Mohammed Merah, Alleged Murderer of Several Muslim French Soldiers and Jews, Is Part of France’s Muslim Extremist-Christian Neo-Nazi Alliance

Fatwah / March 23, 2012

By Max Blumenthal

This is cross-posted from Al Akhbar English…

Mohammed Merah, the alleged murderer of several Muslim French soldiers and Jews, was just killed by a sniper with a shot to the head following a 32-hour standoff with police in Toulouse, France. One of the most salient facts about the killer, a professed Islamic radical seeking to avenge various indignities committed against Muslims by the West, is that he was a member of an outlawed French Salafist group called Forsanne Alizza, or the Knights of Pride. The group, which has expressed sympathy for Al Qaida’s cause, was banned in January after its leadership was accused of training members “for armed combat.”

Now that the Toulouse killer has been unmasked as a radical Muslim, and not a white Christian Islamophobe like Anders Behring Breivik, the French extreme right can breathe a sigh of relief. Marine Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader vying for the French presidency, is apparently seeking to ride the tragedy all the way to victory. Today, she declared, “The Islamic fundamentalist threat has been underestimated in our country and political-religious groups are developing due to a certain laxism.”

But a glance into the recent activities of Forsanne Alizza exposes the irony of Le Pen’s words. Indeed, Forsanne Alizza has been engaged in an open alliance with neofascist figures and extreme right-wing Catholic groups who emerged from the core of Le Pen’s National Front party and who comprise some of her most loyal supporters.

The de facto Salafist-neofascist alliance was forged in October 2011 when two right-wing Catholic groups, Action Francaise (French Action) and Renouveau Francais (French Renewal) staged a morality crusade against a performance in Paris of Romeo Castallucci’s play, “On the Concept of the Face of God.” At first, the rightists tried to halt the performance of the play on the anti-religious discrimination grounds. Their grievances focused on a scene of a son cleaning his father’s feces off the floor while images of Jesus Christ flashed on a projection screen. After failing to stop the play, the groups organized a 10-day protest vigil outside Theatre de la Ville, attempting to stop ticket holders from entering through various means of intimidation. Before one performance, seven far-right activists were arrested while attempting to enter the theater with concealed knives, teargas, and stones.

In footage below, Catholic right activists chant “France, Youth, Christianity,” during a October 29, 2011 demonstration against “Christianophobia” outside Theatre de la Ville:

Among the demonstrators at the Theatre de la Ville was Xavier Beauvais, a schismatic ultra-conservative Catholic priest with pronounced anti-Semitic tendencies. As the blog Culture Bot noted, Beauvais has lionized Leon Degrelle, a Belgian extremist who joined the Nazi SS during World War II then led various neo-Nazi outfits in the decades after. Filling out the protest ranks were members of Renouveau Francais, a far-right group that endorsed Marine Le Pen for President in 2007, and which earned an important show of support from Bruno Gollnisch for its campaign against Castalluci’s play.

Marine Le Pen and Holocaust revisionist Bruno Gollnisch

Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen enjoying a glass of Champagne with Holocaust revisionist Bruno Gollnisch

Who is Gollnisch? He was the closest ally of Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean Marie, and unsuccessfully challenged Le Pen fille for the National Front’s leadership position in 2011. Gollnisch is also a Holocaust revisionist who was placed on probation and slapped with a hefty fine by a Lyon court for denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, among other specious claims. Gollnisch has been a regular speaker at conferences of American Renaissance, an American white nationalist group that brings an assortment of extreme racialist figures from Jared Taylor to Sam Dickson to Philip Rushton together each year to promote biological determinist theories about the genetic superiority of Anglo-Saxon whites (read my report from the 2006 gathering of AmRen here).

Another key supporter of Renouveau Francais’ crusade against Castalluci’s play was Alexandre Gabriac. Gabriac served as a central committee member and regional councilor in Le Pen’s National Front until photos emerged showing him delivering a Nazi sieg heil salute, prompting Le Pen to expel him from the party. Despite calls from National Front cadres to forgive Gabriac, Le Pen was in the process of an intensive image makeover designed to increase her appeal among Jewish voters inclined towards National Front’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant positions. Since embarking on her campaign for the presidency, Le Pen has taken a stridently pro-Israel line, earning her a 20-minute meeting last November with Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor. She was not going to let a mid-level Nazi sympathizer stand in the way of her ambitions.

Le Pen scored a meeting with Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor

Le Pen scored a meeting with Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor

Gabriac was present along with 300 Catholic rightists at the October 29 protest at Theatre de la Ville. There and during a march earlier that day in Paris, the right-wing Catholics were joined by members of the Salafist splinter group Forsanne Alizza. According to the French blog, Poisson Rouge, Forsanne Alizza issued a press release on its website calling for members to protest with the Catholic fundamentalists. And so Forsanne Alizza activists marched side-by-side with members of Renouveau Francais and Action Francaise, echoed their chants, and expressed solidarity against “Christianophobia.”

At 1:03 in the video below, a Forzanne Alizza leader explains (in French — translation coming soon) why his group joined the protests against Castalluci’s play:

Though Le Pen will spend the coming weeks holding forth about the supposed failure of the French government to crush Forzanne Alizza, there was a time when some of her most committed political-religious partisans united with the group that allegedly helped inspire the Toulouse killer in a crusade against the thing they hated more than anything else — more than Islam and even mass immigration. That thing was liberalism itself.

This was cross posted at Al Akhbar English

Would you like to know more? Read more Max Blumenthal articles including “Romney-geddon! Mitt’s Foreign Policy Team Run By Ultra-Neocon Loons & Failures” and “How Israeli Occupation Forces, Bahraini Monarchy Guards Trained U.S. Police for Coordinated Crackdown On Occupy Protests”.

Got something to say to us? Then send us a letter.

Want us to stick around? Donate to The eXiled.

Twitter twerps can follow us at twitter.com/exiledonline

38 Comments

Add your own

1. GosDepAgent | March 23rd, 2012 at 1:18 am
Are there any decent Western nationalistic parties at all?
In Russia, there is a National-Democratic Alliance: http://nazdem.info/. They are atheistic and I think more socially liberal than most of the political movements in Russia.
2. meh | March 23rd, 2012 at 1:39 am
“decent” and “nationalistic” sort of annul each other.
3. burbl | March 23rd, 2012 at 4:03 am
Good point, in the presidential election context it might have been “useful” both to let Merah shoot people and then kill him to avoid embarassing questions.
It is “strange” that the police RAID squad has been used instead of the more experienced GIGN which chief Christian Prouteau boasted that they would have succeeded in arresting him without killing him.
FWIW the RAID depends on the interior ministery (police) and the GIGN on the defense ministery which is (a bit) more impervious to political pressure.
4. John Figler | March 23rd, 2012 at 4:03 am
Tenous… at best.
The left is at pains to turn his “I told you it had to be a nazi” tirade of previous week into something that doesn’t point straight to his doctrinal estance in favor of mass inmigration and the radical unfeasibility of integration with muslims that are not exactly keen about it.
Not saying it couldn’t be done. Just saying that as things go now in Europe, the left has found his historical commitment to antiracism particularly troublesome in the middle of a well concerted assault on workers rights.
Nor that indifferent integration has to be the right answer to mass inmigration delivered in order to destroy the left’s achievements in wages, labor conditions, etc…
5. mikey | March 23rd, 2012 at 4:58 am
It has been reported (World Socialist Web Site)that the shooter was a stocky, tattooed, military type, matching the description of a Neo-Nazi soldier recently drummed out of the French army. The scrawny Arab boy seems to have been made a patsy to save Sarkozy some embarrassment before the upcoming election.
6. 7chan Cam Boy | March 23rd, 2012 at 6:42 am
Figler is right, this is a rather tenuous connection. If you want to find out about the alliance between the French far right and Islamists, look into Christian Bouchet. According to wiki, he is now a branch leader for the FN.
It’s also rather odd that Blumenthal ends his piece with a warning that liberalism is under attack. Granted he’s taking about neofascists and theocratic lunatics, but one of the reasons I come to the Exiled for articles is because it is open and honest about the deleterious effects of liberalism on labor leftism.
Read Hedges’ Death of the Liberal Class and you’ll see that it is it’s own worst enemy. Why leftists want to continue to prop up a system and ideology which has always existed to cow the earest radicals into uselessness is beyond me.
7. Roy | March 23rd, 2012 at 6:46 am
The World Socialist Web Site however is about as truthfull as Pravda. Propaganda is propaganda.
8. Urda | March 23rd, 2012 at 8:34 am
Unless one had first-hand dealing with the Nazies,it is very easy to Idolize these people and their final solution.
That kid had no idea what he was doing or who was doing it for,he just went on a killing spree because the secular society he was a part of had never instilled any real character in him.
That Europeans,whatever their ethnic character might be,still worship Hitler’s cracked empires showers there is still something rotten across that continent.
Most likely he was never indoctrinated into any serious terrorist groups,he just longed to believe he was part of a global struggle against a world he’d never fully understood.
9. Eurotrash | March 23rd, 2012 at 8:40 am
What’s the thrust of this article? I find the Catholics Neo-Nazis Salafists schemata too patently weak for any serious analysis.
The man was a young, alienated Muslim radical. I suppose it’s hard to find anything new to say about that, but that’s no excuse for trying to forge tenuous links to WW II era Belgian Nazis, the Norwegian Knight Templar and aging Missouri klansmen. Six Degrees of Mohammed Merah, and what could be more fun.
The one vaguely interesting factoid in this sorry article is the Salafist defence of Jesus. This is nothing new in itself – Al Muhajiroun used to do the same in Britain, threatening to kill directors guilty of (as they saw it) blasphemous interpretations of Jesus, protesting shows questioning Virgin Mary’s eponymous moral quality, etc.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/493436.stm
10. niccolo and donkey | March 23rd, 2012 at 10:35 am
LOL, talk about a stretch.
Vive Le FN!
11. wengler | March 23rd, 2012 at 10:39 am
Is everyone going to have to look surprised again when FN finishes second in the first round of the Presidential elections?
The mainstream parties in the major EU countries have given the people nothing but lies and austerity in the service of the 1 percent. Of course your righwing idiots are going to go join some nationalist party where the strict hierarchy makes them feel warm and fuzzy.
12. jo | March 23rd, 2012 at 10:50 am
Anders Brevik was a Jew
13. HamsterFist | March 23rd, 2012 at 11:16 am
What’s the big deal? This shit happens in America on the daily. Hell in certain states you could stalk your victim, then shoot them when they get upset you’re following them, claiming self defense. About time Europe caught up with American dehumanization and the violence it leads too.
Congrats France!
14. masseltov | March 23rd, 2012 at 1:00 pm
muslim extremist – christion neonazi alliance??
you must have lost all your marbles.
and you forgot the real backgroud: zionism.
15. Fissile | March 23rd, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Fundamentalist Muslim, right wing Christian alliance? Not likely, everyone knows this plot was hatched by the commie-nazi alliance.
16. Fissile | March 23rd, 2012 at 2:46 pm
@#8. Urda
“Most likely he was never indoctrinated into any serious terrorist groups,he just longed to believe he was part of a global struggle against a world he’d never fully understood.”
That’s it exactly. Ultimately these people unwittingly provide the boogeyman that powers in charge need as a pretense for eliminating what little freedoms people still retain.
It’s the same with “extremist” groups in the USA….either far right or far left or just off the scale. The media and education system actually provides the shit that these poisonous little mushrooms feed off. Of course they are never a real danger to the power structure, but they are useful idiots.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
— Henry Louis Mencken
17. Viennad | March 23rd, 2012 at 4:47 pm
[THE A.E.C. IS PRESERVING THIS COMMENT AS-IS FOR OBVIOUS REASONS]:
Ah, a Jew writer seeking to capitalize on the killing of some Jewlets in France, why am I not surprised? Every Jew must be clapping his hands in delight today. The Jews don’t need to dirty their own hands, they have the U.S. Army for that. (Except when murdering Palestinians of course, away from the TV cameras where they can unleash their true nature. Like the rabbis said when the Gaza Strip was invaded, it was a “holy war” against “goyim”, cattle. The Talmud says non-Jews are cattle given human form to serve the Jews.)
Of course the Jewlets were shipped off to Israel for burial. The filthy “goy” country France is not a worthy burial ground for the self-Chosen elite.
Poor little Max Blumenthal. Despite trying hard you couldn’t find a single connection between the Arab killer and Front National. Only expelled members with connections to a group you claim the killer belonged to. (Yeah, I’m sure they ordered these killings, right? Right?) Don’t worry: just keep writing Le Pen, Le Pen, Le Pen over and over, and your socialist readers will think there is a connection – despite the complete lack of proof. If they weren’t retards they wouldn’t be socialists.
Of course you will never write about the thousands of French women who have been raped by Arab immigrants, and those French who have been robbed, beaten, killed while the socialists applaud in private and pretend not to see in public. Those victims are not the Jewish self-Chosen, so they don’t matter to you.
18. Dave | March 23rd, 2012 at 4:59 pm
I don’t get this article. A radical Muslim kills French Muslims and Jews and for some reason Blumenthal attacks French Catholics.
19. poisonous little mushroom | March 23rd, 2012 at 7:12 pm
@16
Sorry, for giving the government an excuse to stomp on our rights by organizing against the ruling class that keeps stomping on our rights.
I am just a stupid bitch who needs to be told twice. No more labor organization for me.
20. Fissile | March 23rd, 2012 at 8:03 pm
@19
I’m not talking about true opposition like labor or political organizations. I’m talking about the kind of crackpots who shoot 6 year old girls in the head with a .45. Do you think shooting grade school children is going to topple the rule of Lloyd Blankfein?
21. obligatory skeptic | March 23rd, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Yeah, if we’re to believe that western european neo-nazis and salafiists are working together, it’s going to take something a bit more concrete than the tenuous connections described in this article.
I certainly don’t doubt the possibility, but the evidence is very lacking. So it’s still “confused young jihadist” until something more concrete is presented. Sorry.
22. Dimitri Ratz | March 23rd, 2012 at 9:57 pm
Fissile, clearly the reason the rabbi and the children were targeted were to deter French society from none Sunni religion. The French main religion is too strong to challenge in the open and with the temporary French alliance with the Sunnis (Saudis, Qatars, Bahrains, Libyans, Egyptians) where Sunni collectivism is making such gains blocking former secular parties from participating in elections like in Tunisia with full French support for example it doesn’t serve their interest to jeopardize this expansion.
Anyone who loves their children and happens to be Orthodox Jewish now has to weigh the benefits of continuing their children in Orthodox schools and likely some will decide to move them to secular. So even thou it doesn’t directly lead to instant Sunni gains, it weakens and destroys less established religions and their influence which you can’t have without openness.
This is calculated just as the systematic destruction of Orthodox Christians in southern Serbia, and Syrian Shiites in Syria only difference being that they have the numbers to challenge more established religions.
Sunnis in Abkhazia as well as Kazakhstan are quite different from Saudi women can’t drive, Qatar crown prince Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani marrying a totally hot woman only to take another woman in 2009, because his first is not enough. First wife looked great after two kids, but he had his first and second give birth at same time in 2010. Sunni religion is subdivided into 4 main schools, and it would not be fair to characterize Sunnis with the degraded, stonning women who are just looking for jobs, are from Philippines and believe they have healing powers while living themselves in New York and getting it on with high paid escorts. This is clearly Saudi/Qatar scumb alliance and which unfortunately is expanding and now fighting local French minority religions for greater influence and sadly to say with success.
23. poisonous little mushroom | March 23rd, 2012 at 10:11 pm
@20
Oh really
and your south park answer that both extremes are wrong was umm I don’t know fucking retarded would be my best guess, please cite which ass you pulled that statement out of.
Anyone that pulls that both extremes are wrong bullshit seem to also believe some autistic view of politics that can be plotted on some fucking graph.
And if you really want to see how much the ruling class loves extreme leftists do this experiment. Suggest to your co workers out loud that you form a union, post how long it takes your boss to fire your ass.
24. GosDepAgent | March 23rd, 2012 at 10:44 pm
> It has been reported (World Socialist Web Site)that the shooter was a stocky, tattooed, military type, matching the description of a Neo-Nazi
Oh my, it seems like WSWS blames neo-Nazis for everything. Can a non-white person ever commit a crime?
Religious extremist have shot innocent people, it doesn’t matter whether he was Muslim, Christian or Jewish, all religions are oppressive.
25. poisonous little mushroom | March 23rd, 2012 at 11:00 pm
@24
Yeah this pisses me off about the left, thinking that radical islam is a good ally is the same as Israel thinking they have a friend with the BNP.
26. Same same but different skin | March 24th, 2012 at 7:36 am
@25 Radical any religion is always to the right, do you think right wingers only exist in countries with white people, do you think there are no right wing Arabs. It is the same type of people who are religious extremists, they only difference is their skin color.
And NO one to the left sees radical Muslims as allies, only in the minds of right wingers does that connection exist.
The only difference between this guy in France and some guys in Germany are their skin colors, their personalities are 100% the same, which is right wing.
27. Ozinator | March 24th, 2012 at 11:42 am
By Gilad Atzmon
Israeli press reported this evening that French gunman Mohamed Merah had been on a trip to Israel in the past.
According to the report, Merah’s passport had Israeli stamps in it. The purpose of his visit is unknown. Israeli analysts suspect he was either trying to visit the Palestinian territories or preparing for a terror attack.
However, I won’t rule out the possibility that Merah was actually trained by Israeli forces. Marah may have conducted a false flag operation. By way of deception is, after all, the Mossad’s motto.
Read the story of Naeim Giladi, an Israeli agent operating in Iraq in the late 1940’s.
“On May 10, at 3 a.m., a grenade was tossed in the direction of the display window of the Jewish-owned Beit-Lawi Automobile Company, destroying part of the building. No casualties were reported.
On June 3, 1950, another grenade was tossed from a speeding car in the El-Batawin area of Baghdad where most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis lived. No one was hurt, but following the explosion Zionist activists sent telegrams to Israel requesting that the quota for immigration from Iraq be increased.
On June 5, at 2:30 a.m., a bomb exploded next to the Jewish-owned Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid street, resulting in property damage but no casualties.
On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. The explosive struck a high-voltage cable, electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the attack, the exodus of Jews jumped to between 600-700 per day.
Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country. The terrible truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.”
28. Steve | March 24th, 2012 at 2:17 pm
European Leftists have a deep need to believe that all violence and nastiness comes from evil right wing white males. You see this with the moronic Stieg Larsson books were wealthy neo-nazis rape Jewish women. Meanwhile, the Jewish community in Malmo is leaving due to harassment by Muslims and the overwhelming majority of rapes in Sweden are committed by Middle Eastern and African immigrants. But pc morons like Larsson are either blind to this, or refrain from mentioning it for fear of being labelled racist. This article puts the heat on social pathologies of Techno Glowstick Euro Racists like me instead of doing the right thing, which is lynching the Euro-darkies for banging our pale-flowered women…while us real men sweat and dance the night away at the Love Parade! As Count Floyd would say: Ooooh, scary!
29. Man Among the Ruins | March 24th, 2012 at 3:00 pm
Islam is a pure fascist ideology, but the Left is so bankrupt and in denial of reality that they can’t bring themselves to call a spade a spade (so to speak). They also have their eye on our fine white Dixieland womenfolk And you liberals are letting them get away with it. Viewed objectively, modern Leftism is an ideological virus perfectly designed to exploit the liberalism of Western people and destroy their culture from within. Yet still we hear this tired refrain that somehow all our problems are the work of the evil white Christian conservatives, who have been making the world a better place since 1421 ce. Hey Exileds, it’s time you woke up and entered the 21st century, because among my Dixieland Reverse Discrimination Society homies this kind of criticism is so fucking obsolete and bankrupt that it’s almost comical (but mostly criminal—ie we’d string you up for it).
30. Eurotrash | March 25th, 2012 at 2:33 am
These fun component of attacks of this sort (if you’re not a proud islamic radical, that is – the pleasure’s more immediate in that case) is reading the weird beards’ twisty, turny opinion pieces as they try to conform reality to their way of seeing the world.
“So, uh… this guy killed some people for Allah… but – remember WW II! And the Klan! And Sir Breivik’s not a very nice man, when you think about it, really? Also, bankers!”
hahah
31. Weirded out | March 25th, 2012 at 8:27 pm
Another gay jewish apologist for radical islam?, Greenwald will get jealous.
32. Same same but different skin | March 26th, 2012 at 2:28 am
@ Steve 29 and @ 30 Eurotrash
Do you think right wingers only exist in countries with white people?
Do you think there are no right wing Arabs?
It is the same type of people who are religious extremists, the only difference is their skin color.
The only difference between this guy in France and some guys in Germany are their skin colors, their personalities are 100% the same, which is right wing.
33. BasementBum | March 27th, 2012 at 12:00 am
Of course there are no right-wing Arab people, they all love the Jews and think it’d be kickass if there more of em in the mid-east!
34. Buster Mountebank | March 27th, 2012 at 1:53 pm
This all reeks of a false flag attack. Look up the Piazza Fontana bombing. This is the standard MO of mobbed up intelligence agencies who see themselves as accountable to noone. FSB, NSA…it’s all the same noxious crew deftly pushing people’s panic buttons to keep their budgets high and democratic safeguards low.
35. rjb | March 28th, 2012 at 7:50 pm
This is not really a terribly good article. This silly “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” thinking is not going to get us very far, and I hope the religious communities in France won’t indulge in it. French Islamists and the FN may both hate Jews (despite Marine Le Penis’ ostentatious flirting with Zionism), but they also hate each other. I’m also a bit suspicious of Anglophone journalists holding forth on “liberalism” in France, when in fact French liberalism is often very illiberal by American standards.
36. CensusLouie | March 30th, 2012 at 9:59 pm
“The Islamic fundamentalist threat has been underestimated in our country and political-religious groups are developing due to a certain laxism.”
A certain laxism! CHILLS!
Clearly someone needs to vote these people emergency powers. Left unchecked, this Islamic fundamentalist threat could burn down the Reichstag!
37. Jedi Mind Trick | April 6th, 2012 at 8:48 am
The comment section is priceless. It’s like a preschool room in here, everyone is shitting themselves and screaming for attention.
38. zerez | April 20th, 2012 at 10:04 pm
The comment section is actually more interesting than the Blumenthal’s piece. Beside, it’s beyond me why the French gov made such a fuss about ‘getting Merah alive by all means and then judge him’ before finally killing him. He was armed, ruthless, resisting, he was dangerous, so he had to be killed. If you see a plot here, you are a mess.