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France Defiant After Terror Spree













World leaders and dignitaries marched with a massive crowd under tight security in memory of 17 people killed in a spree of terror attacks in the French capital.

Paris Rallies Against Terror
Israeli, Palestinian Leaders in Gesture of Solidarity to France
Obama, Biden Absent From Paris Solidarity March
Western Officials Agree to Tighten Security
Video Appears to Show Coulibaly Swearing Allegiance to Islamic State
Said Kouachi Knew Convicted Nigerian Airline Bomber
Gunman’s Partner Believed to Be in Syria
Alleged Kosher Store Attacker Suspected in Jogger Shooting
France’s Jewish Community Reeling in Wake of Paris Attack
Killings Merge Rivals Groups’ Agendas
What Is Charlie Hebdo? Video
Photos | Video | Social Media Reaction

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            World News
            

France to Bolster Security Forces After Paris Attacks

By William Horobin, Sam Schechner, David Gauthier-Villars


French Prime Minister Manuel Valls speaks during a news conference to unveil new security measures.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images


PARIS—French Prime Minister Manuel Valls unveiled measures on Wednesday to bolster France’s security and intelligence forces, moving quickly to patch holes in the country’s security net two weeks after homegrown gunmen left 17 people dead in a three-day spree of violence.
The government will create 2,680 new jobs and invest €425 million ($492 million) over the next three years to combat a heightened terror threat, Mr. Valls said.
“There’s no such thing as zero risk but we must take all the necessary measures,” the prime minister said at a news conference after a government cabinet meeting.
The government will also present a surveillance law to parliament in early March that would facilitate more wire taps and greater surveillance of Internet communication, Mr. Valls said.
Mr. Valls said intelligence services currently face a “formidable” challenge to keep tabs on a surge in the number of people linked to terror networks in Syria and Iraq. In total, security services are now monitoring around 3,000 people in France, he said.
“This change in scale in a short amount of time forces us to take exceptional measures,” Mr. Valls said.
The proposed new surveillance law will aim to fill gaps in the French government’s already extensive powers of surveillance. It will authorize French domestic intelligence services to use geolocation trackers on suspects’ cars and microphones in their homes, said Jean-Jacques Urvoas, a lawmaker helping draft the law.
The government is also likely to raise France’s ceiling of 2,190 warrantless phone taps that are permitted at any one time on people who aren’t yet under formal investigation for a crime, Mr. Urvoas said.
The new law could also aim to force U.S. companies to turn over more intelligence directly to French investigators, rather than obliging them to make a request via a legal-assistance treaty with the U.S., legal experts said.
“The law will give services the ability to look at the conversations and documents of people we’re following,” said Mr. Urvoas, in a radio interview on Wednesday. “When we’re surveilling someone, we want to be able to penetrate directly into his computer.”
The new law comes on the heels of two other expansions of France’s surveillance powers in the past year that have raised concerns among technology companies and even within France’s own privacy regulator. One expanded the government’s ability to demand real-time access to individuals’ phone-call records and Internet-usage logs without prior judicial review.
Mr. Valls and members of his government say the new law will balance public liberty with the need for greater surveillance access to track down terrorists. Any interception of communications will be overseen by an independent supervisor operating under specific legislation.
“Like most Western democracies, France will at last have a legal framework for the action of its intelligence services,” Mr. Valls said.
Any new surveillance law may also face additional scrutiny within the European Union. The bloc’s data-protection regulators said last fall that they believe EU privacy laws forbid “massive, unrestricted” collection of personal data.
“It is quite possible that in Europe there will be an increase of laws that effectively restrain certain freedoms for the sake of national security,” said Eduardo Ustaran, a privacy lawyer for Hogan Lovells. “But what I think would happen is that data protection regulators would say there has to be some proportionality here” in line with the actual threat.
As part of France’s heightened efforts to thwart terror attacks, French President François Hollande also said he will slow plans to shrink the country’s armed forces by 33,675 between 2014 and 2019. In a statement after a meeting with his defense cabinet Wednesday, Mr. Hollande said he will reduce the number of planned cuts by 7,500, including 1,500 this year alone.
French police say they are actively pursuing all leads on people who may have given logistical and financial support to Amedy Coulibaly, as well as to Chérif and Said Kouachi, the three gunmen who between them killed 17 people.
French prosecutors said Wednesday that four men detained as part of the investigation into the attacks have been put under formal investigation and are suspected of belonging to a terror group.
Investigators have found evidence the four men knew Mr. Coulibaly and spent time with him before he was killed in a police raid on the kosher store in which he had holed up with hostages, Paris prosecutor François Molins said. One of the four men was convicted of robbery and drug trafficking and is believed to have met Mr. Coulibaly in prison, he said.
Some of the men bought tear-gas canisters and other equipment at a gunsmith’s near Paris that were found during the search of a suburban apartment rented by Mr. Coulibaly, Mr. Molins said.
Although the four men may have provided assistance to Mr. Coulibaly, they may not have been aware of his attack plans. The three magistrates handling the case lacked evidence to press preliminary charges of complicity against the four men, the prosecutor said.
Write to William Horobin at William.Horobin@wsj.com, Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and David Gauthier-Villars at David.Gauthier-Villars@wsj.com

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            World News
            

French Investigators Link Four Men to Paris Attacker

By David Gauthier-Villars

PARIS—French prosecutors on Wednesday said four men detained as part of the investigation into the Charlie Hebdo and kosher-grocery store attacks in Paris earlier this month are suspected of belonging to a terror group.
Investigators have found evidence the four men knew Amedy Coulibaly and spent time with the gunman before he was killed in a police raid on the kosher store in which he had entrenched with hostages, Paris prosecutor François Molins said.
Some of the men bought arms and equipment that were found during the search of a suburban apartment rented by Mr. Coulibaly, Mr. Molins said.
Although the four men may have provided assistance to Mr. Coulibaly, they may not have been aware of his attack plans.
The three magistrates handling the case lacked evidence to press preliminary charges of complicity against the four men, the prosecutor said.
Write to David Gauthier-Villars at David.Gauthier-Villars@wsj.com

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            World News
            

Prosecutors Recommend Charges in Connection to Paris Terror Attack

By Inti Landauro


The Jewish Hyper Cacher supermarket. 
Getty Images


PARIS—French prosecutors on Tuesday recommended preliminary charges against four men they suspect of assisting one of the gunmen who rampaged through Paris earlier this month.
The men, aged 22, 25, 26 and 28, were detained on Friday as part of a police investigation into Amedy Coulibaly, who killed five people in two separate attacks in the French capital before being gunned down by police. Prosecutors have recommended that the magistrates who are conducting the probe into Mr. Coulibaly’s Jan. 9 attack on a kosher grocery store and killing of a policewoman the previous day press preliminary charges of “belonging to a terrorist group” against the four men, in addition to arms-trafficking charges against one of them.
Two of the men held in police custody were directly implicated by physical evidence, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor said. Police said they found DNA traces of one of the men on a gun used by Mr. Coulibaly and fingerprints of another man in the car he used before the grocery store attack.
The Paris prosecutor has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday morning to provide more information on the four men.
The detentions come as the French government reflects on how the terror plots on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the grocery store slipped through their security net, and on why the killers, all French nationals, embraced radical Islam.
Speaking to journalists in Paris, Prime Minister Manuel Valls drew an unsettling picture of French society, describing “a territorial, social and ethnic apartheid that has taken hold of our country.”
The French government will present proposals Wednesday on how to prevent future attacks by strengthening police and intelligence services. Mr. Valls said the government will also outline plans later in the week to fight school inequality, which he said fuels divisions in French society.
The investigation into the attacks has revealed the possibility of wider terror networks operating under the radar of authorities. Eight other people—four men and four women—were also detained during the investigation but have been released, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
Police say they are actively pursuing all leads on people who may have given logistical and financial support to Mr. Coulibaly as well as to Chérif and Said Kouachi, the brothers who killed 12 people in the Jan. 7 attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Mr. Valls, a relatively conservative French Socialist and former interior minister, said French authorities have ignored warnings that large swaths of the population feel disenfranchised, referring back to the 2005 riots that shook the Paris suburbs.
In a country proud of a secular state that is purportedly blind to ethnicity and religion, he said, discrimination based on a person’s name or skin color remains a routine practice. Such discrimination isn’t a justification for what happened, but France must face up to its reality and try to combat it, the prime minister said.
“The recent days have underlined the ills that are eating away at our country and the challenges we face. In addition to that, there are divisions and tensions that have been brewing for too long,” Mr. Valls said.
Evoking French values, Mr. Valls and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve paid tribute late Tuesday to Lassana Bathily, a young Muslim from Mali, who was on duty at Hyper Cacher when Mr. Coulibaly attacked the store. Mr. Bathily hid several hostages in the store’s refrigerated storeroom during the attack, then escaped and assisted the police, who have hailed him as a hero.
The government granted French citizenship to Mr. Bathily to thank him. Mr. Valls praised Mr. Bathily for his courage and his efforts to blend into the French society.
“With you here tonight, we have one of the most beautiful images of this country,” he told Mr. Bathily.
Write to Inti Landauro at inti.landauro@wsj.com

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            Russia News
            

French Authorities Detain Five Russian Nationals

By Inti Landauro , Alan Cullison 

French officials Tuesday said they had detained five Chechens after finding a cache of explosives near a soccer stadium and were investigating the possibility of a connection to organized crime.
The five men, all Russian citizens, were detained in and near the southern town of Béziers late Monday, local prosecutor Yvon Calvet said.
While France remains on edge following the terror rampage two weeks ago in Paris, Mr. Calvet said there was no indication the group was about to conduct a terror attack.
The five don’t appear to have a radical religious background, he said, and their names don’t feature on any terror watch list.
He said investigators would seek to determine if the group had ties to organized crime, adding that national antiterrorism magistrates had no plan to get involved in the probe.
The explosives, which prosecutors described as “extremely dangerous,” were found hidden near a riverside soccer stadium, Béziers Mayor Robert Ménard said in a telephone interview.
A spokesman at Russia’s embassy in Paris said he had no information about the investigation.
More than 100,000 Chechens reside in Europe, about 30,000 of them in France. Most fled to Europe when Moscow twice sent troops into Chechnya to crush separatist uprisings.
In recent years Chechens have carried out terrorist attacks in Russia aimed at destabilizing the Kremlin’s hold on their small, predominantly Muslim republic. Many also turned to organized crime during the lawless years, making the Chechen mafia one of the biggest in the former Soviet Union.
In the wake of the attacks on the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Parisian kosher grocery earlier this month, French authorities are re-evaluating all potential threats.
French police rounded up at least a dozen Chechens before a Jan. 11 antiterror rally in Paris and questioned them for two days about possible ties to Syrian Islamists, said Mairbek Vatchagaev, a Paris-based analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S.-based research institute.
Mr. Vatchegaev, who said he spoke to eight of the detainees, said that police apparently took some of them in as a precautionary measure. He said that police made similar sweeps in Austria, Germany and Belgium in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack.
He said the detainees he spoke to in Paris didn’t seem to have extremist sympathies, but probably drew attention from authorities “when one of them said something stupid on the phone.”
“Some of them might have criticized Charlie Hebdo, or something similar,” he said. But one of the detainees was a Chechen journalist who said she was a fan of the newspaper and had wanted to attend the solidarity march.
Many young men from the diaspora have volunteered to fight in Syria, where Chechens have gained a reputation for their military prowess and risen to be commanders.
Write to Inti Landauro  at inti.landauro@wsj.com and Alan Cullison  at alan.cullison@wsj.com

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            NY Politics
            

New York’s Mayor Visits Paris, Pays Homage to Shooting Victims

By Jason Chow


Bill de Blasio, New York City mayor, pays his respects at the site of the Jan. 9 hostage-taking and siege at the Hyper Cacher supermarket in eastern Paris on Tuesday.
Ian Langsdon/European Pressphoto Agency


PARIS—New York Mayor Bill de Blasio completed a one-day whirlwind tour of Paris on Tuesday to express his solidarity and pay homage to victims of violent attacks this month that left 17 people dead across the French capital.
The mayor, who arrived in the city around 7 a.m., made at least eight stops, meeting the Paris mayor, Jewish leaders and dropping into a youth center in one of Paris’ poorest neighborhoods.
“We’re here in solidarity because both of our cities have experienced terror, both are cities that understand what it is to fight back,” said Mr. de Blasio.
His day in Paris began with a stop at the Hyper Cacher supermarket, where a gunman killed four people in an attack on Jan. 9. After laying a large bouquet of flowers, the mayor moved on to a nearby Jewish school and met with Jewish leaders and teenage students, reminding them of New York’s large Jewish population.
“It means a lot to us,” said Michel Emsalem, president of the Hyper Cacher chain, who shook hands with the mayor at the supermarket. “We can see America is definitely fighting terrorists around the world.” He added, “I want to say, ‘God bless America.’”
After the school visit, Mr. de Blasio and his entourage drove to the heart of the capital to meet Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo at her office. As the two exchanged gifts, Mr. de Blasio said he was impressed by the ornate hôtel-de-ville and his host’s grand office, adding that his gifts—a blue-and-yellow scarf and a book—came from “our now humble city hall.”
The two mayors together then drove to the Charlie Hebdo offices, where 11 people were killed by two brothers in a bloody rampage, before walking to where the 12th person, a policeman, was shot, setting down more flowers.
By 1 p.m., the two held a joint news conference in both French and English at Place de la République, a large square where nightly vigils were held during the first days of the violence and which was a focal point in the major solidarity rally that followed the attacks.
“Mr. de Blasio was the first person to call me just after he heard the news. This was very moving for me,” said Ms. Hidalgo at the news conference. She added that New York’s experience with the Sept. 11 attacks “has made the people in New York stronger, and that is what he’s come to say to us today.”
The final two stops on Mr. de Blasio’s itinerary were a visit to a youth drop-in center and a lunch at a cultural space, both located in Paris’ immigrant-heavy northern 19th arrondissement. Last week, Fox News dubbed the neighborhood, among others, a lawless Muslim-dominated “no-go zone.” The label was lampooned by local French media, and Fox News has since apologized.
French media ran after Mr. de Blasio following the news conference, asking his opinion on the purported unsafe areas.
The New York mayor paused and smiled, saying that Paris was safe. Ms. Hidalgo urged Mr. de Blasio to his waiting car saying: “Let’s go to the no-go zone.”

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            General News
            

Australia Sees Growing Terror Risk For Police

By Rob Taylor


A heavily armed police officer walks near Lindt Cafe in central Sydney on December 15, 2014. A lone gunman held numerous people hostage for 16 hours before police stormed the building. 
Reuters


CANBERRA, Australia—Australian police believe they’re at a heightened risk of being targeted by homegrown militants following the terrorist murder of staff on a French magazine, the bloody siege of a Sydney cafe last month, and similar incidents elsewhere in the world.
The FBI-equivalent Australian Federal Police and state police authorities said that the threat level for police officers had been placed at  “high”, following talks with unnamed law-enforcement agencies overseas. It is the first time such an alert has been issued specifically for police in Australia, though the AFP stressed the move wasn’t in response to any particular known threat against its officers.
“While relatively small, there are increasing numbers of Australians who are connected with or inspired by overseas terrorist groups such as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) with the intent and capability to conduct an attack against police,” the AFP said in a statement. “Recent events in France, Canada and Australia serve as a sobering reminder of the risks associated with policing.”
In September the government raised the national-terror-alert levelfrom medium to high. At the time, Prime Minister Tony Abbott warned of potential threats against lawmakers and the Parliament building in Canberra, citing intercepted communications monitored by intelligence agencies.
The new alert level for police came as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop traveled to the U.S. to urge greater global counterterrorism cooperation. It will see police step up precautions, including extra weapons training to counter attacks such as the one earlier this month when militants killed 12 people in an assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. It was followed by two more days of violence that rocked France and prompted a massive increase in security.
Australia had its first major terrorism scare in December, when a lone gunman later identified as Iranian immigrant Man Monis Haron took over a cafe in central Sydney and held numerous people hostage for 16 hours before police stormed the building, killing the perpetrator. Two of Mr. Haron’s hostages also died in the final shootout.
Days later, a Sydney man was charged following police raids that allegedly uncovered documents designed to facilitate a terrorist attack against government targets. Another man was arrested for breaching court orders restricting his movements.
Back in September, more than 800 police in two major eastern states-Queensland and New South Wales-carried out a predawn sweep against supporters of Islamic State to disrupt what authorities alleged was a nascent plan to carry out random public executions in central Sydney. One man was charged after the raids.
Australia, a close U.S. ally, has been one of the largest per capita sources of foreign fighters to Islamic State and other militant groups in Syria and Iraq. Last year, the country introduced tough laws to limit travel by Islamic State supporters and increase the power of intelligence agencies to monitor their movements.
Write to Rob Taylor at rob.taylor@wsj.com

Original Article Format »





 


            Europe News
            

French Author Michel Houellebecq Defends Latest Novel

By Ellen Emmerentze Jervell

French author Michel Houellebecq denied accusations that his new novel is biased against Muslims but also noted that “one has a right to write those kinds of books if one wants to.”
“I would almost have wished for my book to be Islamophobic,” Mr. Houellebecq said at a literature festival in Cologne, Germany, on Monday night. “It would have been easier to explain.”
No stranger to controversy, Mr. Houellebecq came under greater public scrutiny following the attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier this month. The attack coincided with both the release of his sixth novel and with a caricature of Mr. Houellebecq featured on the magazine’s cover, announcing “In 2015, I’ll lose my teeth. In 2022, I’ll observe Ramadan.”
After the attack, Mr. Houellebecq stopped promoting his book and left France. Monday’s appearance was his first in front of a crowd since that time.
The message of his new novel is now even more difficult to explain after what happened in Paris, Mr. Houellebecq said.
The novel, “Submission,” offers a vision of France in 2022. It imagines a country where the fear of putting far-right-leader Marine Le Pen in the president’s seat prompts voters to elect a moderate Muslim instead. Many have criticized the novel, saying it promotes right-wing views and stirs mistrust against Muslims.
“I couldn’t care less, I don’t think anyone changed their minds because they read a book,” Mr. Houellebecq said. “People are as political as a towel.”
Mr. Houellebecq said that in France, political parties, the cultural elite and media have attempted for years without success to halt Marine Le Pen and her right-wing party, Front National. French politics, he said, used to be parted in two—one careless side and one hostile. “And now the hostile have gained traction.”
According to Mr. Houellebecq, Front National’s most powerful weapon has been the ability to revive French nostalgia. Ms. Le Pen is promoting an independent France, he said, that doesn’t have to or want to adapt to Europe. Mr. Houellebecq said the picture Front National is representing is an old version of France, “much like at [Charles] de Gaulle’s time.”
In “Submission,” the French left decides to back the Muslim Brotherhood and its fictional leader. “This is a plausible situation,” Mr. Houellebecq said.
Mr. Houellebecq, who also is a harsh critic of French President François Hollande, said he expected his home country to stand “much more to the right in 2017.”
Mr. Hollande said earlier this month he planned to read Mr. Houellebecq’s newest book but cautioned against “this temptation of decadence and decline…this climate of fear.”
Write to Ellen Emmerentze Jervell at ellen.jervell@wsj.com

Original Article Format »





 


            Europe News
            

Terror Suspects Exploit Ease of Travel in Europe

By Stacy Meichtry, Matthew Dalton, David Román


A Belgian military guard outside the Palace of Justice in Brussels on Monday, part of the stepped-up security in the wake of last week’s arrests in an alleged terror plot in Belgium.
Belga/Zuma Press


European investigators seeking to unravel networks behind the Paris shootings and other terror threats are running up against a major obstacle: Borderless travel across most of the European Union makes it easy for suspects to cover their tracks.
Terror suspects are exploiting the ease of travel across the Continent to stay one step ahead of authorities as they move militants, cash and weapons across the bloc without raising alarms, according to European officials.
In some cases, suspects are evading tough antiterrorism laws in countries like France—where travel to Syria and Iraq has been banned—by moving through other EU countries en route to Syria or Iraq.
The problem is compounded, officials say, by a lack of coordination between national law-enforcement and intelligence agencies from Brussels to Athens who are straining to pursue suspects across European borders.
Investigators are grappling with an array of different restrictions on what kinds of personal information member states can gather on travelers and how they can use the information in existing databases. The EU’s law-enforcement agency, Europol, coordinates police operations and intelligence sharing but lacks the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s power to make arrests.
“We need to strengthen our way of cooperating together—first of all with other countries and then internally,” EU foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini said Monday.
EU foreign ministers began a discussion Monday, focusing on ways to tighten counterterrorism links with countries outside the bloc. Proposals ranged from better intelligence sharing to posting security experts in EU embassies to advise foreign governments on combating extremist groups. They agreed to have a detailed plan ready by Feb. 12.
Examples of porous borders abound. In Germany, citizens need only a national ID card—not a passport—to enter Turkey, a common gateway to Syria’s front lines. An EU database designed to flag travelers facing arrest warrants, meanwhile, is hobbled by a rule that bars border authorities from running “systematic” checks on everyone entering and leaving the bloc. And the EU lacks a Passenger Name Record similar to the U.S., which compels airlines to hand over passenger data.
“This measure is indispensable. We can’t waste any more time!” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told the French Parliament last week.
One of the biggest challenges is the absence of regular policing along most national, or internal, borders under the so-called Schengen Agreement.
That pact, which allows people and goods to flow freely between member states, has long been a symbol of European unity. Of the 28 EU countries, only the U.K., Ireland, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus and Croatia remain outside of Schengen.
But officials say the same pact has also opened the door to the free movement of arms and militants within the bloc.
Belgian officials are investigating contacts that Amedy Coulibaly—who gunned down a policewoman Jan. 8 outside Paris and four hostages at a kosher grocery a day later—had with a man from southern Belgium who was detained last week as a suspected arms trafficker.
Hayat Boumeddiene, who married Mr. Coulibaly in a religious ceremony in 2009, was shepherded out of France early this month to Syria by French-Algerian fixers who have a track record of helping extremists travel across Europe by car and ferry to avoid detection, according to French authorities.
France outlawed travel to Syria and Iraq last fall as an antiterrorism measure, and French officials have detained people en route to Turkey as well on suspicion of planning to cross from there into Syria.
Ms. Boumeddiene’s fixers sidestepped those restrictions, however, by arranging for her to fly from Spain, where such trips are legal.
Spanish police say Ms. Boumeddiene, Mr. Coulibaly and one of the fixers traveled by rental car from France to Madrid, where she boarded a Jan. 2 flight to Istanbul. One of the fixers accompanied her on the flight, according to airport security footage of their arrival at Istanbul.
She crossed on Jan. 8 into Syrian territory under the control of Islamic State, according to Turkish officials.
Mr. Coulibaly returned to Paris to prepare his assaults. By the time French authorities learned of Ms. Boumeddiene’s alleged links to the attacks, she was already out of their reach.
Separately, the man believed to be behind a foiled plot to attack police in Belgium last week remains at large, a government spokeswoman said. The pursuit of suspects by authorities there has been hampered at times by miscommunication.
On Saturday, police in Athens said they had detained four people in connection with the Belgian plot. That was swiftly dismissed by Eric Van Der Sypt, a spokesman for Belgian prosecutors, who declared: “The people arrested in Athens have nothing to do with the case in Belgium.”
Hours later, Belgian authorities backtracked, saying one of the detainees was actually connected to the foiled plot. Belgium is now seeking the person’s extradition from Greece, which has identified him as a 33-year-old Algerian.
Even before the Paris attack, some countries were scrambling to prevent residents from leaving the country to join Islamic militants in Syria and Iraq.
The German government recently approved draft legislation that would allow authorities to revoke the national ID card from suspected Islamist radicals and replace it with one that would bar them from traveling outside Germany.
Meanwhile, EU ministers will discuss changing rules that govern the Schengen database, where national law-enforcement agencies can place arrest warrants or simply a note asking that a person be detained when they enter the Schengen area.
For now, the rules prohibit governments from checking the database in a “systematic” or routine way. That means border guards can’t run every EU citizen’s name through the database when they leave or return to the Schengen area, leaving open the possibility that an Islamic State fighter returning from Syria who is the subject of an arrest warrant could return to Europe without being stopped.
Last March, a Frenchman suspected of having fought with Islamic State was stopped by a border guard in Frankfurt who checked the Schengen database. The man’s unusual travel pattern aroused the guard’s suspicion, officials said. The French police had placed an alert in the database, but it only asked that they be notified when he returned to the Schengen area, not that he be arrested, officials said.
Two month later, the man—Mehdi Nemmouche—allegedly killed four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium.
Mr. Nemmouche, who was charged by a Belgian court last summer with murder in a terrorist context, has acknowledged traveling to Syria but has declined to comment on the Brussels killings, according to his lawyer.
So far, European interior ministers have agreed to expand checks of the database, without violating the prohibition against checking systematically. For example, border guards could check the database for Europeans who are traveling to and from Istanbul.
Introducing more sweeping changes to the border code would require the backing of the European Parliament, which has often been wary of expanded security measures because of privacy concerns.
Joaquin Nogueroles, spokesman for Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s counterterrorism coordinator, said: “There are some member states in favor, and Mr. de Kerchove is in favor of changing the border code.
 –Stelios Bouras, Laurence Norman and Anton Troianovski and Benoît Faucon contributed to this article.
Write to Stacy Meichtry at stacy.meichtry@wsj.com and Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com

Original Article Format »





 


            Europe News
            

Belgium Asks Greece to Extradite Person Arrested in Terror Case

By Max Colchester, Laurence Norman, Benoît Faucon


Policemen stand guard in Colombes, France, on Friday. 
Zuma Press


Belgian authorities are seeking the extradition of one of four people detained in Athens in connection with a foiled plot to attack police in Belgium, as officials across Europe sought to tighten security in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris.
The request comes after Belgian police killed two people in an antiterrorism raid Thursday in Verviers, a city in the southeast of the country. The European Union’s counterterrorism czar said over the weekend that terrorists had planned the attack on Belgian police for Friday.
Belgian media cited Justice Minister Koen Geens saying on Sunday that the suspected head of the terrorist cell behind the alleged police attack was still at large.
Over the weekend, Greek police detained four people in central Athens. Though Belgian authorities initially said the people weren’t connected to Thursday’s raid, a spokesman from the federal prosecutor’s office said that with new information coming in “by the hour,” Belgian authorities were now seeking the extradition of one of the people.
The spokesman, Eric Van der Sypt, said the person could be extradited within a week to 10 days if the person doesn’t appeal the request. Otherwise, the extradition could take a few weeks. He declined to elaborate on the person’s alleged connection to the plot to attack police or the person’s nationality.
Belgian police carried out two further raids Sunday in the Molenbeek district of Brussels although they made no arrests, Mr. Van der Sypt said. He said computers and documents were taken from the two addresses searched but no weapons or explosives were found.
Meanwhile, police in France and Belgium said Sunday they were releasing a total of six people who had been detained as authorities sought to bolster security in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris and Thursday’s antiterror action in Verviers.
Officials in Belgium said they had released three people detained in recent days for allegedly making threats against the police.
Two people were held following an incident outside the police station in Molenbeek. A judge decided this weekend to release them under “very strict conditions,” authorities said Sunday. No further information was given. The third person had been detained after he had pretended to shoot at police officers in western Brussels.
Separately, French police released three women who had been detained over suspected links to gunmen who attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store earlier this month, leaving 17 people dead. Nine other suspects—eight men and one woman—remained in custody in France after being detained on Friday, a spokesman for the Paris prosecutor said. Under French law, they can be held for another 48 hours, he said.
Several European countries have bolstered security and raided suspected terrorist cells following the deadly attacks in France.
European security and intelligence officials have said in recent weeks that the terror threat is as high as it has been for many years—in large part because of the fear of radicalized European Muslims returning from the battlefields in Syria and Iraq with military training.
Belgian authorities deployed 150 soldiers to guard embassies, Jewish community institutions and other important buildings on Saturday. The deployed soldiers are allowed to use their weapons, a special arrangement made possible after Belgium raised its general threat level to three out of four.
In the eastern German city of Dresden, police banned all open-air, public gatherings on Monday, citing death threats targeted at a member of a group organizing a weekly series of anti-Islam protests. The group—known by its German initials as Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West—called off its rally scheduled for Monday.
The move in Dresden came after German police said Friday that they had raided 11 sites in Berlin and arrested two people suspected of providing financial support and recruiting fighters for the militant group Islamic State in Syria. Another man suspected of being a member of Islamic State was also arrested, federal prosecutors said.
On Monday, EU foreign ministers will discuss what more the bloc can do to work with overseas partners to minimize the terror threat.
Both of the brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack were buried in unmarked graves this weekend. Said Kouachi was buried on Friday nightin the city of Reims, though none of his family attended the burial, according to a lawyer for his widow. Chérif Kouachi was laid to rest on Saturday night in the north Paris suburb of Gennevilliers, according to French media reports.
 –Gabriele Steinhauser
	 contributed to this article.
Write to Max Colchester at max.colchester@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com

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            Africa News
            

Anti-French Protests in Niger Kill 10 as Rallies Hit Africa, Middle East, Asia

By Max Colchester, Drew Hinshaw


A man in Niger holds a copy of the Quran during a protest Saturday.
Reuters


Protesters in Niger killed 10 people as they torched churches, wrecked bars and blocked several major roads during two days of demonstrations against a French magazine cover depicting the Prophet Muhammad
The violence was the latest in a wave of anti-French protests that has swept parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia after Charlie Hebdo lampooned Islam in its “survivors” issue published after the Jan. 7 attack on its Paris offices.
Although largely peaceful, some of the protests, led mostly by young men, have turned violent.
Coming just a week after dozens of world leaders joined a massive procession in Paris to condemn terror attacks and show their support for freedom of speech, the protests underscore the challenge France faces in defending long-held values without fueling resentment among Muslims, many of whom regard the Charlie Hebdo cover as blasphemy.
“It is intolerable,” French President François Hollande said Saturday, commenting on the Niger violence and news that French flags had been torched during several demonstrations across Africa.
After the attack that decimated their newsroom, the remaining Charlie Hebdo caricaturists rallied to produce an issuepublished Wednesday with a planned circulation of seven million copiesthat has been widely celebrated as a symbol of defiance against terrorism.
The cover featured a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign under the headline, “All Is Forgiven.”
Angering many moderate Muslims, the caricature risks playing into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who paint a picture of a Europe that is bent on desecrating the faith, several Muslim leaders said.
Saudi Arabia’s top religious authority, the Council of Senior Ulema, condemned the magazine’s decision and said it has nothing to do with freedom of expression.
“Hurting the feelings of Muslims by these drawings doesn’t serve a cause or achieve a rightful goal,” the council’s secretary-general Fahad Al Majed said in a statement Friday. “In the end, it is a service to extremists who seek justifications for murder and terrorism.”
Government and religious leaders in Iraq and Egypt also condemned the decision to publish the magazine.
Some protesters in Niger, Mali and Senegal also expressed anger at their leaders’ decision to attend the Paris march in support of Charlie Hebdo last Sunday. Opposition leaders in Niger, in particular, condemned the march.
In Niger’s capital, protesters awoke early Saturday and began setting fire to churches, looting shops and ransacking establishments that serve alcohol, said Ousmane Toudou, an adviser to Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou.
The government sent in Islamic elders to try to speak to the rioting young men—followed by police, he added. After the crowd dispersed, security forces found two bodies burned in a church and another three bludgeoned to death in a bar: “These were people who were just going to work,” he said.
It was the second day of demonstrations in the country. On Friday, rioters in Zinder, a city a few hours’ drive from Boko Haram’s heartland in northern Nigeria, burned churches, ransacked a French cultural center, stormed a police station, and proceeded to a military barracks.
Five people were killed in the clashes that followed, including one police officer crushed by a vehicle, the government’s Nigerian Press Agency said.
“This is chaos that has been created,” Mr. Toudou said.
Protests began in Pakistan and spread west to Turkey and the Middle East. In Istanbul on Friday, a group sympathetic to al Qaeda staged a rally in support of the militants who stormed Charlie Hebdo. The group held a funeral prayer in honor of Said and Chérif Kouachi, the two brothers who attacked the Charlie Hebdo magazine. Some there held a banner bearing a photo of Osama bin-Laden.
In Pakistan, a photographer for Agence France-Presse was shot and wounded while he was covering a protest in Karachi on Friday. It is unclear who targeted him and why. He wasn’t wearing anything that identified him as working at the French news agency, said Eric Baradat, AFP’s photo editor in chief.
Meanwhile, a largely peaceful demonstration made its way toward the French embassy in Jordan. There were also a marches in several cities in Pakistan.
In Senegal, hundreds protested in the capital of Dakar on Friday, the government’s Senegalese Press Agency said. The country which is, one of Africa’s most frequently-cited examples of religious tolerance, banned the distribution of the magazine.
Thousands more marched in Mauritania’s capital of Nouakchott on Friday and in Mali’s capital of Bamako on Saturday.
The march in Mali marked a sharp change in sentiment toward France.
Just two years ago this month, Bamako was draped in French flags, with children signing “Merci, France!” at passing French people, after the French army helped the country’s government fight back al Qaeda militants who had seized a string of towns in Mali’s north.
Mr. Hollande said Saturday that while he could understand some countries don’t share France’s conception of right to free speech, he expected solidarity from nations Paris has supported in their fights against radical Islamists.
“Some countries may sometimes not get what is freedom of speech because they have been deprived of it,” Mr. Hollande told French radio. “But we have backed those countries against terrorism.”
Like Mali, Niger is part of a chain of former French colonies striving to build a secular democracy in the French model, with children attending French language schools and a constitution echoing the language of the French Revolution.
But the country and the broader region are also awash with al Qaeda-styled groups, such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram, that argue that France is mortally opposed to Islam.
In addition to Mali, Paris has sent troops to Niger to try to help contain insurgents, who themselves are now using the Charlie Hebdo cover to stoke outrage against France.
“We were happy with what happened to France’s people,” Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video released last week, referring to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery in Paris. “Their blood was spilled inside their country.”
 –
                Ahmed Al Omran,
	Nour Malas, Maria Abi-Habib and
	Emre Peker contributed to this article.

Write to Max Colchester at max.colchester@wsj.com and Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com

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            Politics and Policy
            

U.S. Lawmakers Seek Sharper Focus on Fighting Terrorism

By Thomas M. Burton, Josh Mitchell

WASHINGTON—Top lawmakers on congressional intelligence committees said the U.S. and other nations must intensify their focus on potential “sleeper” terrorist cells in Western countries following the recent attacks in Paris and the arrest of terror suspects across Europe.
Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.), the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on CNN’s State of the Union that every country must “stay on them 24/7” to ensure individuals who train abroad don’t ultimately carry out terror attacks, even if they appear dormant for a period of time.
Mr. Burr pointed to the fact that the group authorities said carried out the Paris attack was believed to have been dormant for years.
“We’ve got dozens of individuals that we know went to Syria” and intelligence agencies in multiple countries now need to monitor them in addition to previously known terror threats, Mr. Burr said.
Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D., Md.), said on Fox News Sunday that he is concerned about foreign terrorists who hold western passports and are now in Europe. “In some cases these are Americans who we know have been associated with these extreme groups,” Mr. Cardin said. He said the U.S. and its European allies need to share information on such individuals.
Mr. Burr and Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both said the U.S. also needs to work to ensure allies in the Middle East aren’t aiding terrorism.
Mr. Burr said he is concerned that countries like Saudi Arabia have contributed to funding of terrorist efforts, and that “there ought to be some form of ramification” if Middle Eastern countries don’t help in the antiterrorism cause.
Mr. Murphy, also speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, said “for decades, Saudi Arabia has been funneling money” to groups supporting “radical jihadists,” and that, “we’ve let it go on far too long.”
Mr. Murphy cautioned some U.S. steps in the Middle East, such as the war in Iraq under former President George W. Bush, have become recruiting tools that have drawn young people to jihadist action. For that reason, Sen. Murphy said, “I don’t support a new U.S.-led ground invasion in Iraq or Syria.”
Meanwhile, on Fox News Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, criticized President Barack Obama for what he called a lack of a clearly defined military strategy in Syria. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that more than three months of U.S. airstrikes in Syria have failed to prevent Islamic State militants from expanding their control in that country, according to U.S. and independent assessments.
Mr. Johnson said the president should craft a more-detailed military plan to defeat Islamic State in Syria and then seek congressional approval for the plan.
“He’s got to come to Congress asking for the authority to employ that strategy and accomplish that goal,” Mr. Johnson said. Still, Mr. Johnson said he wouldn’t vote to authorize the use of military force unless Mr. Obama demonstrated he was “fully committed” to the goal of defeating Islamic State.
Mr. Cardin called for limiting U.S. involvement in Syria to actions outside of sending in troops. “I don’t want to see us involved in a protracted ground campaign where we saw in Iraq that was ineffective,” said Mr. Cardin, who was also on Fox News Sunday. He said “ground support” should come from the Middle Eastern countries themselves.
Write to Thomas M. Burton at tom.burton@wsj.com and Josh Mitchell at joshua.mitchell@wsj.com

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            Europe News
            

Belgium Deploys Military in Cities After Terror Raids

By Gabriele Steinhauser






BRUSSELS—Belgium on Saturday started deploying soldiers to guard Jewish community institutions, foreign embassies and buildings belonging to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as governments across Europe stepped up security after last week’s terrorist attacks in and around Paris.
Some 150 troops took up positions across Brussels and the port city of Antwerp, Defense Minister Steven Vandeput said, and their numbers could be raised to 300 if necessary.
Among the sites with special protection are the embassies of the U.S., Israel and the U.K., Mr. Vandeput said. He declined to say whether specific threats had been made against the sites under special protection, saying only that locations had been chosen by Belgium’s National Crisis Center based on a general threat assessment.
The government’s move marks the first time since the mid-1980s—when left-wing terror groups detonated a series of bombs in Belgium—that the government has used its military to help guard civilian sites in its cities. The soldiers are allowed to use their arms, a special arrangement made possible after Belgium raised its general threat level to three out of four.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said earlier on Saturday that some troops could also be deployed outside Brussels and Antwerp, including in the eastern city of Verviers, where police killed two men and arrested several others in an antiterrorism raid on Thursday. Belgian authorities have said the suspects had been on the verge of launching attacks on police.
Meanwhile, Greek police on Saturday said they detained four suspects in connection to those foiled attacks against Belgium police. A Belgian official said later, however, that Belgian authorities had determined the Greek claim to a link wasn’t true. “The people arrested in Athens have nothing to do with the case in Belgium,” Eric Van Der Sypt, spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutors, said.
Several other European countries have boosted security and raided suspected terrorist cellsfollowing the deadly attacks in France.
European security and intelligence officials have said in recent weeks that the terror threat is as high as it has been for many years—in large part because of the fear of radicalized European Muslims returning from the battlefields in Syria and Iraq with military training.
On Friday, France detained a dozen suspects believed to have aided the gunmen who carried out the attacks at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s Paris office and a kosher supermarket. The gunmen—Chérif and Said Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly—were killed on Jan. 9 in police raids, ending three days of violence in and around Paris that left 17 people dead.
Separately, police in Germany on Friday said they had raided 11 sites in Berlin and arrested two people suspected of providing financial support and recruiting fighters for the militant group Islamic State in Syria. Another man suspected of being a member of Islamic State was also arrested, federal prosecutors said.
The Belgian troops deployed on Saturday will focus on “static protection” of buildings and the people inside, freeing up regular police to patrol the streets and do other police work, Mr. Vandeput said. They will operate under the chain of command of the police.
Of the troops already deployed, around 30 are guarding seven locations in Antwerp’s big orthodox Jewish community, he said. The rest are in Brussels.
Also Saturday, prosecutors in Brussels interrogated three people who had been detained for allegedly making threats against police. Judges will decide on Sunday whether the three will be formally arrested.
 –Inti Landauro in Paris, Andrea Thomas in Berlin and Stelios Bouras in Athens contributed to this article.
Write to Gabriele Steinhauser at gabriele.steinhauser@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article misspelled Defense Minister Steven Vandeput’s last name. (Jan. 17, 2015)

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            Europe News
            

Anonymous Burial for One of Three Terrorists Behind France Attacks

By Associated Press


Said Kouachi, right, and his brother, Cherif, killed 12 people in an attack on the Paris office of French magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7. Said was buried in the city of Reims, according to city officials.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images


PARIS—One of the terrorists responsible for attacks last week that killed 17 people was buried in the eastern French city of Reims over city officials’ objections and despite concerns that the grave could become a shrine for extremists.
Said Kouachi, the elder of the two brothers who together gunned down 12 people Jan. 7 in their attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, was buried at the demand of the French government, officials in Reims said in a statement Saturday.
“Given the risk of disturbance of the peace and in order to quickly turn the page of this tragic episode, it was decided to do the burial quickly,” the city said.
Earlier in the week, Reims Mayor Arnaud Robinet said he would “categorically refuse” a request by Mr. Kouachi’s family to bury him in Reims, 144 kilometers (89 miles) east of Paris, where he lived before police killed him and his brother on Jan. 9. “I don’t want a grave that serves to attract fanatics. I don’t want a place that promotes hate,” Mr. Robinet said in an interview on France Info radio Thursday.
Speaking Saturday on French television channel BFM TV, Mr. Robinet said he had been forced to allow the burial by the government, which enforced a French law that grants a right to be buried in the town of last residence.
“He was buried last night, in the most discrete, anonymous way possible,” Mr. Robinet said. Mr. Robinet said he didn’t know where Mr. Kouachi was buried in the cemetery, which he didn’t identify.
Antoine Flasaquier, a lawyer for Mr. Kouachi’s widow, said the burial took place overnight “in the greatest discretion and dignity.” Ms. Flasaquier said the widow didn’t attend the burial for fear she would be followed by reporters and give away the location of the grave.
Two other terrorists killed in shootouts with police following last week’s attacks await burial. Cherif Kouachi will be buried in his hometown of Gennevilliers, outside Paris. City officials there say they wanted to avoid “all useless and indecent polemic” over the burial and said Mr. Kouachi would be buried in an anonymous grave “to avoid all risk of disturbance to the peace and to preserve the town’s tranquility.”
There has been no word of plans for burying Amedy Coulibaly, who killed five people including four hostages at a kosher market in Paris before he was killed by police Jan. 9.
The debate over the burials echoed the one nearly three years ago over Mohamed Merah, who killed three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers in Toulouse in 2012. Then-President Nicolas Sarkozy intervened to allow the burial over the objections of Toulouse’s mayor.

Original Article Format »





 


            World News
            

Photographer Wounded at Muslim Protest in Pakistan

By Syed Shoaib Hasan, Nathan Hodge






KARACHI, Pakistan—A photographer for the news agency Agence France-Presse was shot and wounded during a demonstration here by Muslims protesting what they consider blasphemous images published by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The AFP and eyewitnesses at the scene said Asif Hassan was caught in the middle after shooting erupted at a protest by religious activists outside the French consulate in Pakistan’s largest city.
Dr. Seemi Jamali, head of the trauma unit at Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, said Mr. Hassan was brought in with a gunshot wound to the chest.
“His condition was critical when he was brought in, but he is now out of danger,” said Dr. Jamali, adding that the bullet just missed Mr. Hassan’s heart.
Medical staff at the hospital said two others had been brought to the hospital with serious injuries.
Although there were concerns that rallies against Charlie Hebdo’s new cover depicting the prophet would lead to violence across the Muslim world, most of the protests in Istanbul and elsewhere passed relatively peacefully.
The Karachi gunfire began during a clash between demonstrators and police outside the city’s French diplomatic mission. Security officials said that the confrontation began when dozens of activists belonging to the student wing of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami religious party started marching toward the consulate.
“Initially we tried to negotiate with them, but as they insisted on marching, we had to use force,” a senior police official said.
Local television footage showed water cannons being deployed by police, followed by tear gas and gunshots in the air. Eyewitnesses said activists responded with stones and bricks, and then charged the police lines.
“A free-for-all ensued, and Asif Hassan, the AFP photographer, was shot at this time,” a journalist present at the scene said. It wasn’t clear whether he was shot accidentally.
Pakistan’s parliament Thursday passed a unanimous resolution condemning the latest cover of Charlie Hebdo depicting the prophet. Under Pakistan’s strict blasphemy laws, insulting the Prophet Muhammad is punishable by death.
In Istanbul, following Friday noon prayers at the historic Fatih Mosque, a couple hundred Turkish supporters held a funeral prayer ceremony for the two Kouachi brothers, who killed 12 at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris last week before being killed by security forces.
The crowd carried signs that read “We are all Cherif Kouachi,” “We are all Said Kouachi” and “The Prophet Has Been Avenged.” The congregation’s front row of worshipers unfurled a banner, bearing the images of Osama bin-Laden and the Kouachi brothers, that said: “If there is no limit on your freedom of expression, then prepare yourselves for our unlimited freedom for action.”
Amid chants of “Allah is great” and calls for jihad, attendees held signs that said “We’re putting forth a threat, do you have the courage,” and warned journalists in attendance to be careful.
“Normally, funeral prayers are not held for martyrs, but we want to say we’re here, the Muslims are here,” said the head of the congregation before beginning the ceremony.
The controversial commemoration of Kouachi brothers also played out over social media in Turkey, with secularists and liberals slamming Islamists for praising a heinous act of terrorism. Despite the criticisms, however, one of Friday’s top-trending topics in Turkey on Twitter was #PeygambereHakaretÖzgürlükDeğildir, meaning “Insulting The Prophet Is Not Freedom.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated Friday that Islam doesn’t allow for terrorism. He said Muslims cannot be blamed for the attack, for which the perpetrators exploited religion. But, the president also took a swipe at Charlie Hebdo for engaging in “provocative actions.”
“There is a limit to the freedom of thought. Where is it? Up to my area of freedom,” Mr. Erdogan said in televised comments from the presidential palace in Ankara. “They will respect my religious beliefs. If they don’t, that means agitating the public, and that also has a place in the law as provocation is a crime.”
In the Jordanian capital of Amman, clashes erupted after Friday prayers between about 2,000 protesters and security forces. Riot police used batons to disperse the protesters as they tried to march to the French Embassy. Several people were arrested.
 –Emre Peker contributed to this article.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this story incorrectly said in the caption of the Peshawar protest photo that Mr. Hassan was shot in Peshawar. He was shot in Karachi.

Original Article Format »





 


            The Saturday Essay
            

Europe, Immigration and Islam: Europe’s Crisis of Faith

By Christopher Caldwell


Two women talk as police officers stand in front of the courthouse in Meaux, near Paris, on Sept. 22, 2011. The court convicted two other women for publicly wearing Islamic veils; France banned face coverings earlier that year.
European Pressphoto Agency


The terrorist assault on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7 may have been organized by al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. But the attack, along with another at a Paris kosher market days later, was carried out by French Muslims descended from recent waves of North African and West African immigration. Well before the attacks, which left 17 dead, the French were discussing the possibility that tensions with the country’s own Muslim community were leading France toward some kind of armed confrontation.
Consider Éric Zemmour, a slashing television debater and a gifted polemicist. His history of the collapse of France’s postwar political order, “Le suicide français,” was No. 1 on the best-seller lists for several weeks this fall. “Today, our elites think it’s France that needs to change to suit Islam, and not the other way around,” Mr. Zemmour said on a late-night talk show in October, “and I think that with this system, we’re headed toward civil war.”
More recently, Michel Houellebecq published “Submission,” a novel set in the near future. In it, the re-election of France’s current president, François Hollande, has drawn recruits to a shadowy group proclaiming its European identity. “Sooner or later, civil war between Muslims and the rest of the population is inevitable,” a sympathizer explains. “They draw the conclusion that the sooner this war begins, the better chance they’ll have of winning it.” Published, as it happened, on the morning of the attacks, Mr. Houellebecq’s novel replaced Mr. Zemmour’s at the top of the best-seller list, where it remains.
Two days after the Charlie Hebdo killings, there was a disturbing indication on Le Monde’s website of how French people were thinking. One item about the killing vastly outpaced all others in popularity. The reactions of Europe’s leaders was shared about 5,000 times, tales of Muslim schoolchildren with mixed feelings about 6,000, a detailed account of the Charlie Hebdo editorial meeting ended by the attack, 9,000. Topping them all, shared 28,000 times, was a story about reprisals: “Mosques become targets, French Muslims uneasy.” Those clicks are the sound of French fear that something larger may be under way.
France’s problem has elements of a military threat, a religious conflict and a violent civil-rights movement. It is not unique. Every country of Western Europe has a version. For a half-century, millions of immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived, lured by work, welfare, marriage and a refuge from war. There are about 20 million Muslims in Europe, with some 5 million of them in France, according to the demographer Michèle Tribalat. That amounts to roughly 8% of the population of France, compared with about 5% of both the U.K. and Germany.
Such a migration is not something that Europeans would have countenanced at any other moment in their generally xenophobic history, and the politicians who permitted it to happen were not lucky. The movement coincided with a collapse in European birthrates, which lent the immigration an unstoppable momentum, and with the rise of modern political Islam, which gave the diaspora a radical edge.
Just why Europe has had such trouble can be partially understood by contrasting it with the U.S. Europe’s welfare states are more developed and, until recently, more open to noncitizens, so illegal or “underground” immigration has been low. But employment rates have been low, too. If Americans have traditionally considered immigrants the hardest-working segment of their population, Europeans have had the opposite stereotype. In the early 1970s, 2 million of the 3 million foreigners in Germany were in the labor force; by the turn of this century, 2 million of 7.5 million were.
Europe was not just disoriented by the trauma of World War II. It was also demoralized and paralyzed by the memory of Nazism and the continuing dismantling of colonialism. Leaders felt that they lacked the moral standing to address problems that were as plain as the noses on their faces—just as U.S. leaders ducked certain racial issues in the wake of desegregation.
Europeans drew the wrong lessons from the American civil-rights movement. In the U.S., there was race and there was immigration. They were separate matters that could (at least until recently) be disentangled by people of good faith. In Europe, the two problems have long been inseparable. Voters who worried about immigration were widely accused of racism, or later of “Islamophobia.”
In France, antiracism set itself squarely against freedom of speech. The passage of the 1990 Gayssot Law, which punished denial of the Holocaust, was a watershed. Activist lobbies sought to expand such protections by limiting discussion of a variety of historical events—the slave trade, colonialism, foreign genocides. This was backed up by institutional muscle. In the 1980s, President François Mitterrand’s Socialist party created a nongovernmental organization called SOS Racisme to rally minority voters and to hound those who worked against their interests.
Older bodies such as the communist-inspired Movement against Racism and for Friendship Among the Peoples made a specialty of threatening (and sometimes carrying out) lawsuits against European intellectuals for the slightest trespasses against political correctness: the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci for her post-9/11 lament “The Rage and the Pride,” the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut for doubting that the 2005 riots in France’s suburban ghettos were due to unemployment, the Russia scholar Hélène Carrère d’Encausse for speculating about the role of polygamy in the problems of West African immigrants.
Speech codes have done little to facilitate entry into the workforce for immigrants and their children or to reduce crime. But they have intimidated European voting publics, insulated politicians from criticism and turned certain crucial matters into taboos. Immigrant and ethnic issues have become tightly bound to the issue of building the multinational European Union, which has removed vast areas of policy from voter accountability. “Anti-European” sentiments continue to rise.
So impressed were the Europeans with their own generosity that they failed to notice that the population of second- and third-generation immigrants was growing bigger, stronger, more unified and less inclined to take moral instruction. This is partly a demographic problem. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western Europe has had some of the lowest birthrates of any civilization on record. Without immigration, Europe’s population would fall by a hundred million by midcentury, according to U.N. estimates.
When mass immigration began, Europeans did not give much thought to the influence of Islam. In the 1960s, there might have been worries that a North African was, say, a Nasserite Arab nationalist, but not that he was a would-be jihadist. Too many Europeans forgot that people carry a long past within them—and that, even when they do not, they sometimes wish to. Materialistic, acquisitive, averse to God and family, Europe’s culture appeared cold, dead and unsatisfying to many Muslims. It failed to satisfy a lot of non-Muslims too, but until they ran out of borrowed money with the 2008 crash, they could avoid facing it squarely.
Europeans didn’t know enough about the cultural background of Muslims to browbeat them the same way they did the native-born. Muslims felt none of the historic guilt over fascism and colonialism that so affected non-Muslim Europeans. They had a freedom of political action that Europeans lacked.
As European politics grew duller and the stakes lower, many political romantics looked enviously at the aspirations of the Muslim poor, particularly regarding Palestine. You could see a hint of this last weekend in the BBC journalist who interrupted a mourning Frenchwoman, distraught about the targeting of Jews for murder at a kosher supermarket, to say that “the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands.”
In a world that prized “identity,” Muslim immigrants were aristocrats. Those who became radicalized developed the most monstrous kind of self-regard. A chilling moment in the most recent terrorist drama came when the TV network RTL phoned the kosher supermarket where the Malian-French hostage-taker, Amedy Coulibaly, was holding his victims at gunpoint. He refused to talk but hung up the phone carelessly. The newspaper Le Monde was able to publish a transcript of the strutting stupidity to which he then gave expression:
“They’re always trying to make you believe that Muslims are terrorists. Me, I’m born in France. If they hadn’t been attacked elsewhere, I wouldn’t be here…Think of the people who had Bashar al-Assad in Syria. They were torturing people…We didn’t intervene for years…Then bombers, coalition of 50,000 countries, all that…Why did they do that?”
The Muslim community is not to be confused with the terrorists it produces. But left to its own, it probably lacks the means, the inclination and the courage to stand up to the faction, however small, that supports terrorism. In 1995, there were riots among French Muslims after the arrest of Khalid Kelkal of Lyon, who had planted several bombs—in a train station, near a Jewish school, on a high-speed rail track. In 2012, when Mohamed Merah of Toulouse was killed by police after having gunned down soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish elementary-school children, his brother professed himself “proud,” and his father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit against the government.
And when Charlie Hebdo printed a memorial cover this week that had a picture of its controversial cartoon character “Muhammad” on it, it was as if the attacks had never happened: Muslim community spokesmen, even moderate ones, issued dire warnings about the insult to them and their coreligionists. To many Muslims in France and the rest of Europe, the new drawings were evidence not that the terrorists had failed to kill a magazine but that the French had failed to heed a warning. Impressive though the post-attack memorial marches were, “the working classes and the North African and West African immigrant kids weren’t there,” as the president of France’s Young Socialists told the newspaper Le Temps.
It may seem harsh to criticize the French in their time of grief, but they are responding today with tools that have failed them in previous crises. They reflexively look at their own supposed bigotry as always, somehow, the ultimate cause of Islamist terrorism, and they limit their efforts to making minority communities feel more at home.
The mysterious riots of 2005 in France—which lasted for almost three weeks, during which the rioters made no claims and put forward no leaders—were chalked up to deprivation. The French media responded with an effort to hire more nonwhite news anchors and reporters, and the government promised to spend more in the suburbs. Now, after the murders in Paris, the contradictions continue to accumulate:
• On religion: Mr. Hollande has insisted that the attacks have “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, Prime Minister Manuel Valls speaks of “moderate Islam” and rails against “conservatism and obscurantism”—as if the violence had to do with Islam, and even with religious devotion in general.
• On spying: Some in the French government blame intelligence failures, since the secret services tracked the Charlie Hebdo killers Said and Chérif Kouachi until last summer. But government officials boast of about their principled unwillingness to legislate a “Patriot Act ”—even as they draw daily on intelligence gathered by the U.S.
• On religious hatred: Justice Minister Christiane Taubira has announced an all-out assault on “racism and anti-Semitism,” promising that those who attack others because of their religion will be fought “with rigor and resolve.” In theory, this sounds like a promise to protect Jewish shoppers from getting killed at their neighborhood grocery stores. In practice, it will mean placing limits on any inquiry into the inner dynamics of Muslim communities and may wind up increasing the terrorist threat rather than diminishing it.
What continues is the deafness of France’s government and mainstream parties to public opinion (and popular suffrage) on the issues of immigration and a multiethnic society. Mr. Hollande’s approval ratings have risen since the attacks, but they are still below 30%. In January 2013, according to the newsweekly L’Express, 74% of the French said that Islam “is not compatible with French society.” Though that number fell last year, it is almost certain to be higher now.
Voters all across Europe feel abandoned by the mainstream political class, which is why populist parties are everywhere on the rise. Whatever the biggest initial grievance of these parties—opposition to the European Union for the U.K. Independence Party, opposition to the euro for Alternative für Deutschland, corruption for Italy’s 5 Star Movement—all wind up, by voter demand, placing immigration and multiculturalism at the center of their concerns.
In France, it is the Front National, a party with antecedents on the far right, that has been the big beneficiary. In the last national election, for seats in the European Parliament, the FN, led by Marine Le Pen (daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen), topped the polls. But the ruling Socialists froze the Front National out of the recent national ceremonies of mourning, limiting participation in the Paris rally to those parties it deemed “republican.” This risks damaging the cause of republicanism more than the cause of Le Pen and her followers.
Acts of terrorism can occur without shaking a country to its core. These latest attacks, awful as they were, could be taken in stride if the majority in France felt itself secure. But it does not. Thanks to wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, thousands of young people who share the indignation of the Kouachis and Coulibaly are now battle-hardened and heavily armed.
France, like Europe more broadly, has been careless for decades. It has not recognized that free countries are for peoples strong enough to defend them. A willingness to join hands and to march in solidarity is a good first response to the awful events of early January. It will not be enough.

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            Europe News
            

Raids in France, Belgium, Germany Net Suspects in Separate Terror Probes

By Matthew Dalton, Inti Landauro, Andrea Thomas






France detained a dozen suspects believed to have aided the gunmen who carried out the slaughter in Paris a week ago, while separate raids in Belgium and Germany kept nerves on edge across Europe amid a heightened terror threat.
French police said Friday they had detained eight men and four women  overnight across the Paris region. A police officer close to the matter said all were suspected of having provided support to the three gunmen ahead of the attacks at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
“Most of them are known to the police for criminal activity,” Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
The gunmen—Chérif and Said Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly—were killed on Jan. 9 in police raids, ending three days of violence in and around Paris that left 17 people dead.
European security and intelligence officials have said in recent weeks that the terror threat is as high as it has been for many years—in large part due to the fear of radicalized European Muslims returning from the battlefields in Syria and Iraq with military training.
Several of those involved in the raids Thursday night in Belgium fit that profile, Belgian authorities said.
In all, as many as 5,000 European Union nationals have followed that path, the head of Europol, Europe’s police coordinating agency, told U.K. lawmakers this past week.
Mr. Coulibaly, who killed a policewoman Jan. 8 before taking hostages at the kosher grocery, had professed allegiance in a video to the extremist group Islamic State fighting in Syria and Iraq.
Al Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on Charlie Hebdo by the Kouachi brothers, at least one of whom had trained at camps run by the terror group.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Paris on Friday to pay tribute to the victims of those attacks, days after the Obama administration had expressed regret for not sending a high-level representative to the massive march against terrorism there last weekend.
Mr. Kerry also met with President François Hollande and the two agreed on the need “to keep on strengthening bilateral cooperation in the fight against terrorism,” the president’s office said.
Addressing ambassadors in Paris later, Mr. Hollande said authorities are working closely with their Belgian counterparts, although French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said there seemed to be no direct link between the raids in France and those hours earlier in Belgium.
Belgian authorities said their investigation had begun well before the Paris attacks. Late Thursday, they arrested 13 people thought to have been on the verge of carrying out attacks on the police, authorities said.
The raids came hours after a firefight killed two other people believed to have been involved in the plot; a third man was injured. Two other people linked to the group were arrested in France, Belgian authorities said,
Separately, police in Germany said they had raided 11 sites in Berlin and arrested two people suspected of providing financial support and recruiting fighters for Islamic State in Syria. Another man suspected of being a member of Islamic State was also arrested, federal prosecutors said.
Der Spiegel magazine, citing an unnamed security source, reported Friday that foreign intelligence services have warned Germany about possible terrorist attacks at train stations in Berlin and the eastern city of Dresden, where an anti-Islam group has been holding weekly rallies.
In response to the report, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said  Germany has received various tips over the past few months. “The situation is serious, there is reason to be concerned and vigilant, but not to panic, he said.
European authorities have in particular been on heightened alert for attacks against police, members of the military and other authority figures.
The attacks in France have increased the sense of urgency. Western law-enforcement officials who met in their wake agreed to redouble their efforts to tighten border controls and improve international cooperation as well as to combat Islamist propaganda and recruitment efforts.
Belgium will give the army additional surveillance powers, extend the criminal code to strip suspected terrorists of their citizenship and meet technology companies to fight hate speech online, Prime Minister Charles Michel said Friday.
“We have decided to speed up some concrete measures in the fight against radicalization and terrorism,” he said.
In a sign of the level of alarm, Jewish schools in Brussels and Antwerp closed as a precaution on Friday. A busy Paris train station was evacuated during the morning rush hour after a bomb scare, but nothing was found.
Eric Van Der Sypt, spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor, said officials believe the attack they thwarted had been imminent. “It could have been hours, and certainly not more than a day or two days,” he said.
Authorities said they had recovered Kalashnikov machine guns, explosives, hand guns and police uniforms from the properties searched. Those operations occurred in Verviers and various neighborhoods of Brussels.
On Friday, the windows of the raided apartment building in Verviers were boarded up and the front of the building was charred. Broken glass was strewed around the courtyard and several bullet holes were visible in the windows of the building.
The apartment occupied by the three men shot Thursday night remained sealed off.
The two men arrested in Berlin are both Turkish citizens, police said. They are a 41-year-old who is believed to be the leader of an Islamist extremist group with mainly Turkish and Russian citizens of Chechen and Dagestani origin, and a 43-year-old who is believed to have provided financial and organizational support to members of the group who have traveled to Syria.
There is no evidence that the group was planning any attacks in Germany, the police said.
Late on Thursday, German police also arrested a 26-year-old man who holds a German and a Tunisian passport. Federal prosecutors said the man was in Syria from May to August last year and is suspected of being a member of Islamic State. There is no indication that the suspect had prepared any concrete attacks either, they said.
German security officials estimate that some 550 Islamists have left Germany and headed to Syria since 2012. Officials are concerned that those returning may become further radicalized and gained military training.
 –Cassell Bryan-Low in London and Frances Robinson in Brussels contributed to this article.
Write to Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com, Inti Landauro at inti.landauro@wsj.com and Andrea Thomas at andrea.thomas@wsj.com

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            World News
            

Obama Pledges U.S. Support for Europe’s Terror Fight

By Carol E. Lee, Colleen McCain Nelson, Danny Yadron






WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama pledged unwavering U.S. support for European nations facing a new wave of terrorism threats, including France and Belgium as they carried out raidsthat led to the arrest of some two dozen people suspected of terrorism links.
Mr. Obama, speaking at the White House on Friday during a news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, said the two leaders discussed a range of security issues, including the fight against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria and negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
But the terrorism threats that have gripped Europe since the attacks in Paris last week dominated their meetings, Mr. Obama said.
“This phenomenon of violent extremism—the ideology, the networks, the capacity to recruit young people—this has metastasized, and it is widespread,” Mr. Obama said. “This is a problem that causes great heartache and tragedy and destruction, but it is one that ultimately we’re going to defeat.”
Mr. Cameron said the world is facing a “poisonous, radical, death cult” ideology and vowed to confront terrorism “wherever it appears.” The British prime minister echoed Mr. Obama’s resolve, saying, “We know what we’re up against, and we know how we will win.”
Mr. Cameron said the world is sickened by the terrorism, adding that the real enemy is the poisonous narrative that is perverting Islam.
Police in Belgium on Thursday arrested 13 people thought to have been on the verge of carrying out attacks on police officers, authorities said Friday. French police also arrested two people with links to the plot, Belgian authorities said.
Mr. Obama cited alienated Muslim populations as Europe’s greatest danger.
Mr. Cameron said recent events present an opportunity for European countries to make sure their systems for tackling the problem are fortified. He highlighted the importance of updating legislation to address evolving threats and the necessity of building strong and integrated societies.
Amid increased concerns of terrorist attacks, Mr. Obama said it is problematic that new communications software—made by major U.S. technology companies—can prevent police from reading suspects’ messages even if they have a court order.
Those comments marked the first public foray by the president into a public debate about whether Silicon Valley should be able to make gadgets that go to great lengths to protect users’ privacy, even if it means locking out police as well.
“When we have the ability to track that, in a way that is legal, conforms with due process, rule of law and oversight, then that’s a capability we have to preserve,” Mr. Obama said.
Last year, Apple Inc. provoked a public fight with the Federal Bureau of Investigation when it said its new iPhone software would encrypt all data on the phone and could only be unlocked by a customer’s passcode, which Apple doesn’t know. In the fall, Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp said it would start using a new encryption that not even the company could unscramble. Other venture-backed startups are creating similar apps that have become popular with privacy hawks.
“If we find evidence of a terrorist plot…and despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address we can’t penetrate that, that’s a problem,” Mr. Obama said.
The Clinton administration fought and lost a similar battle with technology companies during the so-called crypto wars in the 1990s.
The president described U.S. tech firms as “patriots” and said that technical issues would have to be sorted out. But it isn’t clear whether Silicon Valley executives are on board.
Write to Carol E. Lee at carol.lee@wsj.com, Colleen McCain Nelson at colleen.nelson@wsj.com and Danny Yadron at danny.yadron@wsj.com

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            Slideshow
            

Europe Conducts Sweeping Terror Raids



Belgian police inspect the entrance of an apartment in central Verviers in eastern Belgium on Thursday. At least two people were killed when Belgian counterterrorist police raided an apartment used by suspected Islamist radicals.
Reuters



German special police units stand in front of an apartment building in the Wedding district in Berlin on Friday. Around 250 police took part in the raid and arrested two suspected Islamists, police said.
Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters



A French soldier patrols the Part-Dieu shopping mall in Lyon after last week's Islamic militant attacks.
Robert Pratta/Reuters



A Dutch gendarme walks in front of the Cheider school, an Orthodox Jewish school in the Netherlands, which was closed Friday as a precautionary measure after the raids in Belgium.
Koen Van Weel/European Pressphoto Agency



Belgian federal prosecutor Eric Van der Sypt, left, and Thierry Werts of the federal prosecutor’s office give a news conference in Brussels after Belgian police arrested 13 people during a dozen raids overnight.
Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images



Fritz-Joly Joachin arrives in court Friday in Bulgaria. The French citizen is suspected of links to one of the brothers behind the massacre at Charlie Hebdo magazine and is expected to be extradited to France, where warrants had been issued for him for participating in a terrorist group and for abducting his 3-year-old son, accusations he denies.
Stoyan Nenov/Reuters



A policeman patrols in front of the cathedral in Antwerp, Belgium, on Friday after police disrupted a plot to kill police officers. 
Dirk Waem/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images



Pallbearers carry the casket of Stéphane Charbonnier, the managing editor of Charlie Hebdo, after the funeral ceremony outside Paris on Friday.
Remy de la Mauviniere/Associated Press



French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Secretary of State John Kerry visit the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store in Paris to pay homage to the victims of last week's shootings.
Glen Johnson/U.S. State Department/European Pressphoto Agency



People wait in line to buy a copy of Charlie Hebdo as it goes on sale in London on Friday.
Luke Macgregor/Reuters

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