In Évry, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, police arrested four Muslim boys (three Turkish brothers between the ages of 13 and 15, and one 17-year-old from Morocco) for gang raping an 18-year-old woman as she left the main train station. During police questioning, the minors said they attacked the woman simply because she was French and “the French are all sons of whores.”
The boys were jailed for rape and—unusually in France—reverse racism. Three of the minors have previously been jailed for rape and robbery, but only six months ago they were released early as part of a government plan to go easy on minors.
One French commentator asks: “Where did their hatred come from? The hatred that drove them to engage in unspeakable acts on a young girl, barely older than themselves, who symbolized their host country? What will I report? Unemployment? Poverty? Inequality?”
In Paris, the 31st congress of the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF) was turned into a platform for Muslim anti-Semitism when keynote speaker Hani Ramadan—a prominent Muslim leader from Geneva—blamed Jews and Zionism for a litany of maladies in France, Iraq, Rwanda, Syria and Central Africa. “All the evil in the world originates from the Jews who have only one thing in mind, realizing the dream of Greater Israel,” the French daily Le Figaro quoted him as saying.
Ramadan said the media and politics are controlled by Zionists. “In the United States, no one can be elected president without having to kowtow to AIPAC,” he said. “It is the same in France, where no one can be elected without the approval of the CRIF [an umbrella group of French Jewish organizations], which in fact leads in the shadows. Against these international schemes of the Zionist power there is only one rampart: Islam.”
Hani Ramadan is the director of the Islamic Center of Geneva and is a brother of Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss professor banned from entering the United States. The UOIF congress, held from April 18-21 this year, is one of France’s largest and most prominent Islamic events.
In Germany, the interior ministry on April 8 said it had outlawed the charity “Waisenkinderprojekt Libanon” [Orphan Project Lebanon] for allegedly raising millions of euros for Hezbollah. The group, based in the city of Essen, collected €3.3 million ($4.6 million) in donations between 2007 and 2013 for the Lebanese Shahid [Martyrs] Foundation, an “integral” part of Hezbollah. The interior ministry said the funds were used to recruit fighters “to combat Israel, also with terrorist measures” and to compensate the families of suicide bombers.
Also in April, it was reported that the 39-year-old German rapper Deso Dogg (born Denis Cuspert), operating under the alias “Abu Talha Al-Almani” [Abu Talha the German], was killed on April 20 as a result of infighting among jihadi groups battling in Syria.
Deso Dogg—the son of a Ghanaian father and German mother, and raised by an American stepfather—abandoned his rapping career and converted to hardline Salafism in 2010 after nearly being killed in a car crash. Soon after his conversion, he began recording nasheeds [traditional Islamic devotional music] in German, praising Osama Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Deso Dogg’s nasheeds inspired Arid Uka, an Albanian-German Islamist, who killed two U.S. airmen and seriously wounded two others at the Frankfurt airport in March 2011.
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Before and After: Left, German rapper Denis Cuspert in 2005, then known as “Deso Dogg”. Right, Cuspert as jihadist in Syria, in 2013, operating under the alias “Abu Talha Al-Almani” [Abu Talha the German]. (Image sources: Wikimedia Commons, ISIS) |
After Deso Dogg became a cult figure for Salafists in Europe, German counter-terrorism authorities, concerned about his potential to serve as a recruitment tool for radical Islamic groups, began monitoring his activities.