Aren't they all?
"France’s far right rides wave of anger" by Elaine Ganley Associated Press December 07, 2015
PARIS — France’s options are no longer as simple as left and right. The far-right, antiestablishment National Front has ridden a wave of anger over migration and extremist attacks straight into the political mainstream — where experts predict it will stay.
Contrary to what you might think, I'm not into the far right due to the Islamophobic blind spot.
Yes, they do have some good tendencies in the economic realm and they are far better than the constant stream of fraud lefti$ts.
The party’s historic results in Sunday’s first round of regional elections were the latest in a series of electoral inroads, with scores that shamed and destabilized traditional parties.
First Spain, then US, now them!
The conservative party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy and President Francois Hollande’s Socialists — the longstanding anchors of French political life — are scrambling to find ways to block the ascent of the far right before the Dec. 13 final round.
They will rig it.
The showing of the National Front, which won six of 13 regions, will dynamize leader Marine Le Pen’s planned bid for the presidency in 2017. In the traditionally Socialist northeastern region where she was running, the party won more than 40 percent of the vote. Her niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, had a similar showing in the southeastern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, a stronghold of the traditional right.
In a bid to stop a second-round National Front victory, the Socialist Party ordered its candidates to withdraw from those two regions so their supporters could give their votes to conservative candidates, a bitter exercise that Prime Minister Manuel Valls said was necessary.
Excu$e me?
‘‘There is a choice between two visions of France,’’ Valls said Monday night — that of traditional parties and that of the extreme right, ‘‘which divides the French, tries to pit one against the other.’’
I think my pre$$ does that.
Opponents say the National Front criticizes without offering solutions.
No, they offer solutions; they are just not what the globali$t bankers and wealthy elite want to hear.
The party, with four lawmakers in Parliament, opposes the European Union and the euro currency and fears Muslim immigrants will supplant French civilization.
Oh, don't we all?
But Le Pen says hers is the party of patriots — a message with resonance since the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris that killed 130. ‘‘I believe that the National Front’s incredible results are the revolt of the people against the elite,’’ she said Monday.
Don't worry; that will get put down soon. That's what French rulers do.
‘‘The National Front is an excellent first-round party,’’ said far-right expert Jean-Yves Camus. More difficult is ‘‘transforming itself into pole position in round two.’’
Already setting the stage for the next narrative.
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"Party leader hails rejection of France’s ‘old political world’; Le Pen’s gains echo Trump’s rise on voter fears" by Ishaan Tharoor Washington Post December 08, 2015
WASHINGTON — France’s far-right National Front made remarkable gains in regional elections on Sunday, winning close to 30 percent of the national vote and consigning the ruling Socialists of President Francois Hollande to a dispiriting third place in the polls. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, hailed the results as a rejection of ‘‘the old political world.’’
While France’s dazed Socialists and center-right parties will hope to peg back the National Front in an upcoming second round of elections, Le Pen’s credentials ahead of 2017 presidential elections look all the more burnished.
To many, though, her ascension is profoundly disturbing. The National Front is a party still known for its xenophobia and wider links to the rhetoric and politics of European neo-fascism. Le Pen, 46, has struggled to move the party out of the shadow of its controversial (and rather racist) founder, her octogenarian father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The WaPo puke adding editorial comment there?
But, as the election results show, Le Pen has capitalized on very real fears and frustrations among France’s electorate. The aftermath of the Paris terror attacks, carried out by Islamist assailants linked to the Islamic State, buoyed the National Front. The party has long maintained a conspicuously anti-immigration line and campaigns aggressively on the question of Muslim integration and the threat of Islamist infiltration.
To be sure, as my colleague Rick Noack noted on Monday, the party also gained massively because of France’s economic woes.
Reporters are not supposed to cite themselves in their own stories! It's rule #1!
Entrenched unemployment and fatigue with the Paris establishment have steadily driven white working class voters to its ranks. But the French election took place amid a steady drumbeat of Islamophobia, as well.
The fault of the crisis drill gone live, staged and scripted productions, and false flags focused on by my pre$$.
In the run-up to the vote, Le Pen’s party ran polarizing ads, including one warning of the possibility of an Islamist takeover. This was a tactic that likely had real effect: According to a Pew survey earlier this year, some 67 percent of French citizens polled said they were ‘‘very concerned’’ about the rise of Islamic extremism....
That is Trump talk!
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So what changed in a week?
"Far-right French party stymied in latest voting" by Michael Birnbaum Washington Post December 14, 2015
CALAIS, France — Voter turnout was significantly higher on Sunday than a week before, at 59 percent compared with 50 percent, suggesting that many had come to the polls specifically to keep the National Front from office.
Chastened political leaders from the dominant center-left and center-right parties vowed to be more responsive to the concerns of those who voted for the National Front.
Sunday’s poor results notwithstanding, the National Front’s policies have already reshaped French political life in the wake of the Paris attacks, and looking ahead to France’s 2017 presidential election, Le Pen is emerging as a powerful force who could mount a credible effort to oust the president.
Do you know to whom she is linked?
In the Fort Nieulay section of Calais, a windswept coastal city where 15-story housing blocks jostle with 19th-century brick warehouses, many voters said they were fed up with a Parisian political class that, they contended, rarely ventures far from the gilded halls of power.
‘‘We’ve tried the other parties. We might as well try the National Front,’’ said Mathieu Coze, 30, a train engineer who voted at a polling station in a maze of gray high-rise apartment buildings. ‘‘The National Front has always talked about migrants. We’ve already lost a lot from what our fathers and grandfathers fought for,’’ he said.
Even in defeat, the National Front was likely to be able to hold on to a sense of victory among its supporters, said Bruno Cautrès, a political analyst at the Center for Political Research at Paris’s Sciences Po.
‘‘They are the victims of the system, the voice of the people that no one wants to hear, the voice of the working class,’’ he said.
Le Pen has engaged in a years-long effort to overhaul the party started by her father, Jean-Marie, who embraced anti-Semitic views and minimized the Holocaust. The younger Le Pen has repackaged herself as a clarion voice for the working class and struggling small-business owners.
She has buried many of the same messages as her father in friendlier language, such as emphasizing France’s secular values, a move critics say is coded language that targets Muslims.
Marine Le Pen, like Trump, has capitalized on a sense that establishment politicians care more about their own survival than about the fate of those who have not prospered for decades. But unlike the American billionaire, Le Pen has been more careful than Trump to avoid embracing policies that seem outright racist or directed against specific religions....
You $en$e it because it is true!
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"Marine Le Pen far from humbled by National Front’s bruising defeat" New York Times December 15, 2015
PARIS — Marine Le Pen’s concession speech after her National Front party lost in every region of France on Sunday was anything but conciliatory, despite more than 70 percent of voters rejecting the far-right leader’s message of hostility toward immigrants and open borders.
That intransigence, analysts say, is the key to both the National Front’s history and its destiny, and the reason — in the absence of truly dire economic conditions — that a takeover by the far right in France is not likely anytime soon.
What gives the party its fiercely loyal following — its vituperative denunciation of migrants, its unconcealed hostility toward Muslims, its xenophobic “France for the French” message — also makes it an impossible partner for any political group closer to the mainstream and helps block its advancement as a political force.
Ahh, they are NATIONALISTS, and there is nothing an agenda-pushing globalist paper hates more.
Throughout the country, in Sunday’s second round of regional voting, the mainstream parties formed a de facto alliance against the National Front, which even lost in the two regions where Le Pen and her niece Marion Maréchal Le Pen were favored to win.
Oh, STINK!
In those areas, in the deindustrializing, high-unemployment north and in a south full of those who still regret the loss of French Algeria, the third-finishing Socialist Party pulled out of the race, letting the mainstream right party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy win.
Permanent outsider status for the National Front — outside the “golden palaces of the Republic,” as Le Pen sneered Sunday — was the result. A similar dynamic was in play in departmental elections in March, when more than half of the left’s voters switched to the mainstream right candidate in the second round, and the right won 535 out of 538 contests with the National Front.
Jérôme Fourquet, a polling expert, noted that the “Republican front was effective, as a big proportion of the left’s voters voted for the right,” meaning Sarkozy’s party. In the southern region around Nice, 65 percent of those who voted Socialist in the first round voted for the right’s candidate in the second, and in the north around Lille, where Le Pen was running, the figure was 70 percent, Fourquet said at a news conference.
French voters are all little lemmings, huh, doing what the Party says?!
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Now about those working folk:
"French farmers used tractors and burning tires to block roads in Brittany and prevent access to the port city of La Rochelle to protest low prices they say are putting them out of business. More than 100 farmers, many of them livestock breeders, on Monday closed the highway near the city of Lorient in the west, said Thierry Coue, head of the regional chapter of farm union FNSEA. In La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast, about 100 livestock farmers and grain producers blocked entry to the city from the east, said local FNSEA chairman Francois Avrard. Insolvencies for French livestock farms last year rose to the highest since at least 1998, led by beef cattle and dairy producers, according to data analysis firm Altares."
Can't even get a taxi or flight out:
"Taxi drivers and air traffic controllers go on strike in France" New York Times January 26, 2016
PARIS — Taxi drivers and air traffic controllers in France went on separate but simultaneous strikes Tuesday, blocking traffic in major cities and disrupting flights at several airports.
The strikes were part of a wider day of protests in the public sector, including hospitals and schools, to call attention to staff reductions, low salaries and education overhauls. More than 100 demonstrations were planned around the country.
Some taxi drivers set fire to tires and tried to block the highway that circles the French capital, but the police pushed the demonstrators back with tear gas. Hundreds of taxi drivers also blocked traffic around airports and train stations in Lille and Toulouse on Tuesday, and they paralyzed traffic in central Marseille.
Taxi unions called the strike to protest ride-booking companies like Uber, which allow people to summon drivers through a smartphone app.
Taxi drivers argue that ride-booking companies do not respect certain regulations — like a ban on cruising for fares, which only taxis can legally do — and they say that drivers for ride-booking services have an unfair advantage because they do not have to pay for expensive taxi licenses.
Better of driving your own car.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls held an emergency meeting with taxi union representatives, the interior minister and representatives from the Transportation Ministry on Tuesday.
Valls’ office said in a statement after the meeting that the government would increase enforcement of the 2014 law that regulates the activity of ride-booking companies, to “put an end to unfair behavior and guarantee the conditions of loyal competition.”
The statement said that Valls was ready to consult industry and government representatives “on the economic equilibrium of the individual transportation sector and on the potential regulatory evolutions that might follow.”
The statement also said that the government would provide support to individual drivers, but it did not provide any details. Some taxi unions have asked that drivers receive financial compensation from the state for their loss of business and the drop in the value of taxi licenses.
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"Hoax bomb is found on Air France flight" by Tom Odula and Lori Hinnant Associated Press December 20, 2015
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A fake explosive rigged with cardboard, sheets of paper and a household timer forced an Air France flight into an emergency landing in Kenya on Sunday, sending hundreds of passengers down emergency slides in what the airline’s CEO said was the fourth bomb hoax against the airline in recent weeks.
Some call them psyops.
The homemade apparatus was discovered around midnight hidden in a lavatory cabinet behind a mirror where it was apparently placed during the approximately 11-hour flight to Paris from the island of Mauritius, said the airline’s CEO, Frederic Gagey. He said the airline has had heightened security checks around the world since the Nov. 13 attacks that left 130 people dead in Paris.
‘‘It was an ensemble of cardboard, papers and something that resembled a kitchen timer. Nothing that presented a danger to the plane, to the passengers or to the crew,’’ a visibly irritated Gagey told a news conference in Paris. He said it contained no explosives.
With France in a state of emergency since the Paris attacks and the United States on high alert since the attack in San Bernardino, California, that left 14 dead, hoaxes present a particular conundrum for security officials, who must choose between feeding mass fear and keeping the public in potential danger.
Sigh. I'm full out of fear, sorry, and if something happens, oh, well.
On Tuesday, the two biggest school systems in the U.S. — New York City and Los Angeles — received threats of a large-scale jihadi attack. LA reacted by shutting down the entire district, while New York dismissed the warning as an amateurish hoax and held classes.
Who did they blame, the mob?
Air France has been the target of three prior hoaxes, all in the United States, Gagey said. The fourth came on board the flight from Mauritius, a popular winter vacation spot for French tourists. The Boeing 777 was heading to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris when its pilots requested an emergency landing early Sunday at Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa.
What a massive mind f*** on those people. No wonder they are swinging right.
Six passengers were being questioned, including the person who informed the crew about the device, said a Kenyan police official who is part of the investigation and who insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press.
Gagey congratulated the crew for their cool-headed reaction to divert the plane to Moi International Airport. A safety check was carried out in the bathroom before the flight, he said, indicating the device was placed in the cabinet while the plane was in the air. He denied any security failure in the flight, saying that passengers are checked and sometimes double-checked on flights.
Passengers praised the cool-headed response of the flight crew. ‘‘The plane just went down slowly, slowly, slowly, so we just realized probably something was wrong,’’ said Benoit Lucchini, who was headed home to Paris on the flight. ‘‘The personnel of Air France was just great, they were just wonderful. So they keep everybody calm. We did not know what was happening,’’ said Lucchini. ‘‘So we secured the seat belt to land in Mombasa because we thought it was a technical problem, but actually it was not a technical problem. It was something in the toilet.’’
The plane carrying 459 passengers and 14 crew members had left Mauritius at 9 p.m., said Kenyan police spokesman Charles Owino. All passengers were safely evacuated and the device was removed, he said. The passengers were being flown to Paris on a special flight late Sunday.
Two Air France flights from the U.S. to Paris were diverted on Nov. 17 after bomb threats were received. No bombs were found on the planes from Los Angeles and Washington. Air France officials said the third hoax was on a Dec. 8 flight from San Francisco to Paris. It was not immediately clear what, if any, action was taken in response to that threat.
Gagey decried the series of hoaxes. ‘‘This is behavior that for me is criminal. It sows doubt, it disrupts our operations, it inconveniences passengers, and obviously each time we can get information about those who are responsible for these extremely bad jokes, pardon the expression, we file a legal complaint,’’ Gagey said. ‘‘We find this behavior stupid, damaging and unacceptable.’’
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks and the Oct. 31 downing of a Russian passenger jet in Egypt’s Sinai desert that killed all 224 people aboard. Moscow says the plane was brought down by a bomb planted on board. IS has also repeatedly threatened the symbols of France — among which Air France is prominent.
Steven Ciaran, a 30-year-old Irishman, said he was seated at the back of the Air France jetliner watching a movie when he noticed the rushed movement of cabin crew preparing emergency drills. The crew told him it was a technical problem and they created a calm environment among the passengers, he said.
Which is exactly what this was!
‘‘I was very distressed because I could see we were far from the destination,’’ said Ciaran, who was traveling from Reunion Island to Dublin for the Christmas holiday. He said passengers reassured each other.
‘‘I thought the plane had difficulty and not that it had anything to do with terrorism,’’ he said.
Yeah, thank God.
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So who was it?
"Ex-officer held after fake bomb found on plane; Flight to Paris made emergency landing" by Angela Charlton Associated Press December 22, 2015
PARIS — A retired French police officer traveling on Air France was detained Monday after a fake bomb hidden in a lavatory forced his Paris-bound flight to make an emergency landing in Kenya, according to prosecutors.
Are you phoqueing kidding?
The hoax — the fourth against Air France in recent weeks — comes amid heightened concerns about extremist violence in many countries, and aggravated passenger jitters around the holidays.
The man in custody is a former police officer who was detained upon arrival Monday at Charles de Gaulle Airport, according to an official in the prosecutor’s office in the nearby Paris suburb of Bobigny. The official, who is not authorized to be publicly identified speaking about an ongoing investigation, did not release the suspect’s name.
Kenyan Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery said the suspect was among six passengers questioned Sunday in Kenya. Nkaissery said Kenya alerted French authorities about the suspected involvement of this man and a traveling companion in placing the fake bomb in the bathroom. He said sniffer dogs traced the package back to their seats and the bathroom.
Sigh. I've seen this movie a hundred times now!
The arrest is part of an investigation prompted by a legal complaint filed by Air France on Monday for reckless endangerment. The lawsuit does not name a perpetrator but leaves it to investigators to determine who might be prosecuted, and allows Air France to seek damages in an eventual trial.
France has been in a state of emergency since Islamic extremist attacks Nov. 13 in Paris killed 130 people and left hundreds wounded. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for those attacks and for downing a plane Oct. 31 carrying Russian tourists out of Egypt, killing all 224 people on board.
On Sunday, Air France Flight 463 from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius to Paris made an emergency landing in Mombasa, Kenya, after a bomb was reported aboard. All 459 passengers and 14 crew members on the Boeing 777 were safely evacuated down airplane emergency slides.
Authorities later discovered a fake explosive, rigged with cardboard, sheets of paper, and a household timer, and declared it a hoax. Air France chief executive Frederic Gagey said the homemade apparatus was apparently placed in a lavatory cabinet during the flight.
Overwhelmed with relief, the passengers arrived safely in Paris on Monday, some crying as they embraced loved ones.
That's another thing they do with the psyops: give you a PTSD-inducing event.
‘‘We thought we were going to die. Because of the speed of the airplane going down, we thought we would crash in the sea,’’ said passenger Marine Gorlier of the French town of Melun after landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
‘‘I really admired the crew, because they thought it was a real bomb and they remained very serene,’’ said Antoine Dupont of the northern city of Lille. ‘‘One of my grandchildren said: ‘The slide was super!’ ’’
It was drill!
These are all drills being reported as live events with a fictitious -- and increasingly ridiculous -- premises.
The Air France-KLM Group, Europe’s biggest airline, has said that last month’s Paris attacks had cost it about $54 million of revenue in the last few weeks of November alone and that it could be May before its pipeline of forward bookings returns to normal.
I don't want to hear it.
Call 'em out on this false flag $hit then!
Five days after the assaults, Air France flights from Los Angeles and Washington to the carrier’s Charles de Gaulle hub made unscheduled landings in Salt Lake City and Halifax, Nova Scotia, respectively after phone threats called in to a reservation center at Delta Air Lines, the European carrier’s US partner in the SkyTeam alliance.
The the Five Eyes spies and NSA data collection effort certainly knows from where they came.
An Air France service from San Francisco to Paris was grounded in Montreal earlier this month after another threat. Authorities are scrutinizing phone records in relation to all three incidents.
And?
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Hello?
Speaking of hoaxes:
"French authorities said Monday that a teacher who claimed to have been stabbed with scissors and a box cutter at a preschool near Paris had fabricated the story. A police official in Aubervilliers confirmed that the man, who has not been identified, admitted to having invented the assault by a supporter of the Islamic State at the Jean Perrin preschool in Aubervilliers, a suburb of Paris. It “was a fake attempt, done so that he could have himself transferred” to another job, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity."
Also see:
Eagles of Death Metal return to Bataclan for first time since Paris attacks
President of France, rocker honor 2015 attack victims
Islamic State militant returned to Belgium before Paris attacks
5 released after queries on Paris attacks
‘‘Did he escape? Did he not escape? Nobody knows.’’
"Police warn more Islamic State attacks likely in Europe" by Rick Noack Washington Post January 25, 2016
LONDON — Hopes for a year less defined by threats of international terrorism were dashed Monday by the European law enforcement agency, which warned there is ‘‘every reason’’ to expect attacks in Europe.
The European Police Office (Europol) said the Islamic State militant group is becoming increasingly global and will keep attempting lethal attacks on soft targets in Europe, similar to those in Paris that killed 130 people 2½ months ago.
In addition to lone-wolf attacks, Europe increasingly faces the prospect of large-scale, organized, mass terror attacks, the agency said in a report.
A la Gladio.
I'm sure Europeans know what that is.
Rob Wainwright, head of Europol, said at a meeting in Amsterdam of interior ministers that more than 5,000 EU nationals have been radicalized by fighting with extremists in Iraq and Syria, and many have returned home.
But take in those refugees!!!
The meeting in Amsterdam was held amid heightened fears of attacks on European capitals similar to the ones in Paris. On Sunday, the Islamic State released a video that featured the Paris attackers and included footage of some of them executing hostages.
‘‘Expect a mujahid to show up to kill you,’’ the alleged ringleader of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, said in the video. He was killed in a shootout with police in a Paris suburb days after the attacks.
The video included general threats against Europe but also showed several landmarks in London, raising concerns about possible plans by the Islamic State to strike in Britain.
All videos cited by the war-promoting pre$$ are now considered staged and scripted propaganda productions. Sorry.
Abaaoud reportedly had visited Britain last year. Despite having returned from Syria, he entered the country on a ferry without being detected by police. He also took photos of British landmarks. British authorities estimate 800 British extremists have gone to Syria and Iraq. Nearly 400 are believed to have returned, according to the BBC.
So which British intelligence agency is working with him?
British intelligence services, like authorities in other European nations, have interviewed returnees to decide who should be monitored more closely. But London bombings in 2005 showed it is often hard to analyze who could become a threat to national security.
Yeah, about that.... sure would be hard to "analyze."
Dozens of officers are needed to observe a suspect around the clock, which makes it necessary for intelligence services to constantly reassess their targets.
The beginning of Sunday’s propaganda video showed encryption software allegedly used by the terrorists.
Heaven help us.
Although it has since been pointed out that the encrypted messages shown in the video are probably fakes and technically flawed, the Islamic State’s focus on such tools was probably intended to raise even more alarm. Such fears were reflected in the Europol report Monday, which concluded that ‘‘the availability of secure and inherently encrypted appliances’’ as well as ‘‘coded language’’ could hamper surveillance.
It's all fake, and we are no longer alarmed. Sorry.
The report singled out France as a main target. It said there is reason to expect that the Islamic State and terrorists inspired by it, as well as other religiously inspired terrorists, will undertake an attack somewhere in Europe again.
The report did not suggest an attack is imminent, but....
WHAT?
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Also see:
Paris attack leader said he slipped in with 90 extremists, according to testimony from the woman who tipped police to his location.
Hollande waives prison for abused French woman who shot husband
The case drew a wave of support, from women’s groups, politicians, and sympathizers around France with a petition signed by tens of thousands."
Related: France calls on US to lift economic embargo on Cuba
The French needed a lift.
NDU: France lays down law for Facebook
Yeah, only the government is allowed to do that!
Also see:
West Bridgewater man honored by France for WWII valor
Eagles of Death Metal return to Paris for concert
Belgian police arrest 10 in investigation of Islamic State network
French court upholds radical mosque’s closure outside Paris
