Hollande had said during the campaign that he would uphold the law on the burqa ban, with the caveat that he would apply it in the best ways possible—a statement which leaves plenty of wriggle room for minimizing enforcement. And his appointment of Christiane Taubira as Justice Minister suggests that soon enough Mademoiselle Liberty will don the burqa.

Taubira, a Guyanese radical leftist, who despite being appointed Justice Minister has no law degree, voted against the law banning hijabs in schools– one of only a handful of members of the National Assembly to do so. She did not cast a vote at all on the 2010 burqa ban, but this year she signed on to an MTE petition on behalf of “veiled mothers” which denounced the “endless series of offenses” against Muslims, a list which included the “anti-headscarf law” and “anti-niqab legislation.”

Appointing Taubira is a concession to the rioters and the burqa bandits. She wasn’t chosen for her degree in African-American Ethnology, but as a reward by the new government for those who burn cars and force women into burqas.

While Taubira has exploited the commemoration of the slave trade for political reasons, she has excluded the crimes of Muslim slave traders from discussion, saying that, the slave trade practiced by Arab-Muslims must not be brought up too often so that “young Arabs do not bear on their shoulders all the weight of the heritage of Arab misdeeds.” Naturally there is no similar restraint when it comes to the weight that young Europeans are told to bear on their shoulders.

The new government will have three Muslim members, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, Kader Arif and Yamina Benguigui.

The Moroccan-born Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who will serve in the cabinet as Minister of Women’s Rights and spokesperson for the French government, has come out against the Burqa ban, saying that “The Republic cannot spend its time making laws that exclude, prohibit and stigmatize.”

Appointing an opponent of the Burqa ban as Minister of Women’s Rights sends a clear message that the new government has no intention of defending women from Islamic repression. The Burqa ban came out of the work of a women’s rights delegation in the National Assembly. As the leading Muslim figure in the new government, with a portfolio that most directly relates to the subject, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem has been positioned to sabotage any efforts made to protect women from Islam.

And that isn’t the only problem with Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who is a dual citizen of Morocco and France, and a former member of CCME, a council of émigré Moroccans appointed by the King of Morocco, whose goal is to strengthen the Moroccan identity of French Muslims and to advise on their Islamic education. This has led some in France to question her loyalties, especially as CCME has been described as a propaganda tool for the Moroccan government.

Echoing a victory speech of his soon-to-be counterpart in the United States, Hollande cast his election as momentous event igniting hope around the planet. “May 6 should be a great date for our country, a new start for Europe, a new hope for the world,” the victorious French presidential candidate announced to supporters at the Bastille. “I’m sure in a lot of European countries there is relief, hope that at last austerity is no longer inevitable.”

Can something so avoided really appear so inevitable?

The word “austerity” is oft spoken in Europe but little applied. This is especially true in France. Hollande promised change from these last lean years. But without exception government spending increased annually during Nicolas Sarkozy’s five-year presidency. Real change would mean implementing austerity, not jettisoning the mere suggestion of it. Sarkozy’s tenure experienced austerity among citizens. But the government economy consistently expanded even as the private economy occasionally contracted.

Could the contrasting trajectories of the public-private fortunes be correlated?

Just 17 of the world’s 210 governments grab more in taxes from their people than Sarkozy’s government grabs in France. Reasons abound for the draconian taxation. France under Sarkozy doles out more in social spending than each of the 27 European Union member states save Denmark and Finland. Though Air France had been partially privatized by the time Sarkozy took office in 2007, state-owned ventures persist in the series of France Télévisions stations, the Paris Opera, the French Rail Network, and the utility giant Electricity of France. The state generously funds higher education and health insurance, making the price of tuition and doctor visits nominal.

Free has proved expensive. Taxation absorbs 49 percent of the French gross domestic product. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which approaches 90 percent, has made the cost of borrowing more costly as Fitch and Standard & Poor’s have recently downgraded the nation’s credit rating. The nation’s deficit has decreased over the last year. But this has more to do with increased receipts than with decreased disbursements. France’s economy is in worse shape than America’s. Stagnation in both instances has coincided with a spike rather than a slash in spending.

Hollande campaigned on a platform of class warfare, and all indications are that he will govern that way. While Europe’s mainstream left parties have made peace with capitalism, Hollande remains an unreconstructed tax-and-spend socialist. Showing little regard for the country’s debt problems, he has promised a government spending splurge to the tune of $26 billion over the next 5 years; this even as he improbably claims he will lower the deficit to 3 percent by next year. A self-confessed hater of the wealthy – “I don’t like the rich,” he once declared on television – he has also pledged to enact a confiscatory 75 percent income tax on the highest earners, as well as a separate “wealth tax” on assets and a bevy of new taxes on estates, banks and big corporations. Where president Obama has dressed up his redistributionist schemes in the guise of “shared sacrifice,” Hollande is upfront about his intent to soak France’s shrinking share of high-income earners. “If there are sacrifices to be made, and there will be, then it will be for the wealthiest to make them,” he announced in the days before the election.

While that message clearly resonated with Hollande’s leftist supporters, a new war on wealth is the last thing France needs. The hard truth is that France has lost its competitive edge in recent years. Symbolic of the decline is France’s rigid labor market, a persistently high rate of unemployment rate that stands at a 13-year high of 10 percent, and a yawning trade deficit that topped $91 billion last year. Debt is a major drag on economic growth. French public debt has spiked to 90 percent of the country’s annual output, with the consequence that interest payments are now the second highest government expenditure after education. France’s finances are now in such perilous shape that in January the credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s took the drastic step of stripping it of its triple-A rating. Against this bleak background, Hollande’s plans to penalize businesses and other wealth producers with crippling taxes is a disaster in the making.

The most charitable take on Hollande’s agenda is that it is a gimmick rather than a political roadmap. Some of his advisors have already said that the 75 percent tax, for instance, is mostly a “symbolic measure” that Hollande would not pursue once in office. But that is a dangerous gamble because Hollande and the Socialists could soon have a chokehold over French politics. Socialists already control all but one of France’s 22 administrative regions, and the upcoming June parliamentary elections may seal their majority status for some time to come. At that point, there would be few restraints on Hollande’s ambitions.

One lesson from the Thirties is that appeasing an aggressor encourages not just that one, but also another. The key act of appeasement of that decade’s many took place in March 1936, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland with 22,000 unseasoned troops and 14,000 policemen, violating both the Versailles and Locarno treaties. Facing them were nearly 100 French and Belgian divisions. Of course they did nothing, even though, as Hitler later confessed, “If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs.” With that daring move, Hitler had taken a huge step toward protecting Germany from Allied counterattacks when he invaded Czechoslovakia and then Poland, and acquiring Germany’s traditional launching pad for his invasion of France and air attacks on England.

But what emboldened Hitler to gamble on French passivity? A few months earlier, in October 1935 Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia in violation of the League of Nations. Like today’s U.N., the League blustered, threatened, and imposed useless sanctions, but in the end did nothing, even though the British Mediterranean fleet could have closed down the Suez Canal and stopped Italy cold. Historian T.P. Cornwall-Evans drew the obvious conclusion of this failure: Hitler “scorns the attitude of England, whose fine phrases contributed nothing to [Ethiopia]. If England hesitated to tackle the Italians . . . how much more would the English hesitate to grapple with the Germans.” Winston Churchill agreed: “Mussolini, like Hitler, regarded Britannia as a frightened, flabby old woman, who at the worst would only bluster, and was anyhow incapable of making war.” Thus appeasement begat appeasement until the horrific denouement came in 1939.

Now consider our decades-long appeasement of North Korea and the way it has emboldened the Iranians to follow the Kim family playbook for acquiring nuclear weapons. Just last week, newly minted North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un defied U.N. resolutions and American threats by launching a missile that could deliver a nuclear payload to the West Coast. Satellite intelligence shows that the North is also preparing for more nuclear tests, indicating they have no intention of stopping their development of more nuclear weapons. This provocation came a few weeks after Obama struck a deal offering 240,000 metric tons of food in exchange for promises to freeze the weapons program. This pattern of offering carrots to North Korea, only to get smacked with sticks in return, has been going on for decades now, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. That is how the North got the bomb in the first place, engaging in “negotiations” and dangling promises of cooperation in exchange for aid and time.

Claude Guéant, the French interior minister, sparked a firestorm last month when he praised Western values as “superior” to the oppressive ones found elsewhere, namely the Islamic world. Yet the controversy did more to spotlight an area in which the West clearly trails its rivals: self-confidence. If a government official cannot extol the unique virtues of freedom and equality that define Western life without being cast as a bigot by the politically correct, how can they be safeguarded against the highly motivated forces of Islamism, which doubt neither the superiority of their own principles nor the righteousness of imposing them on others?

“Contrary to what the left’s relativist ideology says, for us, all civilizations are not of equal value,” Guéant, a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement, told a conference on February 4. “Those which defend humanity seem to us to be more advanced than those that do not,” he averred. “Those which defend liberty, equality, and fraternity seem to us superior to those which accept tyranny, the subservience of women, social and ethnic hatred” — a truth that would be hammered home a month and a half later by a jihadist murdering Jewish children in Toulouse. Thus, Guéant underscored the need to “protect our civilization.”

The response from the aforementioned relativists was swift and hostile, led by the Socialist Party of François Hollande, the apparent frontrunner in this spring’s presidential race. Pierre Moscovici, Hollande’s campaign chief, called Guéant’s observations “a premeditated, willful, conscious gesture” to secure rightist votes for Sarkozy. He is “targeting Muslims,” Moscovici added. Prominent Socialist Harlem Désir condemned Guéant’s words as a “pitiful provocation” reflecting his party’s supposed “moral decline.” Hollande spokesman Bernard Cazeneuve accused Guéant of attempting to “hierarchize humanity,” while the Young Socialist Movement decried his speech as “xenophobic and racist.” Serge Letchimy, representing Martinique in the National Assembly of France, went farthest of all when he addressed Guéant in parliament, saying, “You bring us back day after day to those European ideologies which gave birth to the concentration camps.”

To their credit, Guéant stood by his remarks and Sarkozy supported him. “Obvious words to note that not all civilizations have the same worth regarding the humanist values that are ours,” Guéant later explained to Le Figaro. “Who can contest that there is a difference in values between a civilization that favors democracy, protects individual liberties … promotes the rights of women, and a civilization that accepts tyranny, accords no importance to liberties, and does not respect equal rights between men and women?” Many people, it seems.

Guéant is hardly the first politician to be raked over the coals for touting the exemplary characteristics of the West and shining a negative light, directly or indirectly, on Islam. Indeed, the row recalls one that erupted days after 9/11 when Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister at the time, maintained: “We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights, and — in contrast with Islamic countries — respect for religious and political rights.” The reaction was fierce. Belgium’s prime minister cautioned that such “dangerous” language “could feed a feeling of humiliation” among Muslims, an Italian opposition leader chided Berlusconi for “using terms that no statesman worthy of the name has used,” and another likened him to Osama bin Laden. Berlusconi quickly backtracked, with his office citing his “deep respect for Islam, a great religion … which preaches tolerance” and “respect of human rights.”

Of course, the political figure best known for bluntly comparing the Western and Islamic worlds while suffering the establishment’s wrath is Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. “We will have to end cultural relativism,” he stressed in Rome last year. “To the multiculturalists, we must proudly proclaim: Our Western culture is far superior to the Islamic culture. Only when we are convinced of that, we will be willing to fight for our own identity.”

The ancient military thinker Sun Tzu taught that victory in any conflict is achieved by understanding not merely one’s adversary, but also oneself. Applied to the struggle against Islamism, this starts with Westerners grasping that which they are charged with preserving: a unique cultural patrimony — born in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem and nurtured during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and American Revolution — that sustains the freest and most prosperous civilization in the historical record.

Yet as the response to Guéant demonstrates, appreciation of this Western “self” has grown thin in many circles. Due to “post-modernism, moral relativism, and multiculturalism, the West has lost all self-confidence in its own values, and seems incapable and unwilling to defend those values,” argues Ibn Warraq, author of Why the West Is Best. “By contrast, resurgent Islam, in all its forms, is supremely confident, and is able to exploit the West’s moral weakness and cultural confusion to demand ever more concessions from her.”

The despicable murders in Toulouse, France, on Monday, March 19, 2012 that took the lives of Rabbi Yonatan Sandler (30), his two small children, Aryeh (3) and Gavriel (6), and Miriam Monsonego, the eight-year-old daughter of the Ozer Ha’Torah school’s principal by Mohammed Merah (24), an Arab-Muslim French citizen, has raised anew the question of whether France is a safe place for Jews.

When this writer asked Lyda Peltz, a French citizen born to Jewish parents who came from North Africa, if France is safe for Jews, her response was fast and furious, “France is no longer a safe place for Jews.”  Lyda, who moved to Israel several years ago, joined thousands of other French Jews whose accented voices fill the streets of Netanya, Ashkelon, and Eilat. She contends that the influx of millions of Muslims into France enabled the anti-Semitism that already existed to rise above surface and become legitimatized.

A spate of violent anti-Semitic attacks on Jews throughout France during the 2008-09 “Cast Lead” Israeli operation in Gaza, aided in great measure by the French media’s anti-Israel posture, prompted the exodus of thousands of Jews from France. In the aftermath, terrorists crashed two vehicles, one loaded with firebombs, into the façade of a synagogue in Toulouse, France January 6, 2009, while a lecture was going on. Fortunately, there was only physical damage and no one suffered any injuries. This attack was, however, the second serious terrorist attack on Jewish targets in France in less than a week.

A 29-year old Jewish man was attacked on January 4, 2009 at a Paris subway station by a gang of 20 people who yelled “Palestine will win.” They hit the man in the face and filmed the scene. Three days later, a 15-year-old Jewish girl in suburban Paris (Villiers-le-Bel) accused a gang of ten which included three of her classmates, of an anti-Semitic assault. She had been thrown to the ground, kicked, punched, and the attackers told her that they were “avenging Palestinians.”  On January 8, 2009, “Death to the Jews” was spray-painted outside a primary school in Nice. On that same day, the ORT Bramson High School in Marseille was attacked by vandals who threw aerosol cans soaked with flammable liquid at the school building.

Prior to last Monday’s calculated murders, the brutal murder of Ilan Halimi, a23-year-old Parisian Jew in 2006, was the country’s most shocking.  Halimi had been lured to an apartment by a female gang member, and sadistically tortured to death by Arab and African Muslim Frenchmen. One gang member admitted to having put out a cigarette on Halimi’s face “because he did not like Jews.”  The anti-Semitism of this gang of barbarians went much further.  According to one witness the torturers recited verses from the Koran while Halimi was tortured.

On August 9, 1982, during the First Lebanon War, Arab terrorists used grenades and machine guns in an attack that targeted Chez Jo Goldenberg, the famous Jewish establishment located in the Marais district of Paris.  Six people were killed and 22 wounded.

The work of the French media and academia reveals that a majority of members are not only leftist in their outlook, but anti-American and anti-Israel as well and, elements are allied with radical Islamists. Official policies of the French government since 1967 show they have sought cooperation with the Arab world at the expense of Israel. The actions of the media, academia and the government have all contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism.  However, the multi-cultural and political-correct French elites, who have looked the other way rather than face the violent excesses of many of the Arab Muslim immigrants, and have not spoken out against the radical Islamic imams who preach hatred against all non-Muslims and Jews in particular, are ultimately responsible for the harvest of anti-Semitism being reaped in today’s France.

After last week’s killing of three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, early reports suggested that the murderer was a white, right-wing racist who was targeting minorities.  Indeed, one could be excused for getting the impression, from those first accounts, that the authorities and the media wanted him to be a white, right-wing racist – a lone maniac like the guy who mowed down dozens of teenagers in Norway last July.  Yet the Toulouse terrorist turned out, like so many perpetrators of unspeakable European atrocities in recent years, to be an Islamic jihadist – a self-declared Mujahideen and member of al-Qaeda who said he was out to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and the military involvement of France in the Islamic world, and who, if a van had not blocked the path of his scooter, might have succeeded in executing as many young people as Anders Behring Breivik did on the island of Utøya.

If at first many highly placed Frenchmen were eager to attribute the Toulouse murders to right-wing racism, the revelation of Mohamed Merah’s identity initiated a rush to dismiss the relevance of the killer’s religion and his openly expressed motivations and associations.  Nicolas Sarkozy, who was quick tomeet with Jewish and Muslim leaders at the Elysée Palace, was equally quick to tell the French people that “our Muslim counterparts have nothing to do with the crazy motivations of a terrorist.”  Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris, declared that “what happened in Toulouse…had nothing to do with Islam.”  And in Le Monde, Jean-Yves Camus, an “expert” on radical Islam and the extreme right, insisted that in determining the root cause of the murders, “the impact of the re-Islamization of French Muslims by the conservative currents, that is to say fundamentalists, is less important than the unleashing of a radical anti-Zionism that has gone too far and that does not emanate from our own Muslim compatriots, far from it.”

It is certainly true that “radical anti-Zionism” – not to mention vicious anti-Semitism – is on the rise throughout Western Europe.  But it is also true that before the current wave of Jew-hate really took off, a deep-seated antagonism for Jews was already endemic among Muslims in France.

People across France were supposedly shocked at the massacre, shocked to discover that Jewish schoolchildren in their own country could be murdered in such a fashion.  I don’t know what to make of those declarations of shock.  The fact is that Jewish schoolchildren in France have been in danger for years, and anyone who cares anything about the subject has known this for years.

The killer is Mohammed Merah, a 24-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin who claims to be an Al-Qaeda member. Merah had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan in 2007 he was arrested for bomb making, but escaped months later in a large-scale Taliban jailbreak.

As for his recent attacks, he told police negotiators they were motivated by the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan and by a desire to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children.

In that regard Merah’s words were remarkably similar to those of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Monday, the day of the school massacre. Speaking to a conference in Brussels called “Engaging Youth—Palestinian Refugees” that was sponsored by the Belgian government and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, she said:

when we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and in different parts of the world—we remember young people and children who lose their lives.

These words—clearly connoting that children in Gaza are brutally murdered by Israeli forces—sparked enraged responses in Israel, including from the prime minister, foreign minister, and opposition leader. On Tuesday, Ashton’s office issued a purported “clarification.” It stated that she had “referred to tragedies taking the lives of children around the world and drew no parallel whatsoever between the circumstances of the Toulouse attack and the situation in Gaza.”

The problem, though, is that Ashton’s statement clearly did draw that parallel, and her “clarification” is a weak and unconvincing denial rather than a genuine retraction. Israeli officials reportedly—with justice—see it that way and remain “unwilling to forgive” her remarks. As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had put it, “What gets me especially incensed is the comparison between the targeted slaughter of children and the surgical, defensive activities of the Israel Defense Forces that are meant to hit terrorists who use children for human shields.”

On Friday the 13th, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the credit status of nine European nations. The ratings of Cyprus, Italy, Portugal and Spain were lowered by two notches while Austria, France, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia were lowered by one. Italy’s rate cut from A to BBB+ reflects the second S&P downgrade since September 19th, and Portugal’s debt has now reached “junk” status. “Today’s rating actions are primarily driven by our assessment that the policy initiatives that have been taken by European policy makers in recent weeks may be insufficient to fully address ongoing systemic stresses in the euro zone,” said S&P in a written statement.

The downgrade was hardly a surprise. On December 5th, S&P put 15 European nations on review, warning them that the decisions made during the European Union (EU) summit ending on December 9th would be the primary basis for determining those nations’ credit ratings going forward. The result of that meeting, the EU’s fifth attempt to stem its credit crisis, produced a “deal” best described as an agreement to come to an agreement. The only real highlight of the summit was English Prime Minister David Cameron’s rejection of the treaty in favor of a concept increasingly out of favor among other EU leaders: national sovereignty.

Despite the warning by S&P, the downgrade is being characterized as a “rebuke” of the EU’s prime movers, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Both are on politically shaky ground. Sarkozy is running for re-election in the spring and the downgrade of France to AA+ for the first time since 1975 does not bode well for a man who had often cited his country’s AAA rating as a “badge of honor.” In Germany, one of Merkel’s partners in her governing center-right coalition, the Free Democrats Party (FDP), is sliding deeper into crisis, threatening her grip on power as well.

Germany was the only EU nation to emerge from this latest downgrade completely unscathed. It retained both its AAA rating and a stable outlook going forward. 14 other EU countries–Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain–were put on a “negative” outlook. This means the S&P believes that there is a better than one-in-three chance a country’s rating will be lowered in 2012 or 2013. “It will make it harder to erect firewalls around struggling euro zone economies and convince investors that things are more sustainable,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist for the Center for European Reform in London.

Two countries to watch in that regard are Italy and Spain. Both began the year with fairly successful debt sales, but after Friday’s downgrade both countries saw their bond yields rise, along with those of France and Belgium, while safe-haven German Bund futures hit a new high of 140.22, up over a full point for the day. Another possible complication arising from the downgrade is the likelihood that the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF) will also lose its AAA rating as well, because its guarantor nations have had their ratings cut. An EFSF downgrade could be avoided if the four remaining AAA nations–Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and Luxembourg–would increase the size of their guarantees, but such a move is not considered likely.

The Tribal Update, the media satire television-on-Internet brought to you every week by Latma, the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism website Caroline Glick runs, has  produced a special Christmas song for its Christian friends:

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy do their best to put on a public face of cooperation in resolving Europe’s escalating sovereign debt crisis, behind the scenes both leaders are seething.

They are angry with each other, angry with each other’s policy choices, angry with each other’s friends and allies.

It’s well-known that German taxpayers are fed up with footing the bill for Greeks who take longer vacations than they do and retire on full government pensions many years earlier than they can. Less known is that the German government is actively considering allowing Greece – and possibly Portugal and even Italy and Ireland – to drop out of the Euro-zone.

“If the Euro fails, it will be Merkel’s fault,” a senior advisor to French president Sarkozy told me recently. “Germany has been resisting efforts to prop up the Euro. If the Euro collapses, it will be as much Germany’s fault as it will be that of the over-indebted Euro-zone members.”

Europeans are used to duplicity. That’s why they weren’t surprised to hear President Obama sharing derogatory personal remarks about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to French president Sarkozy when both leaders apparently thought the microphones were off.

But the duplicity of German Chancellor Merkel – smiling at Sarkozy in public, while throwing daggers at him in private – takes the cake.

The European media often talks of the Paris-Berlin axis, a code phrase meant to signify a marriage of reason between Europe’s two biggest economies.

But the extent of the falling out between Merkel and Sarkozy goes way beyond a marital spat. It is verging on divorce.

As the French rely increasingly on Britain and the United States, Germany is leering to the east. “What we are seeing is the emergency of a new Berlin-Moscow-Tehran axis,” the Sarkozy advisor warned.

There are many signs of trouble just beneath the surface.

First, there is Germany’s ongoing trade with Iran. Despite strong European Union sanctions on Iran, top German firms continue to do a booming business with Tehran.

Even worse: German trade associations are actively promoting exports to Iran, even as the EU calls for halting trade entirely.  Here are a few of these trade promotion events from just the past two months:

-          On October 10, 2011, a delegation from southwest Iran visited Dresden seeking to expand Iran’s purchase of oil and gas field technology from German firms. (The organizers of this event have no sense of irony, as their website slogan shows: “European-Iranian ventures, Your Economic Success”)

-          On October 26, the German Foreign Policy Association hosted Iran’s Vice Minister of Economics and Finance, Dr. Mohammad Reza Farzin, to a public forum to promote cooperation with Iran and oppose sanctions.

-          On November 8, the German Business Association hosted a German-Iranian Business Congress in Berlin, spotlighting “Iranian Business Women Power.”

-          On November 22, the Bavarian Ministry for Economics held its annual Export Promotion Day, with a special emphasis on exploring “better market chances in Iran, possibilities to invest, finding business partners in Iran.”

(Hat tip to the enterprising group known as Stop the Bomb for keeping close tabs on German exports to Iran).

We’ve been through this song and dance before with Libya and Iraq in the 1980s, where the Germans were building poison gas factories and ballistic missile plants. It became known as trade über alles.

At the same time, Merkel’s government has been pressing hard behind the scenes to block EU sanctions against the Iranian Central Bank, an initiative being promoted by French president Sarkozy.

So what’s going on? At a closed door meeting among European intelligence czars recently, top officials at Germany’s BND (their equivalent of the CIA) shocked their counterparts with the virulence of their ant-American remarks.

There’s a 1930’s style resurgence of nationalism in Germany that has caught the attention of many Europeans, the top Sarkozy advisor told me. “It’s Germany first, and to hell with Europe,” he said.

At the same time Germany is eager to protect its business ties to Tehran, Chancellor Merkel has been forging a closer political and economic relationship with Russia.

Some observers see the covert hand of Russia’s SVR intelligence service in the recent anti-nuclear campaign that led to Merkel’s surprise announcement on May 30 that Germany will close all of its 17 nuclear power plants by 2022.

The French, of course, are particularly sensitive to such things since they rely on nuclear power to produce around 80% of their electricity and are the world’s foremost exporter of nuclear power technology.

At the recently held Cannes G-20 Summit, the host, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, unaware of the fact that his lapel microphone was live, said to U.S. President Barack Obama, “I cannot stand Netanyahu. He’s a liar.”  And, according to the report by French media website Arret Sur Images, Obama responded with, “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day.”  The shameful and hypocritical behavior of Sarkozy and Obama, not to be outdone by Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron, speaks volumes about their perfidy and treachery.

Earlier this year, Sarkozy and Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron threatened Israel with severe consequences if Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not accept the Hamas-Fatah unification, and agree to their demands as a price for the resumption of “peace” talks.  Sarkozy (and Cameron) hinted he will certainly vote for a Palestinian State. Although France ultimately abstained on Palestinian statehood, France voted for the Palestinians to have full membership in UNESCO.

French treachery vis-a-vis Israel has a history.  And, on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War it was on full display, when French President Charles de Gaulle decided to reverse the country’s foreign policy to one in favor of the Arabs, and placed an embargo on weapons deliveries to Israel, despite France’s contractual agreements with Israel. De Gaulle, who had served as founder and president of France’s Fifth Republic from 1959-1969, had forged an alliance with the Jewish state during a time when both France and Israel fought Arab nationalism in Algeria and Nasser’s Egypt respectively.

In 1960, France promised to supply Israel with 200 AMX-13 tanks and 72 Mystere fighter jets over the next 10-years.  On June 2, 1967, three days before the war broke out, de Gaulle cut Israel off cold.  He told his cabinet that “France will not give its approval to, and still less, support the first nation to use weapons.” De Gaulle’s statement was hypocritical and treacherous since he had already decided to abandon Israel and embrace the Arabs. On November 27, 1967, in a televised news conference, de Gaulle described the Jewish people as “this elite people, sure of themselves and domineering.”

Much of the instability and violence in today’s Middle East has its antecedents in the actions taken by the British and French governments.  While World War I was still going on they met and began to draw the map of the Middle East and drew up what would became known as the Sykes-Picot secret agreement of May 1916.  Following the end of war and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire they created new and mostly artificial nations such as Iraq, Trans-Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, while abandoning minorities such as the Kurds.
On August 10, 1920, a pact between the allies (Britain and France) and the representatives of the Ottoman Turkish government, known as the Treaty of Sevres, abolished the Ottoman Empire and obligated Turkey to renounce all rights over the Arab Middle East and North Africa.  The treaty also provided for the establishment of an autonomous Kurdistan.

The Turks rejected the Treaty of Sevres, and in 1923, Turkey was recognized as an independent nation, with the Treaty of Lausanne subsequently replacing Sevres.  Under its terms, Turkey was no longer obligated to grant the Kurds autonomy.  The treaty divided the Kurdish region among Turkey, Iran, and Syria – with British and French collusion.

Syria became a hodge-podge of ethnic and religious groups.  The French, who were wary of Sunni-Arab nationalism, granted autonomous status to the Alawites. They created an officer cadre from amongst the Alawites, which eventually gave rise to the Assad dictatorships, and Alawite domination of the Syrian military. Today’s upheaval in Syria has a great deal to do with those early French policies. The majority Sunni-Arabs resent the Alawite monopoly on power, and they remember (as the Kurds do) the betrayal of the French.

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad can feel the noose around his neck tightening. France is now calling for a humanitarian corridor in Syria and multiple reports talk of a Turkish-Arab military action following an authorization from the Arab League. The U.S. is telling its citizens to immediately leave the country. War may be on the horizon.

On Thursday, the French Foreign Minister asked the Arab League to endorse a “secured zone to protect civilians” in Syria. France is also officially embracing the Syrian National Council, an umbrella of opposition groups and figures, as a legitimate body. Foreign Minister Alain Juppe played a game of semantics, saying France was not endorsing a military intervention for a “buffer zone,” while admitting that the proposed “secured zone” would need military protection to ensure the delivery of aid.

At the same time, Israeli officials expect Turkey to soon establish buffer zones within Syrian territory near the border to create a safe haven for civilians and military defectors. The Turks are already housing the leadership of the Free Syria Army that is waging an armed struggle against Assad. The Kuwaiti Al-Rai newspaper is being told by senior sources in Europe that the plan is for a no-fly zone to be enforced by Arab and possibly Turkish air power after the Arab League approves of it. The U.S. will be involved behind-the-scenes, offering logistical support but no direct participation. NATO has ruled out military action in Syria.

According to the report, the no-fly zone will not be limited to only stopping Syrian airplanes and helicopters, which have been rarely used in putting down the uprising. It will enforce a ban on all movement of military vehicles and artillery, forcing them off of the streets. It is hoped that Assad’s military will be forced to end operations “in less than 24 hours.” This account differs from the Israeli one in that it states that Turkey has ruled out sending its military into Syrian territory to create a buffer zone.

Turkish state television revealed on Tuesday that the commander of the army was evaluating the forces stationed along the border with Syria. The Syrian military is reinforcing its positions in the area, digging trenches and moving tanks behind trees. The Turkish government is telling its citizens returning from their pilgrimage to Mecca not to travel through Syria following an incident where Assad’s security forces fired upon two buses filled with Turkish citizens.

The U.S. is telling its citizens in Syria to immediately depart. Ambassador Robert Ford’s planned return to Syria has been canceled. It should be noted that the Obama administration waited to support military intervention in Libya until all American citizens had left.

Three cities near the Turkish border have become the focal points of the protests and the fighting between the regime and the Free Syria Army: Idlib, Homs and Hama, the lattermost being the base of the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in 1982 that was crushed by the regime. Part of Idlib is said to be free of the regime’s control. This makes it a candidate to be the Syrian version of Libya’s Benghazi where the opposition headquartered its revolution.

The Free Syria Army’s strategy is to create a safe haven in northern Syria near Turkey and then win international support for its fight to overthrow Assad. The leader of the Free Syria Army claims to have 15,000 defectors under his command, up from the number of 10,000 he regularly boasted of. This may be an exaggeration, but it is clear that the forces’ capabilities are increasing. It recently carried out attacks on the Air Force Intelligence headquarters near Damascus and the ruling Baath Party headquarters in the capital.

The brutal and charismatic terrorist once known all over the world as Carlos the Jackal, already serving a life sentence pronounced in 1997 in France for the murder of two policemen and an informant in 1975, went on trial again this week in France – this time for terrorism charges, for which he faces another life sentence.

Describing himself to the court as “a professional revolutionary,” the 62-year-old Carlos launched into diatribes against “racist” Israel and “Zionist exploiters,” drawing applause from supporters in the packed courthouse, to whom he blew kisses. He denied involvement in the crimes in question, from 1982-3 in France; but in an interview the day before, he boasted that the operations he plotted in his career resulted in 2000 deaths. As for the innocent victims, Carlos justified their Marxist-inspired murders this way: “There were very few. I calculated that they were fewer than 10 percent. So out of 1,500 to 2,000 killed, there were not more than 200 civilian victims.” One of his defense attorneys asked the court instead to spare a thought for “victims” of Western-backed wars in Libya and Afghanistan.

Born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez in Venezuela, Carlos was named after Vladimir Ilich Lenin, whom Carlos’ rabidly Marxist father called “the biggest man in all humanity” (Carlos’ younger brothers were named Vladimir and Lenin). “Humanity before the bomb is divided into two periods,” his father said, “before and after Lenin, not Christ who was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill man.”

The successful lawyer spoonfed ideology to his child with an almost religious devotion, setting the boy on a path of ideological hatred and terrorist violence early on. “Revolution is my supreme euphoria,” Carlos claimed. He joined the Venezuelan Communist Youth at 15, where he organized anti-government street marches and learned how to make Molotov cocktails and set cars on fire.

He was then supposedly sent to Cuba at the age of 17 to complete his education in a political indoctrination camp which also ran courses in sabotage techniques, run by Castro’s secret service and a local KGB boss. There he was trained in small arms, explosives, cryptography, falsification of documents, and other revolutionary skills.

Sent to London to study, he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1970 at the age of 21, after further Marxist student activism and training in guerrilla warfare. An affluent young Latin playboy who enjoyed living large while plotting to rid the world of capitalist oppression, Carlos, whose motto was “life, duty, revolution,” idolized another murderer, Ché Guevara. He fumbled his way through an assassination attempt, then botched (but deadly nonetheless) grenade and bomb attacks in Paris, and two failed RPG attacks at Paris airports, before shooting dead two French detectives and fleeing to Beirut.

The unrepentant killer led a bold assault on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna in 1975 (for which he donned a beret in the style of Ché), a hostage-taking operation that catapulted him to international fame and earned him upwards of $20 million in ransom payout. But his failure to follow orders and to execute specific hostages cost him his membership in the PFLP.

Thereafter and throughout the ‘80s, Carlos connected with a variety of terrorist partners, including Saddam Hussein, to continue his reign of terror. He even spearheaded a plot to assassinate Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, only to have the Muslim Brotherhood beat him to it.

It has been evident for some time that President Obama intensely dislikes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then again, Obama does not have much use for Israel altogether.

The latest example occurred during an unscripted moment when microphones were accidentally left on after a G-20 press conference in Cannes last week had concluded. They picked up a private conversation between Obama and French President Nicholas Sarkozy exchanging bitter words about Netanyahu.

Sarkozy went first. He said, “I cannot stand him. He is a liar.”

Obama couldn’t help himself. He tried to outdo Sarkozy in expressing his displeasure with Netanyahu. “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day,” Obama replied spontaneously without his usual teleprompter to guide him.

Reporters heard the two leaders’ childish insults because the microphones were inadvertently still operating. They were asked afterwards not to disclose what they heard, and many of the journalists went along with the gag request. Fortunately, there are at least a few honest journalists who don’t much like government censorship of a legitimate news story.

France had just voted in favor of the Palestinians’ full membership in UNESCO. It also has reportedly decided to abstain, rather than vote no, when the Security Council takes up consideration of the Palestinian bid for full UN membership.

The United States voted no in UNESCO. It will, if necessary, also veto any Security Council resolution recommending full state membership for the Palestinians in the entire UN system. Obama knows that to do otherwise would cost him dearly in next year’s presidential election amongst Jewish voters whom would normally be in his corner.

However, we all know what Obama really thinks. This is a president who has gone out of his way to visit Muslim countries in the same region as Israel, but has yet to visit Israel itself since taking office. Obama had no trouble bowing to the Saudi king, while insulting the Israeli prime minister at every turn.

Obama’s latest blast at Netanyahu recalls his snub of Netanyahu during the prime minister’s first visit to the Obama White House in March 2010. Obama presented Netanyahu with a list of demands, including a halt to all settlement construction in East Jerusalem. When Netanyahu resisted Obama’s charms, Obama picked up his marbles. He stormed out of the meeting and declared, “I’m going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls.” Obama also refused the normal protocol of a joint photograph with the Israeli leader.

“There is no humiliation exercise that the Americans did not try on the prime minister and his entourage,” Israel’s Maariv newspaper reported on the treatment of the leader of our closest ally and only genuine democracy in the Middle East. “Bibi received in the White House the treatment reserved for the president of Equatorial Guinea.”

Here we go again. Charlie Hebdo, a humor magazine in Paris which had produced a spoof issue “guest edited” by, as The New York Times and other media outlets refer to him, the “Prophet Mohammed,” was firebombed early Wednesday just as the special edition was on its way to the newsstands. Hackers had also disrupted its website with a message in English and Turkish cursing the magazine: “You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech. Be God’s curse upon you!”

The magazine had announced the special issue in satirical salute to the “Arab Spring” victory of an Islamist party in Tunisian elections: “Charlie Hebdo has asked Mohammed to be the special editor-in-chief of its next issue,” the magazine said in a statement. “The prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it.” It renamed itself Charia Hebdo, a pun on the word “shariah,” for the occasion, and featured an editorial by Mohammed entitled “Halal Aperitif” and a women’s supplement called “Madam Sharia.” On the cover was a cartoon of Mohammed announcing, “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.”

But Islamic law forbids depictions of its prophet, and as Iran’s glowering Ayatollah Khomeini once famously remarked, “There is no fun in Islam.” Muslim fundamentalists were apparently not amused by the magazine’s mocking tone, and a Molotov cocktail was thrown through the window of Charlie Hebdo’s offices in the wee hours of the morning, devastating the premises.

Its editor, Stephane Charbonnier, said,

We can’t put out the magazine under these conditions. The stocks are burned, smoke is everywhere, the paste-up board is unusable, everything is melted, there’s no more electricity.

But the issue will appear as scheduled and the magazine’s website appears to have been restored.

Charbonnier said the magazine had received “quite a few letters of protest, threats, insults” on Twitter and Facebook before the attack, but not as many as in 2007 when the publication, with a track record of offending all religions, was criticized by Muslims for reprinting the infamous “Danish cartoons” that caused violent outrage around the Muslim world.

The editor did not see the attack as the work of French Muslims, but of “idiot extremists,” though he did not clarify what kind. He said the attackers could not even have read the offending magazine:

The arsonists haven’t read this paper, nobody knows what’s in the paper except those who buy it this morning. People are reacting violently to a paper without knowing anything of its contents, that’s what’s most abhorrent and stupid.

Actually, what’s most abhorrent and stupid is that Islamic fundamentalists like the 57-member (56 Muslim nations and the Palestinian territories) Organization of the Islamic Cooperation have made the criminalization of any criticism of Islam their top priority, and too many dhimmis in the West, like the Obama administration, are facilitating their demands.

Islamic supremacists have firebombed and caused extensive damage to the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine in Paris, after it ran an issue featuring Islam’s prophet Muhammad as the guest editor.

Some Muslims didn’t get the joke. Recently the magazine’s website was hacked; the hackers left this message: “You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech. Be Allah’s curse upon you!” The firebombing followed shortly thereafter.

The destruction of the Charlie Hebdo offices is the ugly obverse of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s ongoing campaign to compel Western states to criminalize criticism of Islam, including discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism. The objective of this campaign, of course, is to render Western countries mute and hence defenseless against the advancing jihad.

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the OIC’s secretary general, has explained that Islam is under attack and must be defended. That Islam would not be “under attack” were not so many Muslims committing acts of violence and hatred in its name does not faze him for one second. The OIC is dedicated to getting the United Nations to approve a “legal instrument” that would criminalize “Islamophobia,” which “cannot be dealt with,” Ihsanoglu declared, except through “a robust political engagement” – that is, restrictions on the freedom of speech. Abdoulaye Wade, the President of Senegal and chairman of the OIC, made this point explicit several years ago: “I don’t think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy. There can be no freedom without limits.”

Ihsanoglu has expressed his pleasure with the success of this campaign: “In confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film ‘Fitna’, we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed. As we speak, the official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.”

The pressure to accommodate Muslim demands to place Islam off-limits to critical discussion has been met with widespread success. While this self-censorship is presented as an act of “tolerance,” in reality it is a deliberate erosion of core Western concepts of free expression, which is an indispensable foundation of the American Revolution and of republican government in general. And we are surrendering it, gradually and voluntarily, to those who seek to impose on us a value system that elevates the sanctity of Islam over freedom.

Last August, the International Islamic News Agency reported that Secretary of State Clinton had agreed to “coordinate” with Ihsanoglu on ways in which “defamation of religions” could be prevented – an operation that cannot possibly be performed without placing freedom of speech restrictions into law, and giving some government agency the power to determine what is “hate speech” and what isn’t.

No one at France’s national satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, was laughing this week after the publication’s Paris offices were destroyed by a firebomb overnight late Tuesday or early Wednesday morning. It is believed Islamists, angry that the editors had named the Prophet Mohammad as guest “editor-in-chief” for this week’s edition, were responsible for the attack. The edition was dedicated to a satire of sharia law, but the firebomb assault took place before it had even hit the newsstands on Wednesday.

“We received threats, but no one had seen this edition,” said Stephane Charbonnier, the magazine’s designer and director. “People reacted violently to the paper yet they were completely ignorant of the edition’s contents; that is the most aberrant and idiotic.”

The leftist weekly publication, founded in 1960, came up with the idea to satirise sharia law and to honour Mohammad with the editor title after the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia’s election last week and the announcement sharia law would be introduced in Libya. The editors proclaimed the upcoming sharia theme in a humorous statement they released in advance that elicited “quite a few letters of protest, threats, insults,” on Twitter and Facebook.

“To fittingly celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennhada party in Tunisia…Charlie Hebdo has asked Mohammad to be the special editor-in-chief of its next issue,” the statement read. “The prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it.”

When it appeared on Wednesday, the controversial edition’s front page showed a caricature of a “visibly happy” Mohammad and had him saying “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” The edition had also had its title changed to ‘Sharia Hebdo’ and contained a women’s section called “Madame Sharia” as well as an editorial by Mohammad titled the ‘Happy Halal Hour.’ There are also two pages of cartoons with sharia law as their subject, and Mohammad appears again on the last page, wearing a clown’s nose, with, ironically, the caption: “Yes, Islam is compatible with humour.”

As it turns out, the magazine was wrong. Its headquarters were also not the only target singled out for attack. In what may have been a co-ordinated move with the firebombing, Charlie Hebdo’s website was simultaneously hacked. On Wednesday morning, its home page showed the words “no god but Allah” accompanied by a picture of the grand Mosque in Mecca with a message in English and Turkish.

“You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech,” the message read. “Be God’s curse upon you!”

French politicians and France’s newspaper association were all quick to condemn the assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices and express solidarity with its staff. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the “…every attack against the freedom of the press must be condemned with the greatest firmness,” while the French minister of culture, Frederic Mitterand, called the assault “intolerable.

This story is cross-posted from LisaGraas.com

At Two Circles, a popular site in India for Muslims, comes a curious article by Rehan Ansari.

According to the site’s “About” page:

We will not publish articles that is racist, sexist or makes baseless allegation against a person or community.

Well, that’s nice of them, but let’s just see about that, shall we?

Ansari writes: Happy Birthday to Catholic State of France!

The article claims that because “approximately 80%” of French citizens are “at least nominally” Catholic, then the recent burqa ban must mean that France is now a “Catholic state”, ostensibly imposing Church law on Muslim women. (Like Sharia?)

The question which arises then, is the France truly a secular democratic country? Or a Majoritarian state that ascribes to the Catholic religion and where the majority has a right to crush tiny minority because only 1800 to 2000 women observe veil as reported in the media.

And…

The French counsel did not forget to mention the strict rules in Saudi Arabia and said that when French women visits in Saudi Arabia they follow the rules and lives according to the Saudi culture. But I am sure he will not be able to answer that Saudi Arabia is a declared Islamic state and France proclaims to be a Secular Democracy.

Since Ansari is Muslim, I cannot expect him to understand what Catholicism teaches, nor can I expect him to understand the difference between a secular democracy that gives Christians and Muslims an equal vote, and Sharia Law….but I will try to explain for him where his attempt at logic fails.

Osama bin Laden has threatened terror attacks on France for banning of the face veil, while Islamic extremists in Britain are threatening to kill women who do not wear a head scarf.   From the stealth Jihad perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood to violent Jihad, Islamists have and continue to impose Sharia law on Western soil, becoming increasingly emboldened.  Note Bin Laden’s warning to France:

If you unjustly thought that it is your right to prevent free Muslim women from wearing the face veil, is it not our right to expel your invading men and cut their necks?”

France is to be applauded for its stance.  Westerners that will defend the rights of women to wear the veil and defend the right of Muslims to practice their faith in contradiction to Western values have provided the fertile soil for the seeds of creeping Sharia to grow.

Three years ago, Islamic law was officially adopted in Britain to oversee Muslim civil cases in Sharia courts which have continued to multiply, while Canada (in the province of Ontario) narrowly escaped it. Here’s how it almost happened, but failed:  In 1991, Ontario changed its Arbitration Act to include faith-based arbitration to settle family disputes, such as divorce, inheritance and custody issues, outside the court system. CAIR-CAN was pleased and in 2004, released a statement that this was “a form of accommodating the needs of religious minorities within a multicultural society”.

Shortly after, the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice pushed the envelope by stating that it wanted this faith-based arbitration based on “Sharia Law.”  The proposal was met with stiff resistance from women’s groups and the Muslim Canadian Congress, which put an end to this drive.  The congress argued:

[S]haria is flawed because it does not view women as equal and therefore cannot provide equal justice to all parties in a dispute especially on issues of divorce, child custody and division of property.

Five months ago, Oklahoma passed a ballot initiative—70-30%– to forbid state courts from relying on Sharia in what was dubbed a “pre-emptive strike” by supporters. Yet Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, commented, “The Oklahoma ballot initiative struck us as silly and absurd — a proposed solution chasing a problem that doesn’t exist.”  He added that the initiative “underscores the deep level of misunderstanding of Muslims and Islam in America.”

The conjoined twins of violent jihad and stealth jihad —>