Are You Comfortable, Monsieur Merah? Can We Get You Coffee, a Croissant?

I'm not one to joke at a time like this, but chalk it up to gallows humor.

The French have this guy "under siege," still? And this is the guy who murdered the Jews of the Ozar Hatorah School, in cold blood? Why? What's taking so long? Oh, wouldn't want to be too harsh on the jihadi, that might be racist, to hear Steve Erlanger of the New York Times:

Here's this just now from the Toronto Star, "Toulouse killings: Siege on suspect’s apartment drags on more than 24 hours":

After a siege that lasted more than 24 hours, the man suspected of a killing spree that shocked and terrified France remained holed up in his Toulouse apartment.

Authorities said Mohamed Merah told negotiators that he killed a rabbi and three young children at a Jewish school on Monday and three French paratroopers last week to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan.

The slayings stunned France in their brutal and calculated execution. Eyewitness reports led French Interior Minister Claude Guéant to describe the gunman as “someone very cold, very determined, very much a master of his movements and, by consequence, very cruel.”

Merah, 24, was caught hours after the victims were buried amid scenes of profound grief. At the Jerusalem cemetery known as Har Hamenuchot, or the Mount of Rest, family members wept as they buried a rabbi, his two sons and an 8-year-old girl who were killed outside Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse on Monday.

And Telegraph UK continues its live coverage.

And at Jerusalem Post, "Toulouse shooter standoff continues into second day":

Police have been trying to get 24-year-old Mohamed Merah to turn himself over after he fired through the door at them while they tried to storm his apartment in the suburbs of Toulouse in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Plus from D.G. Myers, at Commentary, "Removing All Traces of Islamist Terror from Toulous Shootings."

And from Melanie Phillips, at London's Daily Mail, "Laying the goundwork for the Toulouse massacre":

When the Toulouse school massacre happened, the media rushed to say that the perpetrator was a white far-right racist. The lone gunman had mown down at close range a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school, wounding several others. He was thought to be the same killer who a few days earlier had murdered three black French paratroopers in two separate attacks. A killer who targeted Jews and blacks – must be a far-right white racist, right?

Wrong. The suspect who the French police have now cornered turns out to be a jihadi Islamic terrorist with self-declared links to al Qaeda, who has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past. Well, there’s a surprise.

Jews throughout the world are all potential targets for attack in a terrifying manifestation of global incitement to murder. Many Islamists regularly declare their intention to kill Jews wherever they can find them. Hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel over the past couple of weeks bear out daily the frenzied attempt to murder as many Jews as possible. In the Mumbai massacre in 2008, it turned out that the attack on the tiny ultra-orthodox Lubavitch centre was for the Islamic perpetrators of that atrocity the most important target. There have been repeated terrorist attempts on Jewish targets around the world. Oh - and Islamists have been murdering black people in Libya because they are black.

Yet all this is ignored by the mainstream media. Desperate to sanitise Muslim genocidal terrorism and prove that racism and Jew-hatred is confined to white people and the ‘far right’, the media simply did not entertain the possibility that the perpetrator of the French killings might have been a Muslim. So a range of likely perpetrators was canvassed – but they were all variations on white racists.

And even when the perpetrator turned out to be an Islamic terrorist the media were still trying to spin it away, with Sky News stressing the deprivation of the killer and his family and interviewing a French female journalist living in London who claimed that this was ‘an attack against diversity’. As blogger Edgar Davidson observed here:

‘She said that it was all down to the racist climate in France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had introduced.’

Not only are the media and ‘progressive’ commentators in the west desperate to sanitise Islamic terrorism and genocidal incitement; they also join in. The Toulouse jihadist said he was ‘seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French military postings overseas.’

But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers in harm’s way in order to any minimise civilian casualties in military operations against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which  it undertakes solely to protect its own people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product of war – and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children in harm’s way.

I'll have more later...