Behind the Charlie Hebdo Massacre, the martyr finale of the Kouachi Brothers and the deadly anti-Semitic hostage standoff at the Kosher Market in Paris by Amedy Coulibaly is a factor that the mainstream talks little about:  the criminal mindset  of Jihadists in France and throughout the EU. Watch this MEMRI video of Coulibaly made shortly before the Jewish super market attack in he declares his connections to the Kouachi Charlie Hebdo massacre. In the wake of this week’s sorrow over the victims of Islamic terrorism by the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly have come some revelations about their criminal records, as well as those who previously committed barbaric murders of French Jews.

Cherif Kouachi was arrested in 2005 before he could travel to Iraq. He was part of the “Buttes-Chaumont network” that helped send would-be jihadists to join Al Qaeda. While in detention awaiting conviction, Kouachi met Djamel Beghal in 2006l,  who attempted an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Paris in 2001 and was an Al Qaeda recruiter.  Beghal was a disciple of notorious UK- based hate mongers, Abu  Hamza al-Masri  and Abu Qatada. Egyptian-born Al-Masri, whose hand and an eye were lost in a bomb-making explosion, was deported to the US  by the British.  Coincidentally on January 9, 2015, al-Masri was sentenced to life by a New York federal judge for support of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Qatada, considered as ‘Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe’, was freed from a UK jail in February, 2014. Kouachi was sentenced  in 2008 to time served during his three years of detention for recruiting fighters to join Al Qaeda in Iraq,(AQI) from which the Islamic State(IS) emerged.  AQI  was headed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi.  Zarqawi became the exemplar for IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by graphically beheading U.S. contractor, Nick Berg and others on video.  Zaraqawi  was  killed in a US  Air Force strike at an AQI meeting north of Baghdad  in June, 2006.

In 2010, Cherif and Beghal conspired in an attempted  prison break for convicted  Algerian terrorist, Smaïn  Ali Belkacem,  convicted in 2002 to life for  the bombing  in 1995  of the  Museum D’Orsay train station  injuring  30 persons.  Among the  14 persons  arrested  by French authorities  in that case were  Cherif and Coulibaly who  had known each other as Muslim gang members in the  tough 19th Arrondissement  of Paris  and were  apparently  members of a sports team. The French prosecutors couldn’t prove the conspiracy and Cherif, Coulibaly and the others were released for alleged lack of evidence. Notwithstanding this,  Coulibaly was subsequently sentenced to three years on a related charge.  Coulibaly, a possible prison convert to Islam,  had a long rap sheet of criminal convictions. At age 17 with convictions for theft and narcotics, he  went on to armed robbery of a bank in September 2002 in Orléans.  In 2011, Cherif traveled to Yemen where it is alleged he underwent  terrorist military training with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula  (AQAP) prior to the September drone strike that took out American-born  Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki. AQAP has claimed it directed the Kouachi brothers Charlie Hebdo attack that ultimately led to their  deaths in a hail of bullets becoming Martyrs for Jihad, Islamikazes.

This pattern of jail-house radicalization following criminal convictions is a pattern that we have seen across Europe and in America.  In France’s case it is compounded by the formation of an estimated  750 so-called ‘no go areas’ in Paris and other major cities throughout the country.  Those areas are alleged to be  compliant with Islamic Sharia law in defiance of French secular law. There is alleged to be radical Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist infiltration  of  many of the country’s Mosques.

While Muslims account for 7.5% of France’s 66 million in population, sociologists estimate that Muslims account for 50% of the country’s prison  population. The troubled second and third generations  of North African and Equatorial  African Muslim émigrés find themselves without  adequate education and with menial job prospects become disaffected. They are readily susceptible to recruitment by the on-line video and social media messages  extolling graphically the barbaric Islamist ‘successes’ of the Islamic State.

 Marseilles, second largest city in France with a population of over 850,000 is  the  Mediterranean  port of entry for North African Muslim émigrés. It currently  has  a Muslim population of over 41%. It has been ravaged by rival Muslim drug gang, equipped with AK-47s,  dispatching “revenge” on competitors and anyone who gets in their way. In 2012, local politicians requested French military assistance to bring matters under control only to be rejected by then Interior Minister Manuel Valls, now Premier in the Hollande government. Daniel Greenfield in a January 2014, Front Page Magazine article, “French City with 40% Muslim Population is the Most Dangerous City in Europe”:

The eruption has refocused attention on Marseille’s long-standing reputation as a European drug-smuggling hub, a place where entire neighborhoods have slipped away from police control and fallen under the command of gangsters who earn millions importing and selling North African hashish and settle turf disputes with AK-47 assault rifles.

“Marseille is sick with its violence,” Interior Minister Manuel Valls said.

Vowing to squash the drug trade and end the violence, Valls  dispatched 250 paramilitary and other national police officers to reinforce the usual deployment of around 3,000. The night after they were deployed, with television cameras in tow, another body was found, burned to a crisp with a bullet in its charred skull, the execution method local traffickers call the “barbecue.” The next day, two Turkish immigrants were shot and wounded, and a pair of youths driving by on a motor scooter opened fire with a pistol on a third man, wounding him in the legs.

Marseille doesn’t have a violence problem. It has a Muslim immigrant problem.

Prior to  the bloody Jihadist spectacles this week in Paris there has been a  grisly history  of anti-Semitic violence perpetrated by French Muslim gangs and  criminals.

In Paris in 2003, young Jewish disc jockey Sebastien Selam, a.k.a. DJ Lam.C, was brutally murdered by his childhood friend Adel Amastaibou  in one of the banlieues.  According to reports in the Jerusalem Post, Adel Amastaibou took out a long knife and stabbed Sebastien Salem repeatedly in the chest, killing him. He went upstairs to his mother’s apartment and told her and then the police when they arrived, “I killed a Jew, I will go to paradise. Allah made me do it.”  Amastaibou  was examined by a panel found mentally ill, confined to a mental hospital,   not brought to trial and released.  Subsequently after denials  of trials  it was discovered that Amastaibou had a rap sheet that included “10 prior violent convictions, including assaulting rabbis, threatening pregnant Jewish women and making Molotov cocktails.”  Nidra Poller wrote in January 2010:

The ghastly murder and mutilation of Sébastien Selam was committed in the midst of the worst wave of anti-Semitic attacks since WW2. And, it should be noted, in the month of Ramadan. Psychiatric expertise, in Amastaibou’s case, purified murderous Jew hatred into psychotic fantasies detached from reality. But the experts are not alone. Overwhelming pressure to deny the anti-Semitic motive was immediately exerted from all sides. The media, law enforcement, government officials, and Jewish organizations concurred in the cover up. The grieving Selam family was slyly accused of having somehow participated in its own misfortune or suspected of trying to attract sympathy by framing a vulgar criminal act in a noble anti-Semitic narrative. Several lawyers in succession failed to prod law enforcement and the courts into seriously investigating the case.

 [French Lawyer] Axel Metzker when he took over as counsel for the Selam family  found proof that the registered letter informing them that the case was closed had never been delivered. Marked “unknown at this address,” it lay in a pile of neglected mail at the post office. Based on this proof, he pleaded successfully to reopen the case and allow his clients to appeal. This culminated in the January 5, 2010 verdict, which [was] appealed to France’s highest court.

In January 2006, Ilan Halimi, a young  Parisian cell phone salesman of Moroccan Jewish origins was lured by a  teenage French Iranian girl, abducted and tortured over a three week period by  the so-called Gang of Barbarians resulting in his death. Poller described the barbaric coup de grace of Halimi and what happened to his Muslim tormentors:

 On February 13th Youssouf Fofana, the Brain of the Barbarians, took an emaciated battered Ilan to Ste. Geneviève des Bois, stabbed him in the throat, sprinkled him with inflammable liquid, set him afire, and left him to die by the railroad tracks. Three years later Fofana–along with 27 accessories and accomplices– was tried behind closed doors in juvenile court and was sentenced to “life” in prison, with no possibility of parole in the first 22 years.

In 2012, petty criminal and alleged Al Qaeda operative, Mohammed Merah gunned down four French soldiers in  Montauban. He then went to Toulouse where he  killed a Rabbi and three young  Jewish students at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school.  The standoff and ultimately killing of Merah  in a  shootout  with police  occurred in Montauban.   Israel Hayom reported that Merah, had been arrested in Israel in 2010.  His family was deep into the Jihadist circle in Toulouse.  A Wall Street Journalarticle noted:

His mother is married to the father of Sabri Essid, a leading member of the Toulouse radical milieu who was captured in Syria in 2006. Essid and another Frenchman were running an al Qaeda safe house in Syria for fighters going to Iraq. In a 2009 trial that came to be known in the press as “Brothers for Iraq,” they and six others were convicted in France of conspiracy for terrorist purposes. Essid was sentenced in 2009 to five years imprisonment.

Merah’s Mother and Sister were arrested by French authorities in April 2014 for support of terrorism and other charges. More than 30 suspects  had been detained by French counterterrorism prosecutors.  Those still under arrest, according to a Jerusalem Post report were: “Abdelkader Merah, the older brother of the killer, Muhammad Mounir Miskine, a friend, and Fetha Malki, the arms supplier. “  Merah’s heinous murder of the Rabbi walking his young children to the Toulouse Jewish school  was the worst anti-Semitic Islamic terrorist murders prior to the Hyper Cacher Paris supermarket killing of four innocent Jewish customers by  Coulibaly.

In  the wake of the Toulouse  fiery martyrdom of Merah, we issued a warning about what occurred in Paris this week  regarding  criminal mindset of jihadists.

Given the lengthy criminal record of  French Jihadists  Mohammed Merah, [the Kouachi Brothers and Amedy Coulibaly] , it is time to give wider credence, both in the EU and here, to Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels’ clinical observations drawn from his assessment of young Muslim criminals in Copenhagen. See: Muslims and Westerners: The Psychological Differences … in the May 2010 NER.

 It is the Islamic doctrine at the core of their rejection of host country values and integration in the West that leads them to perpetrate such criminal enterprise and commit violence.  They spent time in French jails for their criminal convictions, where their Jihadist creed clearly gave rise to rejection of the West, criminal recidivism and terrorism. Their minds and those of young Danish Muslim criminals were marinated in Islamic doctrinal violence towards unbelievers.

In a  December 2014, 10 News.Dk  article “Psychology: Why Islam creates monsters” Sennels  wrote following the Sydney Lindt Café jihad attack:

Brainwashing people into believing or doing things against their own human nature — such as hating or even killing innocents they do not even know — is traditionally done by combining two things: pain and repetition. The conscious infliction of psychological and physical suffering breaks down the person’s resistance to the constantly repeated message.

Totalitarian regimes use this method to reform political dissidents. Armies in less civilized countries use it to create ruthless soldiers, and religious sects all over the world use it to fanaticize their followers.

During numerous sessions with more than a hundred Muslim clients, I found that violence and repetition of religious messages are prevalent in Muslim families.

Muslim culture simply does not have the same degree of understanding of human development as in [Western] societies, and physical pain and threats are therefore often the preferred tool to raise children. This is why so many Muslim girls grow up to accept violence in their marriage, and why Muslim boys grow up to learn that violence is acceptable. And it is the main reason why nine out of ten children removed from their parents by authorities in Copenhagen are from immigrant families. The Muslim tradition of using pain and intimidation as part of disciplining children are also widely used in Muslim schools — also in the West.

[..]

Not only does a traditional Islamic upbringing resemble classical brainwashing methods, but also, the culture it generates cultivates four psychological characteristics that further enable and increase violent behavior.

These four mental factors are anger, self-confidence, responsibility for oneself and intolerance.

Counter-terrorism officials in France and elsewhere in the West should study this important body of work by Sennels. It might materially assist counter terrorism echelons in understanding the criminal mindset behind predatory jihadist Islamic threats whether in Paris, Israel or elsewhere in the West.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is a screen shot of video of the late Islamikaze Amedy Coulibaly. Source: Imtel Center.