By killing these terrorists — which may have been inevitable from a security standpoint — it has now become more difficult to find out if the three acted on their own or if they were part of a larger group and supported by an ideologically driven network. Were they, especially the Kouachi brothers, motivated solely by a desire to punish Charlie Hebdo for its despicable cartoons of the Prophet as claimed by one of them according to the media or were they also fulfilling some other cleverly concealed agenda, unknown to them?
This is a valid question to ask because the cartoons which have enraged a lot of French Muslims have become a regular feature of the Charlie Hebdo weekly for at least eight years now. There has been no report of any specific cartoon in recent days eliciting a particularly potent reaction from any section of the French Muslim community. Incidentally, the weekly also lampoons revered personalities from other religions.
It has been suggested that it was not just the cartoons that incensed the terrorists. France’s aggressive role in fighting so-called Islamic jihadists in central Africa may have also been a factor. This argument is somewhat compromised by the fact that the French government was directly and indirectly on the side of the jihadists in Libya in the brutal overthrow of the secular Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Even more significant, the French clearly share the same trench as Islamic rebels of different shades who have been fighting another secular leader, President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria, for almost four years now. So there is no reason to believe that it is France’s adventures in other parts of the world which have angered Islamic jihadists. This story about the country’s stand against jihadists in other lands may have been deliberately put out by the media to divert attention from some other more plausible explanation for the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
The massacre could well have been a Mossad operation to arrest the growing tide of support and sympathy for the Palestinians in their struggle for statehood among people in France and in a number of other European countries. This is the one really momentous development of the last few months that has impacted upon the Israeli government and global Zionism. Parliaments in Sweden and Spain to Ireland and Britain have adopted resolutions endorsing the Palestinian struggle. France has also taken a similar step. In my main article I alluded to the French vote in the UN Security Council which some analysts have described as the culmination of a major shift in the public mood vis-a-vis the Israel-Palestine conflict within Europe.
By staging a massacre which once again reinforces the image of the Muslim as a terrorist opposed to civilized values such as the freedom of expression and incapable of living in harmony with the majority population, Mossad and the Israeli government may be seeking to drive a wedge between the majority European citizenry and the Muslim minority. The aim may be to dissuade governments and citizens in Europe from moving any further along their newly discovered path of engagement with Palestinians who they are now beginning to see as victims rather than as aggressors which is how they have been portrayed all these years by the Israeli elite and the Zionist controlled media. What better way of doing this than by reviving that deeply entrenched image of the Muslim in the European mind as a violence prone creature hell-bent on wiping out the innocent?
