In the unfolding bloody ISIS coordinated attack in Paris we had a special family concern. We were anxious to learn of the whereabouts of a granddaughter who was spending a fall semester at the famed SciPo in Paris under a joint program with Northwestern where she is in her junior year.  Given text message exchanges with my son who was at a meeting in his law office in Manhattan, we learned that by happenstance she was spending the weekend in Amsterdam. Our eldest granddaughter is safely marooned in Amsterdam this weekend. She has made it a habit to visit European capitals on weekends during her fall semester of her junior year. at SciPo with her Northwestern U program. We reached out to cousin Nidra Poller to find that she and Jiro were okay. On a Skype call with her last night, she spoke of the ironic coincidence completing her latest book,  The Black Flag of Jihad Stalks la Republique.

What follows is an exchange with Debra Glazer, a friend and cousin of Nidra Poller who lives in California.  Glazer is a lawyer and graduate of Yale Law School. Her  husband  is an Economics professor at a major University of California campus. . Her email letter to me was prompted by concerns about our granddaughter and her own family members in Paris.  My son, wife and younger daughter, together with his in-laws, were headed to visit his older daughter, our granddaughter, during Thanksgiving week in Paris. That trip may be in abeyance pending decisions by Northwestern University as to whether students on the special SciPo exchange program may be requested to return home in the wake of last night’s ISIS Jihadist assault on Paris and Western civilization.

Dear Jerry,

I seem to recall that one of your grand-daughters was studying in Paris.  I hope she and all her friends are safe and secure.  I did hear back from Nidra this afternoon and she and Jiro and the family are all safe.  I had been hoping that Jiro wasn’t on duty photographing the game at the soccer stadium.

The enemies are becoming more brazen.  Will this wake up America and good people everywhere?

As we have always said, what starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.  But the world doesn’t remember or acknowledge that.  And in the meantime, the best and the brightest at Yale are hyperventilating over Halloween costumes.  I would hope that universities everywhere would volunteer to donate their therapy dogs, coloring books, crayons and jars of bubbles to the people of Paris, who really need a “safe space.”

Best,

Debbie

Dear Deb:

Our eldest granddaughter is safely marooned in Amsterdam this weekend. She has made it a habit to visit European capitals on weekends during her fall semester of her junior year. at SciPo with her Northwestern U program. We reached out to cousin Nidra Poller to find that she and Jiro were okay. On a Skype call with her last night, she spoke of the ironic coincidence completing her latest book with a title about “The Black Flag of ISIS in Europe.”

My colleague Lisa Benson and I were in the throes of finalizing the lineup of guests for Sunday’s program when the news broke about the coordinated jihadi attacks in Paris. As the toll mounted in reports from Fox News affiliate Sky News and independent France 24 it became more grisly. We had eyewitness reports from survivors of the hostage massacre at the Bataclan theater rock concert by the American band the American Eagle Death group. The callous indifference of the attack was evident in three jihadis shooting cowering victims from a rostrum on the second floor punctuated by explosions from grenades tossed in the hapless crowd below. It was eerily similar to episodes during Nazi Einsatzgruppen campaign murdering milions of Jews in Russia. But then the Qur’anic imperative of Salafist supremacist the Islamic State has always dictated killing  converting or extorting Jizya hush money from Infidels whether Saturday people or Sunday people. Among the dozens killed in Paris may be American victims in the several attacks at the Soccer stadium, restaurant shootings and the Bataclan theater. Ironically the American Death Eagles band survived. So did the 40 plus escapees who made their way to the roof of the Bataclan to find a man waving at them to enter his attic window in an adjacent building thereby making their escape from the bloody charnel scene unfolding inside the theater.

Among the commentary I watched was that of Morten Storm, the Danish double agent who worked with CIA inside Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In his interview with Megan Kelly of FoxNews.  He repeated prescient warnings that he gave on the Lisa Benson Show last summer that this bloody terror spectacle by ISIS was inevitable. Especially in France with hundreds of returning ISIS fighters and horrific precedents of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and Hyper Cacher kosher market attack of last January.  Cousin Nidra Poller, French Jewish commentators Michel Gurfinkiel and Phillipe Karsenty have written of the drip by drip killings of French Jews, riots against Jewish synagogues and businesses in communities near those Muslim banlieuses, administrative suburbs, in Paris and other French cities.

French Jews, especially those who migrated from North Africa during the 1960’s, now five decades later, are leaving for aliyah to Israel or emigration to Canada and the US. In Israel they are confronted by daily Islamikaze knifings, car rammings and shootings. We have had grisly episodes here of ISIS ‘inspired events” in the US and Canada.  Geert Wilders in the midst of the murderous ISIS razzia in Paris in a blast email said, “This is war.”

Last night’s bloody spectacle perpetrated by ISIS made the comments of President Obama earlier in the day delusional suggesting that the seizure of Sinjar suburbs in northern Iraq by Kurdish Peshmerga and Yazidis units with US special ops and air support was demonstration that ISIS was being “tamed”. The US crowing about tracking and killing of ISIS executioner Jihad John by a US drone evaporated with ISIS’ jihad assault of Paris. Shades of Mumbai in 2008, the seventh anniversary looms of that Islam terrorist attack by deobandi Kashmiri and Pakistani fanatics who tortured and killed their Jews at the Nariman Chabad house.

It should not be lost the Paris jihad is the culmination of a string of catastrophic events by ISIS: the ISIS downing of Metrojet Flight 9268 with 224 passengers and crew aboard and the bombing of the Hezbollah bastion in South Beirut with dozens killed and hundreds injured. Those jihad assaults immediately preceded last night’s bloodbath in what some now call France’s 9/11. The turning off the lights in the Eiffel tower sent a clear message.  That despite the brave front of President Hollande, himself a spectator to the suicide bombings at the French soccer stadium during a friendly French German national team matches ISIS succeeding in intimidating France and the West. I am reminded of the fateful comment of British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey on the eve of WWI: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time

President Obama can’t bring himself to face the reality of his failure to “degrade or defeat ISIS.” He and his minions in the White House are moral cowards and appeasers of Islamofascism. Moreover he, Secretary John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter have sold out to both Shia and Sunni supremacists. They persist in not recognizing the dual Shia and Sunni extremist threats to Israel and alleged Middle East Sunni allies. Moreover they have lied about supporting Kurdish Peshmerga and Syrian Kurdish forces with desperately needed arms, equipment, vehicles and unit training the only effective boots on the ground combating the Islamic State. They dither over recognizing genocide of Syrian and Iraqi Christians, Yazidis and other non Muslim minorities. Instead they have offered asylum to potential tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to be settled in more than 180 US cities. Those Syrian Muslim refugees are virtually incapable of being vetted given the absence of documentation from the failed state. Meanwhile our State Department denies sanctuary to Christians and other minorities facing extinction.

That was the judgment of former New York office FBI supervisory agent Jim Kallstrom during a Fox News interview last night. Kallstrom assumed the post that John O’ Neil held in New York. O’Neil warned about Al Qaeda intentions following in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, only to be among the 2,700 killed on 9/11.  O’Neil was just beginning his stint as security director at the ill fated WTC complex in lower Manhattan. Kallstrom had conducted the investigations into the explosion of TWA Flight 800.

At issue is whether this country, lacking moral leadership, can resolve to recognize, gather resources and build alliances to destroy the Islamic State. It is a doubtful prospect given capitulation to Shia extremist Iran in its quest threatening Israel’s and America’s extinction equipped with nuclear missiles. Sic transit ignominia Obama mundi.

Jerry Gordon

UPDATE: Fox News reports, “Nohemi Gonzalez, 23, a student at California State University Long Beach, was identified as the first US citizen killed in Friday night’s terror attack in Paris that claimed the lives of 129. Belgium authorities have also said they arrested three in raids in Brussels after tracing a car’s license plate that was seen near the concert hall that was attacked. ”

RELATED ARTICLE: At least one man linked to Paris attacks registered as refugee in Greece: police

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.