'Surly Misfit' Attack in Nice, France

Here's the unbelievable New York Times, "A Surly Misfit With No Terror Links Turned a Truck Into a Tank."

This surely must be some kind of joke, as I reported earlier, "Leftist Media Whitewashing Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's Fanatical Islamic Background."

Update your NY Times style guide: Out: Jihadist -- In: Surly misfit https://t.co/MhuHVIz8IL

— Doug Powers (@ThePowersThatBe) July 16, 2016

Mohamed was screaming "Allahu Akbar!", but of course it has nothing to do with Islam.

Actually, a little belated, but the French government is changing its tune. At WaPo, "Attacker in Nice is said to have radicalized ‘very rapidly’":

French official: Attacker in Nice underwent swift radicalization https://t.co/oIhsP1EGXG

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 16, 2016

NICE, France — The Islamic State on Saturday asserted responsibility for an attack that killed 84 people in this coastal French city, according to the organization’s news agency, as France’s interior minister announced for the first time that investigators think the attacker had been “radicalized.”

It remains unclear whether the militant group directed the attack, was taking responsibility for an assault it inspired or was simply seeking publicity from an event in which it had no direct hand.

“It seems” that the attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, “radicalized his views very rapidly. These are the first elements that our investigation has come up with through interviews with his acquaintances,” Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Saturday, without offering details. Five people have been detained for questioning in the case.

“We are now facing individuals who are responding positively to the messages issued by the Islamic State without having had any special training and without having access to weapons that allow them to commit mass murder,” Cazeneuve said.

The Amaq news agency, which is linked to the Islamic State, cited an “insider source” in declaring that Bouhlel “was a soldier of the Islamic State.”

“He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations that fight the Islamic State,” the news agency wrote.

Separately, the Islamic State’s al-Bayan radio station said Bouhlel used “a new tactic” to wreak havoc. “The crusader countries know that no matter how much they enforce their security measures and procedures, it will not stop the mujahideen from striking,” the station said.

But the oblique claim of responsibility left open the question of whether Bouhlel had acted alone or had any prior communication with the group, which has also claimed ties to the attacks that struck Paris twice last year and Brussels in March. French authorities have been scrambling to determine whether Bouhlel had a support network in Nice, where he appears to have been living for at least six years...

More.

It doesn't matter if Bouhlel had direct contact. He was sucking up Islamic State propaganda and jihad exhortations, and decided to go with what he knew.

Robert Spencer has more, at FrontPage Magazine, "Muslims Celebrate Bastille Day":

Muslims Celebrate #BastilleDay: 80 Dead, 68; “The worst tragedy in the history of Nice” – but many more are to come https://t.co/siorbmNeS9

— Jewhadi™ (@JewhadiTM) July 15, 2016

Jihadis have had their eyes on France for quite some time. The Islamic State issued this call in September 2014:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him…

Yes, “run him over with your car.”

Then again from the Islamic State in May 2016:

“The French must die by the thousands…. Towards paradise, that is the path….Come, brother, let’s go to paradise, our women are waiting for us there, with angels as servants. You will have a palace, a winged horse of gold and rubies….With a little rocket-launcher, you can easily get one of them… you do something like that in the name of Dawla (Islamic State), and France will be traumatised for a century.”

The French are already traumatized. The BBC reported last week that “more than 5,000 French police will be deployed at key venues in and around Paris ahead of the Euro 2016 football final between France and Portugal,” and that “there will be no victory parade if France win.” Why not? For fear of jihad terror attacks.

The Bastille Day jihad massacre demonstrates that the answer to jihad attacks is not to curtail one’s activities and cower in fear. Even if free people do that, the jihadis will strike anyway. Even without a victory parade, the jihadis struck yet again in France. The response should not be to cower in fear, but to recognize that this is a war and act accordingly. France has just suffered a fresh attack in a war that is being fought by people in service of an ideology that France, like other Western countries, refuses to acknowledge even exists.

France, even as it is under serious attack by the warriors of jihad, continues to pursue policies that will only result in the arrival of still more Muslims to France – and with them will come jihad terrorists, and many, many more jihad massacres like the one on Bastille Day in Nice. French curtailing their activities for fear of being struck by jihadis did not save them. The Bastille Day jihad attack should be the last to take place under the regime of politically correct fantasy that forces law enforcement and intelligence officials to pretend that the threat is other than what it is, and that the remedy is to apply, one more time, policies that have failed again and again and again.

Bastille Day should be a day for the releasing of prisoners. In the war against the global jihad, the truth has been prisoner for too long. It is time to set it free – before it, too, becomes irrevocably a casualty of this war against an enemy no one dares name...