by Srdja Trifkovic • March 23, 2012 • Printer-friendly

As soon as I heard the news I suspected the score. “Far-Right extremists!” screamed the media pack, but my hunch was right: the murderer of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school near Toulouse, and of three French soldiers only days earlier, was not French. He was a French citizen of Algerian descent, as we now know, but his allegiance and his identity had nothing to do with passports and ID cards.

Mohammed Merah (23), who was killed at his apartment on Thursday after a 30-hour standoff, was a Muslim—one of at least twenty million who now inhabit the European Union. The “context” was duly provided by The New York Times: “Much of the concern about domestic terrorism in Britain, Belgium, Germany and France has focused on these young people, who may have had little formal religious education but are susceptible to calls for jihad, especially when their own lives have been marked by disappointment, crime, racism and joblessness.”

The suggested narrative about this “soft-spoken and alienated youth” is clear:

1. Had Mr. Merah and his ilk had more “formal religious training,” they would have been less likely to kill, maim or otherwise harm their infidel fellow citizens because they would have become good Muslims, which is to say peaceful, tolerant and compassionate.
2. Had the infidel host-society been less racist and had it provided “jobs”—which Mr. Merah and millions of other young “European Muslims” like him would no doubt eagerly take in lieu of welfare—they would not have succumbed to the lure of jihad.

The variants on the theme of “racism” as the root of all evil in France are too numerous to quote or hyperlink. The Associated Press report, carried by dozens of newspapers all over the United States, took note of the supposedly “chronic and ambient discrimination within French society.” The Islamist terrorist and the neo-Nazi, for La Stampa’s editorialist, are “two opposite nightmares which live side by side.” According to The Scotsman, “the neo-Nazi threat” is real and by no means diminished by the killer’s identity. “France is a deeply racist country, and Toulouse will only make that worse” was Adrian Hamilton’s headline in The Independent, with the French merely transferring their resentments from Jews to Arabs.

This is all predictable liberal nonsense. The key neglected aspect of the Merah case is that he should have been marked, tracked, and prevented from carrying his murderous plans years ago. We now know that Merah had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to undergo terrorist training in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan border, but what happened next is unclear. French investigator say that he was arrested in Afghanistan and handed to the United States military, which “put him on the first plane headed back to France.” A Pentagon spokesman on detainee issues confirmed that he had been taken into custody by the police in Kandahar a few years ago, but that it remained unclear whether he had been released or turned over to American, French or some other NATO nation control after that.

More here.