By Giulio Meotti
François Hollande, called to testify at the trial for the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris, confessed that the government “knew that operations were being prepared”, reports Le Figaro.
Can this be? The former President of the French Republic revealed in the courtroom that the socialist government of the time knew that “operations were being prepared and that individuals had entered the river of refugees to deceive the vigilant security.”
These observations sparked a strong political reaction, in particular from the essayist Eric Zemmour, who denounced a power that “knew” and “did nothing”. “The government was aware of the danger and preferred that French citizens die rather than prevent ‘migrants’ from coming to France.”
Before the massacres of November 13, various media and politicians had downplayed the risk of infiltration by jihadists among the migratory flows or had called it a “fantasy”. “All the members of the commandos, foreign or French who remained in Syria, traveled the migratory route from Eastern Europe”, confirms Jean-Charles Brisard, president of the Center for the analysis of terrorism. “They took the Balkan route, after Kosovo opened the passage in 2015, to then arrive in Hungary”.
According to a note from Hungarian intelligence, “10 members of the terrorist cell responsible for the attacks in Paris and Brussels stayed or passed through Hungary between July and November 2015, exploiting the flow of migrants.” Between 30 August and 2 October, Salah Abdeslam (now the only survivor of the commando and on trial) made three round trips between Belgium and Hungary, ferrying numerous terrorists to Brussels.
Two of the three suicide bombers at the Stade de France (Bilal Hadfi, Ahmad Al Mohammad and Mohammad Al-Mahmod) arrived with the flow of migrants from Leros, Greece after the sinking of the makeshift boat which they boarded in Turkey. They were then registered on the island, according to the rules of the European Union.
Bilal Hadfi passes through Hungary where he is collected by Salah Abdeslam at the end of August, along with Chakib Akrouh, one of the Paris bombers. They will all pass by the Keleti station in Budapest, which in those days was full of reporters eager to tell how bad the government of Viktor Orban was to want to stop the flow of migrants.
In those days Francois Hollande was busy announcing that France would welcome migrants.
The first jihadist to use the migratory flow, Bilal Chatra, was commissioned by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the operational commander of the November 13 attacks, to test the migrants’ route to reach Belgium. “He was a scout in charge of informing Abaaoud of all the difficulties encountered at the border posts to pave the way for others”, explains Jean-Charles Brisard.
Abaaoud himself will later follow this path with a false identity to return to Europe. “Most of the terrorists had posed as immigrants,” concludes Jean-Charles Brisard.
The day after the Paris massacres, Hollande re-established border control.
Yet, after the Bataclan – the symbol of evil – we have not learned. a full 19 percent of Islamist attacks in Europe were committed by asylum seekers, the German newspaper Welt reported. “The link between illegal migration and terrorism should not be underestimated or contested,” said British researcher Sam Mullins. “Not even one in a thousand asylum seekers commit attacks, but they are over-represented in Islamist attacks.”
-The latest case is that of Brahim Aoussaoui, the terrorist of the basilica of Nice who passed through Lampedusa.
-And then the train bombings in Würzburg, Ansbach and the Berlin Christmas market (both in 2016), the attack on the supermarket in Hamburg in 2017, on the motorway in Berlin and with the knife in Dresden (both in 2020) .
-Not to mention that Samuel Paty’s beheading was also carried out by a Chechen with the right to asylum.
-And a few days ago in Cannes a terrorist hit three police officers. He had received a residence permit in Italy.
Analyzing and studying what happened does not mean “playing the game of the far right” or deserving to be labeled as “fascists”, a stupid Pavlovian reflection of the majority of political or media commentators engaged in ideological blindness. Hollande’s words at the trial and the reconstruction of what happened should have been on the front pages of newspapers that are following the chaos on the Polish border. The have been completely ignored,howver.. And it’s not hard to see why.