IS claimed responsibility for the truck attack carried out by Tunisian-French Muslim Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel. From memory, it is the identical statement issued after the Orlando massacre:
"The person who carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State. He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State."
"The person who carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State. He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State."
The second sentence is probably true. The first sentence is true if every Muslim who carries out mass murder in the West is an IS soldier. To most people, official and non-official, that seems a laughably self-evident statement for me to make. It may be laughable but it is not self-evident to this self. IS is going to claim credit for as much as they can. They're like Trump. And becoming a "soldier" for IS is about as easy as it is for a Nazi to become a member of the Republican Party. Omar Mateen was a registered Democrat, switched parties to IS as he was committing the Orlando massacre. (We've gotta tighten the criteria for party membership in this country, sheesh.) Mateen saying he was an IS member didn't make it so and, laughable alert, he wasn't, from the evidence I read.
Comes now Reuters, with this article:
French authorities have yet to produce any evidence that the 31 year-old Tunisian killer, shot dead by police in the attack, had turned to radical Islam. Nevertheless, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel may have undergone a rapid change.
"It seems that he was radicalised very quickly -- in any case these are the elements that have come up from the testimony of the people around him," Cazeneuve told reporters.
Speaking from his home town in Tunisia, Bouhlel's sister told Reuters he had been having psychological problems when he left for France in 2005.
Other relatives and friends interviewed in Nice doubted he had militant Islamist leanings.
Bouhlel was known to police for petty crimes but was not on a watch list of suspected militants. He had one criminal conviction for road rage, having been sentenced to probation three months ago for throwing a wooden pallet at another driver.
What is laughably self-evident to me is that French Interior Minister Cazeneuve has his head up the interior of his ass and can't find any evidence in there. That evidence may exist!, I think it less than probable, but I give it greater odds than I gave that Mateen was an IS member. I give no odds that Cazeneuve is going to find it in his current anatomical position. And that sucks if you're French. You have had the President, the Prime Minister, now the Interior Minister, you've got the Presbyterian minister down the street, everybody stating with certainty that Bouhlel was an Islamist Terrorist, "That's your enemy right there, go git 'em," and they may git non-enemies and leave the real enemies out there. Which sucks. Official France is making an enemy of every French Muslim by this identification on no evidence. "It is good to have enemies," as I am fond of quoting myself. If you can tell them from your non-enemies. Key point there.
