She has one point

It's strange to see Marine Le Pen with an op-ed in the New York Times. She gets her opening salvo -- mirroring a Fox News talking point -- that there's a reluctance among politicians to refer to the religious nature of the Islamist terrorist threat. She correctly notes the emergence of the term "Daesh" among European policy elites and indeed it's ridiculous, like the cricket bat in Spinal Tap, minus the irony. Here's a good New York Times analysis from a few months ago on how the term came into vogue.

FIFA has more than World Cups to ponder

Flicking through the soccer on television yesterday, one witnessed West Ham prominently featuring (on shirts and on sideline advertising) the insolvent foreign exchange trading company Alpari, while Deportivo La Coruna (versus Barcelona) were advertising Nairabet, a Lagos-based betting outfit. Meanwhile, Paddy Power is bankrolling a candidate for FIFA president. But the general attitude to the entanglement of speculative and sports betting operations to soccer seems to be, move along folks.

Greasing the wheels

Excellent New York Times article on how the Charlie Hebdo + Kosher Supermarket attackers were radicalized -- not in no-go zones -- has this interesting detail:

He [Amedy Coulibaly] also apparently used a bank loan to help finance his operation. On Dec. 4, Mr. Coulibaly was approved for a loan of 6,000 euros from the credit agency Cofidis, after providing a telephone bill, pay slips and an identification card, according to the daily La Voix du Nord newspaper. In a posthumously released video, Mr. Coulibaly said he lent money to one of the Kouachi brothers to help pay for “what he had to buy.” 

Note that by the logic of American lawsuits against Middle East banks, Cofidis could be liable in this atrocity.

Choices

AFP via Yahoo News --

Beirut (AFP) - Syrian regime forces battled Kurdish fighters in the eastern city of Hasakeh for the first time Saturday, leaving at least six people dead, a monitoring group said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting broke out at around 2 am at several points in the city, control of which is split between the two sides.  ...  The clashes began after Kurdish fighters detained around 10 regime forces they accused of seizing part of a demilitarised zone. Under a deal agreed last year, Kurdish forces control around 30 percent of the city's Kurdish and mixed Kurdish-Arab districts, with regime forces controlling most of the city's majority-Arab districts. 

Now why would the Assad forces suddenly have more time and inclination to attack the Kurds, whom they'd been previously ignoring? It's as if someone else is relieving some of the pressure in their struggle against the rebels!

Straight Talk Express needs oil

Senator John McCain in Riyadh today meeting Crown Prince Salman. Doubtless he'll claim he raised the issue of imprisoned and flogged blogger Raif Badawi but given the uselessness of such sternly worded démarches, wouldn't it have been better to cancel all his meetings with the government in a show of protest?

It's on this kind of warmish plateau

The post title is from John Christy, an atmospheric scientist, quoted in the New York Times minimizing the seriousness of a string of global temperature records. Maybe Frodo needed to think about Mount Doom (above) the same way.

Image via Wikipedia.

The Broken Windows theory of Islamist terrorism

Fox News has been peddling the police no-go zone view of large of European cities since the Charlie Hebdo atrocity occurred and it's good to see the well-deserved deluge of mockery, even if it was late arriving.

But why would Fox News keep peddling the no-go zone view of the world when the evidence for the existence of such zones, let alone their links to terrorism, was flimsy from the start? Beyond of course the usual imperveriousness to evidence?

Well, one reason is the Fox News demographic. It's a New York City-based "news" station that recruits heavily from local TV news and chases an audience that swung conservative partly as a reaction to urban crime waves of the 1970s and 1980s. So it's an audience with a paradigm that if you let the minorities run wild in urban areas, eventually they'll run wild everywhere. But if they vote Republican, they can stop it.

Their audience is being offered a narrative of Islamist terrorism in terms they'll understand.

Burnt Squid

Reuters on some of the Swiss Franc fallout --

Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, on Thursday closed its 'top trade' recommendation of a short position on the Swiss franc against the Swedish crown, with a potential loss of around 16.5 percent. It added that its current forecast for the euro against the Swiss franc is under review.

Market signals

The Swiss economy is a strange thing. The people seem to want less immigration but today's 30 percent appreciation of the Swiss Franc just made it a lot more attractive for migrants to work there.

It's Qaeda all the way down

Newt Gingrich, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has a list of things he wants the US Congress to study --

5. The Arab countries—including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria—that have successfully contained and minimized radical Islamists. We must learn how this was accomplished and what aspects should be replicated. 

This would indeed be a good topic for investigation, but it wouldn't go the way Newt suggests. It was Egyptian repression of Islamist opposition that led to the birth of Al Qaeda. And France's 1990s terrorism problem suddenly worsens when Algeria launches a brutal assault on its own Islamists. When the Arab countries lean on their own Islamist opposition -- with their grudging support of their middle classes -- the world ends up with more virulent forms of radical Islam. Ask Syria.

How can the same thing happen to same guy 10 times?

French philosopher Ruwen Ogien with a succinct explanation (in an interview with France 2) of why exactly the latest Dieudonné outburst is problematic --

Comme à son habitude, en disant cela, il désigne une certaine partie de la population, à savoir les juifs, qui ont été la cible d'Amedy Coulibaly [il n'a pas dit "je suis Charlie Kouachi].

[As is his habit, it's aimed at a certain portion of the population -- the Jews -- who were the target of Amedy Coulibaly. He didn't say "I am Charlie Kouachi."]

It's always some weird misunderstanding with him and Jewish stuff, isn't it?

VIPs gone wild

Great photo montage in Le Monde working off a report in Paris Match showing how Nicolas Sarkozy moved himself to the front of the dignitaries section of the rally. Also fascinating, via Reuters, the combined antics of Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Desperation

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro hops on a plane to Riyadh to check on the health of King Abdullah, who has pneumonia.

The fact that oil prices have crashed and could well send Venezuela into default has nothing to do with it at all!

Photo: Saudi Press Agency

Maghreb Legacy

There's an extraordinary confluence of Tunisia connections running through the three days of terrorism in Paris beginning with the Charlie Hebdo atrocity. As this Wall Street Journal article (free link) well lays out (and mirroring similar reporting in French media), the three Paris killers, despite initially broadcasting their Yemen connections, have deep links to Islamists in Tunisia who in turn are connected to significant killings in that country. Tunisians are in turn one of the biggest sources of foreign fighters -- and apparently held in high regard as such -- for ISIS which seems to have its most active affiliate in Libya. And finally, three of the 4 victims in the kosher supermarket killings had strong Tunisian origins. The dispersal of French North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s looms large a generation later.

Nous sommes Yoav, Philippe, Yohan et François-Michel

The 4 people murdered for their religion at the kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, Paris.

All shall have prizes

Der Spiegel Interview with Sabine Lautenschläger, German member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB) -- 

I do not expect that the ECB purchasing government bonds on a large scale would change that [corporate lending] in a sustained manner. Instead, banks must again be in a position to see that their borrowers have decent economic prospects. 

Q: How could that be brought about? 

Above all, national governments could contribute to this goal by implementing effective structural reforms to improve the competitiveness of industry. If a company is competitive, it has a future, the risk of default is lower and banks extend loans with lower risk margins.

Alien vs Predator

It's difficult to know how to authenticate the alleged AQAP statement sent to The Intercept and claiming credit for the Paris attacks. But it has one revealing sentence --

The policy of hitting the snake’s head followed by the Al-Qaeda organization under the leadership of Adhawahiri is still achieving its goals; until the West retreats. 

Besides the odd spelling of Ayman Al-Zawahiri's name (doubtless being analyzed by intelligence specialists), the point is that this claim is setting up a contrast with ISIS, with which core Al-Qaeda has disagreed on the policy of setting up an Islamic state. Core al-Qaeda believes it's too soon to establish an Islamic state, and that more "spectaculars" are needed to force a western disengagement from Islamic lands and mobilize Muslims before the state can be declared.

In other words, the Paris attack was to signal that the strategy is still operative, or at least the TED talk-type Al Qaeda types want to read it that way. This will be a feud with a lot of collateral damage.

The 2020s are going to be fun

What the world really needs now is an Egyptian President who used to be a general and for a while gained from an alliance with Islamists but now is willing to clamp down hard on them and help avert a nascent terrorist threat to Egypt, the region, and the world.

The problem is that while for the media, that person is Egyptian President Abdelfattah al-Sisi, history has seen this act before. Mapping it back to Nasser and Sayyed Qutb, we're therefore at 1954: the Muslim Brotherhood is being driven underground, and over the decades metastasizing into Egyptian Islamic Jihad and eventually Al Qaeda, with figures like Ayman Al-Zawahiri still to come on the scene.

Good luck American conservatives with your new Egyptian Deep State friends!

Hate's anchor

From the alleged AQAP statement on the Charlie Hebdo massacre send to The Intercept --

So, why is France so thick in learning from its past mistakes? Is it leaving Paris undefended once again? Woe upon you from tens of Muhammad Merah!

Muhammad Merah being the person who killed French soldiers and people at a Jewish school in southern France in 2012. Somewhat similar to Amedy Coulibaly who killed a policewoman and 4 people at a kosher supermarket today.

The Charlie Hebdo staff and the police were targeted because of their occupations. The Jewish civilians were targeted because of who they were.

Not trending on Twitter: #jesuisjuif

UPDATE: The names of the Jewish victims.

In actual good news

Sri Lanka, constantly being bashed -- with justification -- for its troubled civil war reconciliation process and corruption -- accomplished what very few countries can say they did: an electoral change of power from an entrenched President --

(Reuters) - Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa lost his bid for a third term on Friday, ending a decade of rule that critics say had become increasingly authoritarian and marred by nepotism and corruption. Opposition candidate Maithripala Sirisena, a one-time ally of Rajapaksa who defected in November and derailed what the president thought would be an easy win, took 51.3 percent of the votes polled in Thursday's election. Rajapaksa got 47.6 percent, according to the Election Department.

Je suis juif

So if Je Suis Charlie is the logical response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and now the same cell is attacking a kosher supermarket, then ... ?

Lost in the chaos

Clarissa Jean-Philippe, the 26 year old municipal policewoman who was murdered in Paris (Montrouge) earlier this week in a separate incident from the Charlie Hebdo massacre but one that appears now connected to the second hostage siege in France today. 

They didn't say it in English?

The Vox storystream on the Charlie Hebdo massacre is still claiming that among the things we don't know is "what the attackers motive was" even though there was lots of data at the start to draw reliable inference -- data-driven journalism! -- and now Le Monde has provided a gripping account of the shootings including:

Selon les propos des rescapés, ils ont crié « Allahou akbar » et « Vous allez payer , car vous avez insulté le Prophète » .

UPDATE: Vox's studied mystification regarding "motive" has finally disappeared on Friday morning, to be replaced by "Whether the attackers were targeting specific individuals or the magazine generally." If you kill lots of people who work for the same magazine ...

FINAL UPDATE: The motive mystification line is not being pursued at all in the case of the kosher supermarket siege.

Don't forget the economist

Bernard Maris, professor, member of the French Central Bank general council and well-known Keynesian policy advocate, one of the murdered in the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Not dealing with Syria has reanimated the Iraq nightmare

That's certainly true for Iraq itself, as Al Qaeda in Iraq morphed into ISIS using the energy of the Assad regime's brutality.

But now it appears that it's true overseas as well, given the apparent links of the Charlie Hebdo attackers to this Iraq jihadi case ("19th arrondissement/Buttes Chaumont cell") from 2008 (New York Times). It's particularly interesting to read that article given its perspective that the Iraqi jihadi threat was subsiding.

What changed since that threat assessment?

Syria.

Let's agree to be careful about the word Provocative, for a start

If you're concerned about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, then you should probably be concerned about the words that are used to describe Michel Houellebecq and his new book, Submission. Don't paint the target on his back for ISIS, or AQIM or AQAP, or whoever, to kill him.

People power

Writing in the New York Times, Arthur Brooks notes the demographic challenges of Europe but realizes he can't skip over France's healthy population dynamics so comes up with a wheeze to dodge that one --

There are some exceptions. France has risen to exactly two children per woman in 2012, from 1.95 in 1980, an increase largely attributed to a system of government payments to parents, not a change in the culture of family life. Is there anything more dystopian than the notion that population decline can be slowed only when states bribe their citizens to reproduce?

Er, wouldn't it be more dystopian to be in a society where more and more of the money is directed to a tiny share of the population who in turn want more and more wealth for their own children?

European Central Bank was confused about lender of last resort role in 2008

Bank of England Committee of Non-Executive Directions meeting 10 September 2008 (page 297)

ECB investigation 

It was reported that the ECB was undertaking an investigation into whether any central bank action over the recent period had breached Article 101 of the EU treaty, in providing financing that should have been provided by government, and therefore amounted to finance to government. It was explained that the ECB was the legal authority that had a duty under the Treaty to monitor compliance with Article 101. Therefore ECB officials needed to apply a procedure to investigate all countries in an even way. 

As part of the investigation, the ECB had made a very broad request for information and documents, including Court papers. The Bank had instead supplied a statement about what had happened, and offered to answer further questions. Legal documents setting out the terms of the facilities provided for Northern Rock and the state aid material had also been provided. The Bank had not sent any internal papers or conceded the ECB's right to these. It was noted that, even if the ECB disagreed with what had been done, it was likely that it would only be able to criticise the UK authorities for not having transferred the lending to the Treasury when Northern Rock had been nationalised or earlier. There were good arguments for HM Treasury having phased the repayments rather than having to issue gilts rapidly following their clear statements of intent. 

However, it was stated that the ECB had the right to take a central bank to the European Court for breach of the monetary financing prohibition. This was relevant to the Bank's future role as the Special Resolution Authority. 

The Governor had spoken to the ECB President to ensure an overly legalistic interpretation of Article 101 did not inhibit financial stability operations or circumscribe what the Bank could do as the Special Resolution Authority. It was explained that Article 101 had originally been framed to ensure national central banks did not buy government debt as part of the need to anchor fiscal discipline within monetary union. It had never been designed with lender of last resort or special support operations in mind. Mr Trichet had agreed with that distinction.

From an ECB legal opinion during this same period --

The provision of emergency liquidity assistance is a central bank function, which consists in giving support in exceptional circumstances and on a case-by-case basis to temporarily illiquid but solvent credit institutions. However, it is the ECB’s view that ‘national legislation foreseeing the financing by NCBs of credit institutions other th an in connection with central banking tasks (such as monetary policy, payment systems or temporary liquidity support operations), in particular to support insolvent credit and/or other financial in stitutions, is incompatible with the monetary financing prohibition.’ 

The news here is as follows.

1. At the height of the financial crisis, with central banks reaching deep into the toolbox as lenders of last resort to prevent the banking system from imploding, the European Central Bank was hounding all EU central banks about whether they were financing insolvent banks.

2. The central banks probably were financing insolvent banks, including in Ireland, but it was very hard to tell so at the time.

3. Jean-Claude Trichet told the Bank of England that yes, yes, he understood the distinction between central banks giving money directly to governments (bad) and central banks engaging in operations to prevent banks from collapsing (good), but when it came to actually writing legal opinions, it saw no such distinction -- both bad.

4. This may explain why Ireland was so keen to come up with non-bail out options during this period, and went instead for the disastrous guarantee. Of course the Article 101 blow-up would come 2 years later.

Bank of England believed Irish as bad as Lehmans in causing global financial crisis

Minutes of Bank of England Committee of Non-Executive Directors meeting, 15 October 2008, page 325 --

It was also noted that whilst international coordination proved to be the route to a solution [to the banking crisis], the lack of it also proved to be as much a trigger for the crisis as the failure of Lehman Brothers. Actions announced first by the Irish government and then the German government were both unclear and uncoordinated, and led effectively to a 'beggar thy neighbour' policy which froze the international banking system. 

The Irish policy being discussed is the notorious 2008 blanket bank liability guarantee.

The world's gun shop

From the US Department of Justice press statement regarding the indictment of two US citizens for involvement in a failed coup in The Gambia --

Prior to departing for The Gambia, between August and October 2014, Faal and other co-conspirators purchased multiple firearms, including M4 semi-automatic rifles, and shipped them to The Gambia for use in the coup attempt. Members of the conspiracy also acquired night-vision goggles, body armor, ammunition, black military style uniform pants, boots, and other personal equipment.

All these purchases appear to have been legal.