Three Commando-Style Islamists Have Been Identified, Hunt for Cartoonist Killers Continues

French police have identified the three Islamist gunmen who mounted Wednesday's terrorist attack at a Paris satirical magazine's office 

reports Fox News, killing four controversial cartoonists along with eight other people.

Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, named the suspects to

the Associated Press as Frenchmen Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, in their early 30s, as well as 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn't immediately clear.

One of the officials said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network.

All three remain at large.

 … The gunmen moved with the skill and precision of highly-trained commandos, military experts told FoxNews.com.

Decimation of Charlie Hebdo Artists: "Not Afraid"

Following the bloody attack on Charlie Hebdo's editorial office, tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in cities all over France in the evening.

France Gathers to Mourn Charlie Hebdo's Satirical Artists

See No Pasarán's archives on Charlie Hebdo, the martyred magazine which was firebombed already in 2011.

• "Go to the Devil, Charlie Hebdo!" "You Will Reap the Consequences" 

“We’ve avenged the honor of the prophet!” the killers shouted after they machine-gunned the Paris office of a satirical publication, killing at least 12

Three black-clad gunmen shouting "Allahu Akbar!" stormed the Paris offices of a satirical publication known for lampooning Islam Wednesday, 

reports Fox News,

killing 12, including its editor, three political cartoonists and a police officer whose cold-blooded murder at close range was captured on a disturbing video.

The masked, Kalashnikov-toting shooters moved with military precision, and then escaped following the 11:30 a.m. attack at Charlie Hebdo, the publication known for challenging Muslim terrorists with a 2011 caricature of Prophet Muhammed on its cover and which recently tweeted a cartoon of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and were being sought.

“We’ve avenged the honor of the prophet!” the killers shouted, according to witnesses who spoke to Sky News. Other witnesses said the men shouted "Allahu Akbar," Arabic for "God is great." The gunmen spoke French without any accent, according to Le Monde.

Les dessinateurs (de gauche à droite) Cabu, Charb, Tignous, et Wolinski,
tous décédés dans la fusillade de "Charlie Hebdo" © DR

That evening, tens of thousands of Frenchmen will gather in streets across France to mourn the deaths of the Charlie Hebdo artists and to declare that they are not afraid…

The French consumer really ought to feel grateful to the French service sector for actually serving them

… today is the first day of the winter soldes – the sales

exclaims Stephen Clarke.

 … any shop daring to start its soldes before 8am, even online, could have been hit with a hefty fine. The sales are defined in article D 310-15-2 of France’s code du commerce, and various government websites publish timetables giving the exact dates when they’re permitted to start and finish.

Strange, you might think, to be so strict. Surely the French government should be rebooting the economy, letting businesses do what they want to make money? We’ve recently been told that two major links in the French retail chain are about to break. Surcouf, a computer shop, and the Virgin Megastores are putting their electronic keys under their mousepads. You’d think that France would have encouraged them to slash prices and tempt in the customers before things got too bad. Mais non. You will begin your winter sales on (and I quote) “8 o’clock on the morning of the second Wednesday in January, except if it falls after the 12th, in which case the sales will begin on the first Wednesday of January.” It’s the same for the summer sales, except they’re on the last Wednesday of June. And they can only last for five weeks.

To us free-market Anglos, it sounds crazy. If I as a shopkeeper want to cut my profits and clear my shelves or racks before, say, going ski-ing or heading off on a stockbuying trip, why shouldn’t I?

The simple answer is: because you’re in France. But to get some more subtle detail on the subject, I turned to an expert, Pascale Hebel, head of the consumer department of the Crédoc, the Centre de Recherche pour l’Étude et l’Observations des Conditions de Vie.

“It’s all about protecting small businesses,” she told me. “The law stops big chain stores cutting prices whenever they want, and it also makes it illegal to sell anything at a loss, even during sales periods. That way, small businesses, who can’t afford to sell too cheaply, have a fair chance.”

This is similar to the French law that protects small bookshops – even the on-line giants can’t take more than 5% off the recommended retail price of a book, which explains why there are still so many independents (and, incidentally, why French books are so incredibly expensive – the French large paperback edition of my 1000 Years of Annoying the French costs 21 euros, compared to about £9 full price in the UK.)

 … In short, in sounds like business as usual – the French consumer really ought to feel grateful to the French service sector for actually serving them.

You're in the Army Now: “While these insurgents are chopping people’s heads off and raping women, the idea they can take us to court because somebody shouted at them is ridiculous”

The latest military guidelines on interrogating terrorists and other prisoners are so stringent that it makes interrogation pointless, write Robert Mendick and Tim Ross in the Daily Telegraph (“Don’t yell at terrorist suspects, soldiers told”).

British soldiers have “lost their capability” to interrogate terrorist insurgents because of strict new rules on questioning that even ban shouting in captives’ ears, military chiefs have warned.

The rules — detailed in court papers obtained by The Telegraph — also prevent military intelligence officers from banging their fists on tables or walls, or using “insulting words” when interrogating a suspect.

 … “The effect of the ambulance-chasing lawyers and the play-it-safe judges is that we have got to the point where we have lost our operational capability to do tactical questioning. That in itself brings risks to the lives of the people we deploy.

“These insurgents are not nice people. These are criminals. They behead people; they keep sex slaves. They are not normal people.”

Lord West, the former First Sea Lord and national security adviser, said: “We have gone too far in letting people take us to court.

“While these insurgents are chopping people’s heads off and raping women, the idea they can take us to court because somebody shouted at them is ridiculous.”

In an interview with The Telegraph, Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, voices his concern about the legal scrutiny on British troops. He says he is gravely concerned about the rising cost of legal cases “that turn out to be completely spurious”. He added: “What’s important for us is to understand the legal scrutiny that we are under all the time now, the cases that are being brought sometimes spuriously by law firms representing people who claim they were wrongly detained.

Today, MLK Jr Would Be Unemployable in America, Given That He Would Be Anathema to Most Americans… of the Left (!)

For some reason, Benny Huang ain't that impressed about Martin Luther King, Jr. He must be a racist or something. (Oh, wait; he is either Asian himself or married to one—I forget which—so that theory doesn't hold a lot of water…) Having said that, Benny Huang has shown in the past how much admiration he has for Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech, so let's hear what he has to say…

Left, right, and center, everybody thinks MLK was pretty cool.

The consensus, I believe, arises from the fact that most people admire Martin Luther King for the man they wish he had been rather than the man he really was. King has become the embodiment of justice, an intangible element that is difficult to define because it means different things to different people. Consequently, we create our own images of who he was, some of which are divorced from reality.

That the real flesh and blood Martin Luther King does not conform to the immaculate image that we have created for him should come as no surprise. He was a mortal man.

What’s not to like about Dr. King? He wasn’t a real doctor, for starters. His alma mater, Boston University, admitted in 1991 that his PhD was secured through academic fraud. But there are more reasons why conservatives and liberals alike should dispense with the hero worship.

 … Martin Luther King was sexist. There were actually fewer women in King’s inner circle (zero) than former members of the Communist Party (three that I have counted). Bernard Lee, a personal assistant to King, spoke candidly on the subject: “Martin…was absolutely a male chauvinist. He believed that the wife should stay home and take care of the babies while he’d be out there in the streets.”

Perhaps he believed that Coretta should stay home with the babies because he didn’t want her to discover his philandering? Sure, the fact that King was an adulterer is old news. Liberals don’t care about that stuff because they aren’t prudes like the rest of us; but would they be bothered to know that he was physically abusive to women he was cheating with? Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s second-in-command wrote in his autobiography “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down” that King got into a physical altercation with a girlfriend just hours before his assassination. After losing his temper with her, “he knocked her across the bed… She leapt up to fight back, and for a moment they were engaged in a full-blown fight, with [King] clearly winning.”

Of course he was winning. He was a man beating up a woman. When he talked about nonviolence what he really meant was that he avoided fights with policemen. Fisticuffs with an unarmed woman was another matter entirely.

King was also “homophobic,” which should come as no surprise to anyone. [The charismatic black preacher who led the struggle against Jim Crow] spent his life studying a holy text, the Bible, that is unequivocal in its condemnation of homosexuality. These days there are some clergymen who preach the very unbiblical message that however your wiggle your worm is okay with The Man Upstairs, which is supposed to prove that there is a legitimate debate within Christianity concerning sexual morality. There isn’t. “Anything goes” clergymen merely demonstrate that some churches have given up preaching Christianity.

MLK, however, was not a twenty-first century, college town, rainbow-flag waiving, post-Christian kind of pastor. He made his beliefs clear in an advice column he wrote for Ebony magazine in 1958. A boy asked for advice on how to deal with same-sex attraction. King responded: “Your problem is not at all an uncommon one.” Problem? What problem? He continued, sounding much like the Michele Bachmann of his time: “…The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired… Therefore, it is necessary to deal with this problem by getting back to some of the experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit.” What he’s saying is that the boy could change his sexuality if he tried hard enough. Barbaric!

 … To sum up King’s philosophy on homosexuality, he believed that it was a “problem” that needed to be “solved,” as well as a “habit” that could be ditched with the benefit of a little psychotherapy. He essentially held the traditional view that all Christians held for the first two millennia Anno Domini, that we should hate the sin and love the sinner.

Will the revelation that King held such “unenlightened” views on homosexuality change liberals’ attitude toward his marital infidelities? Perhaps. If we learned anything from the Monica Lewinsky thing, (and the Anthony Weiner thing, and the Gavin Newsome thing, and the John Edwards thing) it’s that liberals are pretty blasé about adultery. It’s hypocrisy they don’t like. Cheat on your wife if you’d like, just don’t oppose the homosexual agenda. …

Related: • Is It Possible?! What If All Southern Whites Weren't the Equals of Nazis and What If the South Had Not Been a Total Racialist Nightmare?! •