France

In a Paris courtroom this week, lawyer Claire Josserand-Schmidt stood face to face with Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving suspect from a gang of violent jihadists who killed 130 people in Paris six years ago.

As a lawyer for the victims and their families, her job was to cross-examine France’s most high-profile defendant.

“It would have been much easier for everyone to have to deal with a heartless monster,” she told the BBC. “The human being is more subtle. I didn’t want to have a confrontation with him. The point is to learn as much as possible.”

Salah Abdeslam, giving evidence for first time, says he did not ‘inflict so much as a scratch on anyone’

The main surviving suspect on trial over the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris took the stand for the first time on Wednesday, telling a court that he had never killed or wounded anyone and was not a danger to the public.

Salah Abdeslam is suspected of being a member of a group of jihadists who carried out a coordinated series of bombings and shootings across the French capital that left 130 people dead and hundreds of others injured.

Called to be cross-examined for the first time in the marathon trial, he said: “I did not kill anyone and I did not injure anyone. I didn’t inflict so much as a scratch on anyone. It’s important for me to say this.”

“What else do you need to wake up and understand that we have to defend ourselves?”, asked the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci.

We should be worried about Europe. It is the cradle of European culture, especially France. Henry James, in The Ambassadors, writes about France as the epitome of civilization, as the “eldest daughter of the Church”. Now, however, France’s churches are being burned, demolished and abandoned, and its adherents sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. France’s Jews, “the canaries in the coalmine”, are being physically attacked and leaving their country. Since 2000, more than 60,000 have fled.

A journalist has been given police protection after presenting a documentary on the impact of radical Islam on a French town.

Ophélie Meunier, 34, has received death threats for her part in Zone Interdite, a hard-hitting documentary which focused on the poor northern town of Roubaix.

The programme highlighted a restaurant with cubicles for women to eat in, without being seen by men, and a toy shop which sold faceless dolls for Muslims who follow the Islamic ruling which forbids the depiction of facial features of any kind.

Isn’t it great to have your country turned into a 3rd World shithole?

Paris, December 18, 2021. The Algerian national soccer team wins the Arab Cup in Qatar. Tens of thousands of Algerian supporters, waving Algerian flags, rush onto the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Shop windows are smashed. The unrest lasts until nightfall. Slogans are shouted: “Long live Algeria”, “By Allah, the Koran!” — and also “Fu*k France!” and “Fu*k Zemmour!” The police are ordered not to intervene. They are attacked anyway.

The next day, Jean Messiha, a former member of the National Rally Party, notes on television: “The great replacement and the ethnic hatred, we can see them”.

Éric Zemmour, a Jewish candidate for the French presidency, does not comment. He simply states in an interview: “sadly banal scenes”.

French Mosque is shut down for supporting Islamist groups and anti-Semitism – two weeks after another was ordered to close for inciting hatred

Mosques are not monitored in Canada.

A mosque in the northern French region of Oise has been closed because of an imam’s radical sermons, said to have “defended jihad”.

The mosque in the town of Beauvais will remain shut for six months, local authorities say.

Oise’s prefect said sermons there called jihadist fighters “heroes” and incited hatred and violence.

France has been carrying out checks on Islamic places of worship suspected of having links to extremism.

Dozens of French academics have warned that freedom of expression is at risk after a German professor was suspended over a row with politics students.

Klaus Kinzler has been locked in dispute for months over accusations of Islamophobia at Sciences Po Grenoble.

In a case that has provoked allegations of left-wing cancel culture, the political studies institute has suspended him for “defamatory remarks”.

The institute is now set to lose local funding because of the row.