An excellent interview and scoop by Geller.
In the aftermath of the massacre, Joseph pointed out that during a news report about the attack, Muslim children gathered behind the journalist, happily making the hand signal of firing a gun, making the V sign, and celebrating. “This is in their blood,” Joseph said. “It’s not something that Americans understand. But I’ve been stabbed, I have had a lot problems with them. I know their hatred. These are people whom the Koran commands, very clearly, many times, to kill us. We are supposed to be murdered. Yet I see these people reports on TV saying, ‘Oh well, Jews and Muslims lived side by side for many years in Muslim Spain.’ But you can talk to my, to my grandparents. You can talk to those who lived under Muslim occupations. They were dhimmis, they had to pay more taxes, and the day that the Muslim king wasn’t happy, he’d come in and kill everyone.”
INSIDE THE JIHAD SIEGE OF THE PARIS KOSHER SUPERMARKET
On Saturday, I spoke at length with a man named Joseph, a French Jew who had family members and friends inside the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris when it was stormed by Amedy Coulibaly, an Islamic jihadist who ultimately murdered at least four Jews for the cause of Islam. He spoke to the families and some of the survivors and told me some shocking and terrible details about what happened during the attack – revealed here for the very first time.
When I spoke to Joseph, he was grief-stricken: “I lost a good friend and it’s very hard, very hard. You have no idea how difficult it is.” Joseph was close friends with Yohan Cohen, who was murdered in the jihad attack. Coulibaly was threatening to kill a three year-old, and Cohen tried to save the child by grabbing Coulibaly’s gun; the jihadist shot Cohen in the head.
Joseph was not just grief-stricken; he was also angry, saying of the jihad attack: “I got a lot of information. I spoke to people from the inside of what happened. It was a catastrophe. This could’ve been avoided.”
Joseph explained this by pointing out thatMohammed Merah, who murdered four people, including three children, at a Jewish day school in France in March 2012, first killed three members of the French military. Coulibaly, he said, worked the same way, first participating in the jihad massacre at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and then going to Hyper Cacher to kill Jews. “I talked to the owner of the supermarket,” Joseph said, “and apparently, from what he told me, Amedy Coulibaly was there a week ago. The owner’s brother was inside the store during the siege and he recognized Coulibaly, because he saw him a week ago. The owner’s brother was shot in the arm, and he is alive to tell the story.”
The attack, Joseph said, was “planned ahead of time. Because they knew it was Shabbat. They knew that people would come shopping for Shabbat. It wasn’t like the media said, that he saw a kosher place, he stopped by and that was it. No. This was planned by Coulibaly, his wife and the Kouachi brothers. They all had a very specific plan. The Kouachi brothers were supposed to take care of Charlie Hebdo and Coulibaly had to take care of police officers and the Jews.”
The plan unfolded swiftly. Joseph recounted: “Someone who had been close to one of the people who died told me that when the terrorist came in, he asked for the store to be closed. He immediately shot two people – some tell me he shot three – and asked the woman at the register to go out and close the curtains at the storefront. And she did. But unfortunately someone came to the door and said, ‘Listen, I forgot my challah.’ And she told him, please get out. But he said, ‘Please, I beg you, it’s shabbat, I forgot my challah, please help me.’ And when the terrorist heard him, he said, ‘Bring him in.’ And as soon he came in Coulibaly shot him in the head.”
