George Carlin once observed that euphemisms are almost invariably longer than the "offensive" words they are introduced to replace. And eventually even those are replaced by longer terms once the former ones take on too much of an undesirable connotation, and the cycle continues. Granted, this headline is no worse than many others on this subject, but one can't help wondering: How many syllables might be required in place of "jihadist" by, say, 2015?
"France tries 'Islamist militant network'," from Agence France-Presse, October 1:
PARIS (AFP) — Four young Muslim men went on trial in Paris on Wednesday accused of operating an extremist network that planned attacks in Europe and sent volunteers from France to fight in Iraq.
French authorities allege that the arrests of the four -- three Moroccans and a Frenchman of Algerian origin aged between 23 and 38 -- allowed officers to thwart several potential terror attacks in Europe and North Africa.
The suspects -- the Moroccans Hamid Bach, Yousef Bousag, Reda Barazzouk and French citizen Amine Liassine -- were arrested between June 2005 and January 2006 in the southern city of Montpellier.
Investigators believe that Bach travelled to Damascus in Syria with a friend from Montpellier in mid-2004. The friend continued to Iraq to join the then growing insurgency against US and Iraqi forces and was killed in action.
Bach, then aged 34, returned to France on a mission to plan attacks in Europe and North Africa, prosecutors allege.
Police say they seized a large amount of evidence at Bach's Montpellier address to back up this charge, including documents and chemicals used in the manufacture of explosives.
Bousag and Barazzouk, who were studying electronics and telecommunications at the time of their arrests, are accused of taking part in the planning by building bomb detonators and remote control devices.
Somewhere in there is a terrible pun about "Bach Inventions," or lack thereof.
Along with Bach, Liassine is regarded as the ideological motor behind the group. The pair are alleged to have confessed to travelling to London to meet members of the radical Islamist underground.
The alleged Montpellier cell was rounded up after a similar operation in Paris led to seven young Muslim men being jailed this year after they were convicted of running a network in the city between 2004 and 2006.
Prosecutors said leads from that case led to the Montpellier suspects.
The four are charged with "membership of a criminal organisation". The trial is expected to end on October 9.
Mmmmmm.
Marisol at midnight.
"How many syllables might be required in place of "jihadist" by, say, 2015?"
I say 5 considering the use of the widely accepted term of "anti-Islamic", which is almost sure to follow.
Regards.
Putting a French technical education to good use? To blow people up by remote? Ah, the advances of Islamic science are staggeringly exaggerated. Or should I say are... remote?
"Montpellier..."
-- from the article above
Where Paul Valéry, from nearby Sete, received his education. Only that grim geographic coincidence, and nothing else, can conceivablely connect Valéry, and the civilization that produced him, with "the Moroccans Hamid Bach, Yousef Bousag, Reda Barazzouk and French citizen Amine Liassine" who were studying were studying such subjects as "electronics and telecommunications at the time of their arrests" and who "are accused of taking part in the planning by building bomb detonators and remote control devices."
And while Valéry could declare, ventriloquent as Vattemare, that "la bêtise n'est pas mon fort," These Muslims were allowed into too-generous France to study (and one of them even allowed to acquire French citizenship) but are not of France, have nothing to do with France or the civilization, the "perfected civilization," which Valery, some may think, embodied. They were students, of course, but what were they studying? They were "studying electronics and telecommunications at the time of their arrests" and "are accused of taking part in the planning by building bomb detonators and remote control devices."
The four accused were not French nor of France, even if one of them had managed to acquire -- possibly by the accident of birth -- French citizenship. They merely regarded it as a convenient place to live, and from which they might plan and plot, in comfort (no doubt with student subsidies of every kind), the death and destruction they have in mind for Infidels in Iraq, in France, everywhere.
Fortunately for the forces of order, while Valery, ventriloquent as Vattemare, had M. Teste say in his stead that "la bêtise n'est pas mon fort," in the case of these dangerous Arab four, "la bêtise était -- est -- leur fort." And how. But this is slim consolation.
Others, inculcated with the same thoughts, the same hatreds, but cleverer and more deadly, are bound to come along, bound to cause France, and every other Infidel nation, and their citizens, trouble and anguish. They already do. And the more the Muslim numbers swell, in the too-tolerant countries of the West (China is a different matter, Russia is a different matter), that have shown how difficult it is for their populations, and their elites, to grasp what is happening, then the harder it will be to track them, to locate them, to nab them before they can do what they so ardently wish to do.
Here is a very interesting article I found on the demographics of France written in 97. I love this old demographic stuff. The older the model the more firm it is when you hit an idiot in the head with it. In 97 they were predicting anywhere between 7-20% Islamization of France by 2016. Listen to this tasty little predictive tid bit. "In fact, as many sociologists -- including Muslim ones -- acknowledge, an almost symbiotic relationship exists in the ghettoes between the underclass way of life and ethnic/religious separatism. Conservative Muslims see the ghettoes as a way to benefit from immigrating to France without having to assimilate into French society." then it goes on to say, "Some level of violence has the advantage of ensuring separation from the outside world and can be used as a bargaining tool with the authorities to get more de facto autonomy " and then, "meaning that Muslim enclaves are ruled only by Muslims according to Islamic law and mores -- as well as to obtain more funding. It also serves as a social control tool against liberal-minded Muslim individuals, for conservative Muslim leaders can easier exert pressure on liberal-minded Muslims -- for instance to compel females to don the veil -- within the context of the ghettos' violence." Then a real nice one here illustrates how nicely the French government has been helping Muslims place a noose around its neck, "according to the 1995 Louis Harris poll, 76 percent of all Muslims in France would like to send their children not to secular schools but to Islamic schools run under the benign supervision of the state and with its financial help." Then this nice little bit of taqqia, "Boubakeur makes clear in his commentary that "according to the Shari`a [Islamic sacred law], a non-Muslim country is not to be seen any more as Dar al-Harb [house of war] but rather as Dar al-`Ahd [house of covenant]"; and "the Platform is an expression of such a covenant." in reference to Article 32, which effectively breaks down the separation between mosque and state in France. Then an ominous picture of the forbidding future ... the French seem to get it somehow, "the immigration and Islamization process may bring about a backlash. According to a December 1995 survey carried out by CSA and published in La Vie, a liberal Catholic weekly, 70 percent of the French are "afraid of religious fundamentalism" and a further 66 percent think that "fundamentalism is more prevalent in some religions than in others." DUH!
Read it all here .... incredible.
http://www.meforum.org/article/337
Surely, the headline should be "France tries four 'youths' ".
If it threatens like a Muslim, plots like a Muslim, kills like a Muslim...then by all means, call it Muslim...
From the article: 'The four are charged with "membership of a criminal organisation"'.
They were also members of the Ummah.
A distinction without a difference?
There seems to me, from the many news stories about jihad financed by smuggling, piracy, narcotics, and fraud of every imaginable description, all of it carried out by people who seem to regard it as perfectly justified and justifiable by their religion's explicit instructions - not to mention the fact that the system of dhimma and jizya is EXACTLY like every system of mafia-style criminal extortion that has ever existed, except with extra refinements of petty and gross cruelty due to Muslim supremacism - that the line between Islam and an organised crime gang (think Mafia, Triads, Thuggees) is very, very blurred.
Marisol - in connection with your observation about euphemisms, here are some wise words from G K Chesterton that you may enjoy, if you do not already know of them.
"Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.
"Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.
"Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves.
"It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.
"If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull.
"But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think."
"The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard."
From G K Chesterton, ‘Orthodoxy’, chapter 8.