Stuart J Hooper, “The Charlie Hebdo False Flag in Paris: Theory, Evidence and Motive” (21st Century Wire, 13 January 2015)
If like me, you suspected something odd about the official accounts of the shootings that took the lives of 12 people and injured 4 others at the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in early January 2015 and you believe there’s far more behind the massacre that’s being withheld from the public, this essay by Stuart J Hooper ought to stir your interest. The article can be read at the 21st Century Wire website or you can listen to the audio transcript. Both prose and audio transcript go into considerable detail and range widely in examining the broad geopolitical context behind the killings so readers and listeners alike may need two or more excursions through the material to digest it all.
The essay posits that the killings may be a false flag operation as defined by US commentator Dr Webster Griffin Tarpley in his book 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA. Tarpley’s definition of a false flag incident includes a setting in which unseen actors perform heinous acts and force patsies to bear responsibility for them under a privatised and controlled hidden command structure. The acts are reported by a controlled corporate media interested in currying favour with its owners and masters over proper investigation and analysis of the acts and reporting the truth to the public. What Tarpley might have added is that for such a setting with such actors and institutions to exist, a particular culture with certain political, economic and social conditions, values and belief systems exists that favours its development and continuation. Governments and corporations, be they private, public or in-between, feel no compulsion to be accountable to their publics and lying, opacity and disseminating propaganda are so widespread as to be a necessary part of living as breathing is. The people are trained to want to be lied to. Citizens are treated with contempt and as cyphers to be used and abused by governments and others with political, social and economic power.
Hooper’s essay then examines what is known about the attacks to see if details about them suggest the attacks could be a false flag. The perpetrators were masked: because they were masked, their shouting of “Allahu akbar!” and that they had avenged the Prophet Mohammed don’t mean much in identifying them as radical Islamic extremists – anyone can shout such exclamations regardless of his/her faith, including you and I. What the utterances do though is to frame the attacks and push them into a particular narrative to be taken up and repeated by an unquestioning news media, and to be exploited by governments and corporations, sure in the knowledge that the public accepts the narrative, to advance their own agendas. All other alternative explanations about the perpetrators and their motives are shut out. The men on whom the killings are blamed appear to be patsies: what is known about Said and Cherif Kouachi’s backgrounds and histories suggests they lacked the ability, skills and experiece in planning and executing a professional hit on 16 people. The getaway driver turned out to be a teenage boy at school at the time of the murders.
If the attacks had been done in such a way that none other than professional killers could have performed them, how could the killers be so remiss as to leave their passports behind in the getaway car? An explanation may be that leaving ID papers behind was part of the killers’ mission to frame the Kouachi men and the teenager in order to distract the police and throw them onto a wild goose chase after the patsies. The killers would then have time to escape, blend in with the French public and maybe even leave France.
The fact that the Kouachi men had been tracked by the US, UK and French governments for years and that one of them was linked to al Qa’ida in Yemen and to Anwar al Awlaki, himself killed by a US drone in 2011, could suggest that these men were being used as assets by an unknown organisation with a command structure.
Perhaps the most important part of the essay is its investigation of the prevailing geopolitical situation to find possible motives for the attacks to occur in France in the way they did at the time they did. A number of such motives exist: the French President François Hollande recently broke ranks with his fellow NATO leaders in a radio interview in stating that Russia did not want to annex eastern Ukraine, that economic sanctions against Russia had to stop and that France would not participate in unilateral military intervention in Libya. It so happens also that France is under pressure from Russia and from French ship-building unions to deliver two long-overdue Mistral warships to that country; the likely legal and financial consequences of non-delivery and the effect on France’s business reputation must be weighing heavily on Hollande. The insinuation is that the Hebdo attacks are a warning to France to follow the NATO narrative and agenda without question regardless of the impact on French national interests and the EU project. This suggests that a hidden command structure of the kind Tarpley’s definition of a false flag requires does exist. Some websites have raised as a possible motive the fact that in November 2014, the French lower house of parliament had voted in favour of supporting Palestinian statehood. This is more difficult to prove but there an eerie parallel could exist with Malaysia, which hosts a war crimes tribunal in Kuala Lumpur that convicted Israel guilty of genocide against Palestinians in November 2013; the following year, Malaysia Airlines lost two passenger jets in separate incidents, one of which (the shoot-down of MH-17 in Ukraine in July) appears very strongly to be a false flag incident as per Tarpley’s definition.
Hooper’s article does quite a convincing job of making the case for the Hebdo attacks being a false flag, in tying up and reconciling various anomalies and contradictions in the details of the attacks. Subsequent developments after those attacks: the march of various world leaders in Paris to show solidarity favouring freedom of the press; terror raids in Belgium, France and Germany; cyber-attacks on 19,000 French websites; the increased police security around Jewish public places in France while Muslim communities suffered increased anti-Islamic attacks and discrimination but no extra police presence; Israel pressuring the French Jewish community to leave France for its own shores; and governments in various European states including the UK ramping up repressive measures – all insinuate that the Hebdo attacks have become an opportunity to shock and scare Europeans into accepting police state measures they otherwise would have decried, even demonstrated against. One could be forgiven for being paranoid and imagining that an unseen command structure or institution is indeed manipulating events and shepherding Europeans and others through fear, terror and uncertainty into a dark direction.