clashed with police and broke windows at a Paris children's hospital, Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called on unions to cease holding protests in the French capital.

Speaking from the Necker children's hospital on Wednesday, Valls said it was "intolerable" that the destruction would be directed at a hospital. Dozens of people were arrested, and several police officers were hurt in the clashes.

 

Watch video01:17

Strikes cast shadow over Euro 2016

"No one can ignore that this is a hospital," he said in an interview with French media. "Behind these windows is an operating room."

He added that he had called on the CGT labor union, which is behind many strikes and protests in France, to stop organizing "these types of demonstrations in Paris."

French President Francois Hollande indicated that a ban on protests was a possibility.

"At a time when France is hosting the Euro (football tournament), when it is faced with terrorism, demonstrations can no longer be authorized if property and people and public property cannot be safeguarded," said Stephane Le Foll, a spokesperson for Hollande, in a cabinet meeting.

The protests are directed at government labor reforms that affect companies' ability to hire and fire workers as well as the length of the work week. Valls vowed to stand firm on the reforms despite the massive backlash from workers in the form of strikes and protests.

"The government will not change a text which is already the outcome of a compromise sealed several months ago with reform-minded unions," Valls said on France Inter radio.

Critics say the reforms unfairly benefit businesses, and CGT leader Philippe Martinez said Tuesday "the struggle is far from over."

France is slowly learning what it's like to be Israel

French police couple killed in attack claimed by Islamic State

Tue Jun 14, 2016 4:41pm BST

By Chine Labbé and Simon Carraud

PARIS/LES MUREAUX (Reuters) - A Frenchman who pledged allegiance to Islamic State stabbed a police commander to death outside his home and killed his partner, who also worked for the police, in an attack the government denounced as "an abject act of terrorism".

Larossi Abballa, 25, also took the couple's three-year-old son hostage in Monday night's attack. The boy was found unharmed but in a state of shock after police commandos stormed the house and killed the attacker.

Born in France of Moroccan origin, Abballa was jailed in 2013 for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan and had been under security service surveillance, including wiretaps, at the time of the attack, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said.

The attacker told police negotiators during the siege he had answered an appeal by Iraq-based Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi "to kill infidels at home with their families", Molins told a news conference.

"The killer said he was a practicing Muslim, was observing Ramadan and, that three weeks ago, he had pledged allegiance to ... Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi," Molins said. 

Police found a bloodied knife at the scene along with a list of other potential targets including rap musicians, journalists and police officers, the prosecutor said.

The killings came as France, which has been under a state of emergency since Islamic State gunmen and bombers killed 130 people in Paris last November, was on high security alert for the Euro 2016 football tournament, which began last Friday. 

In a video posted on social networks, Abballa linked the attack to the football championship, saying: "The Euros will be a graveyard."

The video had been removed from Facebook on Tuesday. Michelle Gilbert, a Paris-based spokeswoman for Facebook, said the company's guidelines forbade hate messages and aimed to remove such content swiftly from the website once alerted. 

"ABJECT ACT OF TERRORISM"

The attacker knifed 42-year-old police commander Jean-Baptiste Salvaing repeatedly in the stomach on Monday evening.

He then barricaded himself inside the house in Magnanville, a suburb 60 km (40 miles) west of Paris, taking the policeman's partner Jessica Schneider, 36, and their boy hostage. Schneider, a secretary at a police station in a nearby suburb, was killed with a knife, Molins said without giving details.

Islamic State claimed the attack. "God has enabled one of the caliphate's soldiers in city of Les Mureaux near Paris to stab to death the deputy police chief and his wife," a broadcast on its Albayan Radio said. 

It was the first militant strike on French soil since the multiple attacks on bars, restaurants, a concert hall and the national football stadium in Paris in November. 

"An abject act of terrorism was carried out yesterday in Magnanville," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after an emergency government meeting, before visiting Les Mureaux, where the police commander worked.

President Francois Hollande said the killings were "undeniably a terrorist act" and that the terrorist threat in France was very high.

Police searched Abballa's home and other locations on Tuesday and detained three people close to him for questioning.

Details started to emerge on the profile of the attacker. Abballa was born in the nearby town of Meulan and lived in Mantes-la-Jolie, where he had set up a fast food outlet in April, documents from the Versailles court showed. 

He was given a three-year prison sentence in 2013 for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan. His name appeared in a separate ongoing investigation into a man who went to Syria, but he was not considered a threat, a source close to the investigation said. 

Abballa had also been convicted three times on charges of aggravated theft and driving without a licence, another source close to the investigation said.

David Thomson, an RFI radio journalist specialised in Islamic radicalism, wrote on his Twitter page that Abballa had filmed himself at the site of the attack and posted the message on Facebook. 

With the couple's boy behind him, Abballa said: "I don't know yet what I'm going to do with him," Thomson wrote. 

Islamic State's claim of responsibility came after the Islamist militant group also claimed responsibility for the killing of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

"In Orlando after the terrible homophobic terrorist attacks and Magnanville in a different way, the same ideology of death with the same beliefs (has been at work): kill and spread terror, contest who we are and prevent us from living freely," Prime Minister Manuel Valls told parliament. 

(Additional reporting by Leigh Thomas, Marc Joanny, Matthieu Rosemain, Richard Lough in Paris and Muhammad Yamany in Cairo; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Paul Taylor and Janet Lawrence)

Europe’s Leading Rabbi: Jews Must Begin Carrying Guns

Europe’s Leading Rabbi: Jews Must Begin Carrying Guns

Washington Free Beacon

Top Jewish org petitions EU to permit Jews to carry guns

BY: Adam Kredo  
January 15, 2015 5:00 am

One of Europe’s most prominent Jewish organizations is petitioning the European Union to pass new legislation that would permit Jewish community members to carry guns “for the essential protection of their communities,” according to a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The European Jewish Association (EJA), which represents Jewish communities across Europe, says that gun license laws must be altered following a string of deadly attacks on Jews in France and other European countries, where anti-Semitism has been growing at an alarming rate.

The recent attacks, including one on a Kosher market that killed four, “have revealed the urgent need to stop talking and start acting” in a way that empowers Europe’s Jews, according to a letter sent Tuesday by EJA General Director Rabbi Menachem Margolin to EU leaders.

The EU, which has enacted very stringent gun control laws, should empower and train Jews to be proficient with guns in order to maintain their safety, according to Margolin.

“The Paris attacks, as well as the many challenges and threats which have been presented to the European Jewish community in recent years, have revealed the urgent need to stop talking and start acting,” Margolin writes.

“We hereby ask that gun licensing laws are reviewed with immediate effect to allow designated people in the Jewish communities and institutions to own weapons for the essential protection of their communities, as well as receiving the necessary training to protect their members from potential terror attacks.”

Margolin told the Free Beacon that he and the EJA have been warning for “a very long time” that anti-Semitism is growing in Europe and that it poses a direct threat to the continent’s Jewish population.

There has been a “dramatic increase of anti-Semitism in Europe,” Margolin said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.  “We demanded from the European governments some time ago that action should be taken [and] were not surprised to see the results in Paris.”

Many Jews are living in fear and have shunned popular community outposts such as synagogues and kosher markets out of fear of an attack like that in Paris.

“Many people today are not coming to synagogue because of the issue and they’d be more comfortable if they knew people were trained to react in an emergency,” Margolin said.

Attacks against Jews have been on the rise, as neo-Nazi parties and other anti-Semitic organizations gain a foothold in some European nations. However, the growth of anti-Semitism has not always been acknowledged by leaders.

“We need to recognize the warning signs of anti-Semitism, racism, and intolerance that once again threaten Europe and our European ideals,” Margolin wrote in his letter to the EU.

The situation cannot continue as it is, Margolin insisted.

Jewish community representatives should be armed and on guard at Kosher markets and synagogues, he said.

“We realize that we also have to do something to take responsibility in case it takes too long” for authorities to put the proper defenses into place, Margolin explained.

This would include stationing armed Jewish community members at popular hubs.

Meanwhile, extremists who have travelled to countries such as Syria, where they train alongside the Islamic State and other terror groups, are now returning home to Europe, where they pose a direct threat to Jews, according to the letter

“The European Jewish Association has long and publicly warned European governments of the need to clamp down firmly on any and all acts of terror wherever and whenever they arise,” the letter says.  “As you know, the danger is that much greater as many Europeans travel abroad to be indoctrinated into radical Islam, before returning to their European homelands to use their militant training to devastating effect.”

Any changes to the gun laws can be made in a safe and effective way, Margolin argues.

“Let there be no doubt, we are asking that all weapons will be issued for self-protection only, and to designated personnel that will undergo thorough investigation and training by local authorities,” he wrote.

Margolin said that he is currently in negotiations with EU leaders to relax certain gun restrictions, though some remain hesitant to do so.

“Some people are afraid it might bring the situation to be uncontrolled,” he said, noting that negotiations on the matter would include ways to ensure Jewish community members are properly trained to use weapons.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that while guns could help Jews defend themselves against an individual attack, only authorities can protect them against a mass attack like those carried out in France.

“As to personally being armed, such a move could help when a Jewish person is threatened by thugs, but won’t help if G-d forbid, Charlie-type terror attacks are launched,” Cooper said.

“Bottom line: Only the Police and intelligence can protect France’s Jews from terrorism,” Cooper said, noting that it is expected French authorities will continue boosting defenses. “If the government doesn’t, then there is no long range future for Jews there.”

“In the meantime, additional steps by the community to train and defend Jews from hate attacks are appropriate, necessary, and prudent,” Cooper said. “I pray that all these steps will help.”

Another Islamist attack in France. The third in three days.

THIRD TERROR ATTACK IN THREE DAYS AS VAN PLOUGHS INTO CHRISTMAS MARKET, FOURTH ATTACK FOILED BY POLICE AS GUNMAN ARRESTED

French authorities have ruled out terrorism as a motive for the van attack, despite reports the driver shouted “Allahu akbar” as he piloted the white Fiat van into crowds of people doing last minute Christmas shopping. Hours later police arrested a man reportedly “armed to the teeth” on Tuesday morning.

Despite the similarities to an almost identical motor-attack that occurred less than 24-hours before in the French city of Dijon, the local prosecutor speaking in the wake of this latest event said “We cannot speak of a terrorist act”, saying evidence suggests it was an “isolated case”.

British newspaper The Times reports a number of reliable sources, including a police officer, witnessed the driver of the white van attack in Nantes shouting “Allahu akbar” as he drove into people. The phrase is Arabic and translates as ‘God is Great’.

It is reported the ram-attack specifically targeted a chalet serving mulled wine. After his vehicle came to a rest and he had injured eleven bystanders, five seriously, the driver began to stab himself repeatedly in an apparent, unsuccessful, suicide bid. He is now in police custody.

Police Respond at Nantes Christmas Market

The two motor attacks followed a knife attack in a French police station, which left one officer fighting for his life. A French-Burundian Muslim convert reportedly walked into the station on Saturday and shouted the now familiar phrase “Allahu akbar” as he started his attack. He was shot dead after injuring three.

In all cases the French authorities have described the attackers as “unbalanced” and denied the attacks are in any way related.

The situation further developed in France this morning as another arrest was made after a heavily armed man was seen walking in the historic city of Cannes. The man, who was in his 40’s, is described as having been carrying two fully loaded pump-action shotguns, wearing an ammunition belt, and a large knife. No more is known at this time.

Tax insanity. Animal Farm come to life

Taxes on some wealthy French top 100 pct of income: paper

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PARIS | Sat May 18, 2013 1:16pm EDT

(Reuters) - More than 8,000 French households' tax bills topped 100 percent of their income last year, the business newspaper Les Echos reported on Saturday, citing Finance Ministry data.

The newspaper said that the exceptionally high level of taxation was due to a one-off levy last year on 2011 incomes for households with assets of more than 1.3 million euros ($1.67 million).

President Francois Hollande's Socialist government imposed the tax surcharge last year, shortly after taking office, to offset the impact of a rebate scheme created by its conservative predecessor to cap an individual's overall taxation at 50 percent of income.

The government has been forced to redraft a proposed bill to levy a temporary 75 percent tax on earnings over 1 million euros, which had been one of Hollande's campaign pledges.

The Constitutional Council has judged such a high rate of taxation to be unfair, leaving the government to rehash it to hit companies rather than individuals.

Since then, a top administrative court has determined that a marginal tax rate higher than 66.66 percent on a single household risked being considered as confiscatory by the council.

Les Echos reported that nearly 12,000 households paid taxes last year worth more than 75 percent of their 2011 revenues due to the exceptional levy. ($1 = 0.7798 euros)

How dare a company not kow-tow to French worker demands...

France threatens boycott on US auto firm over plant closure

What the Democrats want for America

New nationwide strike hits France

Is de Gaulle's France finally dead?

France's rendezvous with history
Earlier this week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said his country would end four decades of self-imposed isolation and return to Nato's military command.
Here, the BBC's Allan Little reflects on France's long journey to reconcile itself with one of the darkest chapters in its history and its difficult relationship with the US and the UK.
There is a story about a conversation between General de Gaulle, who, as president of the French Republic, telephoned his American counterpart Lyndon B Johnson, to inform him that France had decided to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty alliance.
Since its foundation nearly two decades earlier, Nato had had its headquarters in France. Now Nato would have to move.
Furthermore, de Gaulle added, it was his intention that all American service personnel should be removed from French soil.
"Does that include," Johnson is said to have replied, "those buried in it?"
Ouch.
Anti-Americanism
But go to the cemeteries of Normandy and you see what an Anglo-Saxon business the D-Day landings - and the liberation of France - really were.
The historian Andrew Roberts has calculated that of the 4,572 allied servicemen who died on that day on which, in retrospect, so much of human history seems now to have pivoted - only 19 were French. That is 0.4%.
“ France, he said, had made peace with Germany... but it could never - never - forgive the British and Americans for the liberation ”
Of the rest, 37 were Norwegians, and one was Belgian. The rest were from the English speaking world - two New Zealanders, 13 Australians, 359 Canadians, 1,641 Britons and, most decisively of all, 2,500 Americans.
After the disastrous Suez crisis in 1956, it fell to Harold MacMillan as UK prime minister to move Britain from the Age of Empire to the Age of Europe.
But his attempts to take the United Kingdom into what was then called the Common Market fell foul of General de Gaulle's famous vetoes.
Twice Monsieur Non listened politely to Britain's plea, and twice he slammed the door.
De Gaulle saw in British membership the Trojan Horse of American imperialism in Europe.
After Algeria won its independence from France in the early 1960s, de Gaulle was fond of saying that he had not granted freedom to one country only to sit by and watch France lose its independence to the Americans.
MacMillan, in old age, spoke ruefully of France's almost psychotic relationship with its Anglo-Saxon allies.
France, he said, had made peace with Germany, had forgiven Germany for the brutality of invasion and the humiliation of four years of occupation, but it could never - never - forgive the British and Americans for the liberation.
French anti-Americanism has a long pedigree. The 18th Century philosophers of the European Enlightenment believed the New World to be self evidently inferior.
They spoke - and wrote, prolifically - of the degeneration of plant and animal life in America.
They believed America had emerged from the ocean millennia after the old continents; and that accounted for the cultural inferiority of civilisations that tried to plant themselves there.
Self-liberation
I was living in Paris when France celebrated the 60th anniversary of its liberation.
I went to the beaches of Normandy on the 60th anniversary of D-Day and watched veterans assembling one last time, old men, heads held high, marching past blown up photographs of themselves as young liberators.
France's ambivalence - the same neurosis that Harold MacMillan spoke of - was evident.
Paris launched a series of events to mark the 60th anniversary of its own liberation in August 2004.
The city's mayor had given the celebrations the title Paris Se Libere! - Paris Liberates Herself!
One of the newspapers published a 48-page commemorative issue. There was no mention of the allies until page 18.
Building a myth
An English friend of mine, in town that weekend, had remarked how empty Paris felt in August, the month the city empties out as its residents head for their annual sojourn in the countryside.
"I see," he said "that Paris was liberated in August. I guess the Parisians didn't find out about it till September, when they came back."
Again - ouch. The caustic Anglo-Saxon wit stings.
It stings because the tale that France told itself after the war was built around a lie. Paris se libere.
The words were first spoken by de Gaulle himself at the Hotel de Ville on the evening of 25 August 1944.
Paris had been liberated by her own people, he declared, "with the help of the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, that is to say of fighting France, the true France, the eternal France."
France knew, in its heart, even in 1944, that that was not true. It took until the 1980s for a generation of historians properly to re-examine the darkest chapter of France's 20th Century history.
When I was living in Paris, it struck me that Sarkozy - not yet president - had the potential to be France's first post-Gaullist leader.
His enemies called him "Sarkozy the American" in the hope that this would make him unelectable. It did not work.
And now he has taken his country back into the Atlanticist fold.
It seems to me another step in a long journey, in which France - in its mature, disputatious, entrenched democracy - is growing reconciled to the history that is now challenging the myths.

A footnote to history

French Holocaust role recognised

Frenchman Surrenders to Poodle

Some things are beyond parody:

Former French president Jacques Chirac was rushed to hospital after being
mauled by his own 'clinically depressed' pet dog.
The 76-year-old statesman was savaged by his white Maltese dog - which suffers from frenzied fits and is being treated with anti-depressants.
The animal, named Sumo, had become increasingly violent over the past years and was prone to making 'vicious, unprovoked attacks', Chirac's wife Bernadette said.