French Prisons are ‘Radical Islam’ Terrorist Universities

The common link to France accounting for five of the 16 major Western nation terrorist incidents in 2016, including the July 14 “lone wolf” attack in Nice that killed 84 people, is French prisons being “radical Islam” terrorist universities.

Despite Muslims comprising just eight percent of the population of France, 60 percent of the 68,000 French prison inmates are Muslims and about the same 60 percent of the 235,000 French parolees are Muslims, according to the Paris newspaper Le Figaro.

France has well-known problems with integrating its Muslim community, including high unemployment and concentrating Muslims in ghettos on the edge of big cities. French youth unemployment is a horrendous 23.3 percent. But for the millions of first- and second-generation Arab and African immigrants from former colonies that now live in the suburbs of Paris, the youth unemployment is 50 percent or more.

According to Stratfor Global Intelligence, the “frequent discrimination against Muslims in the job market, leaves many Muslims feeling alienated, disenfranchised and resentful.” When this resentment is combined with the European welfare state, in which working is not necessary for survival, Muslim ghettos have become breeding grounds for all kinds of crime and drug dealing. As youths indulge in criminal behavior, many are arrested, jailed, and eventually sent to prison.

According to a July 6, 2016 report to the French National Assembly, “Everyone knows” that “Prison is one of the soils of radicalization.” Incarceration time gives many young Muslims the “opportunity to be exposed to radical discourse and to become involved in radical political or even militant activity.”

Over the last 18 months, the French security agencies have identified 1524 Muslims in prisons linked to Islamic State terrorist sympathies. French security forces credit being able to prevent nine terrorist attacks and arrest 190 former prisoners on terrorism charges to monitoring parolees known to have been radicalized while in French prisons.

The National Assembly report claims the authorities should dramatically increase resources spent on surveillance of prison inmates, because the current French “prison intelligence” force that is tasked with monitoring prison radicalizing developments is composed of only 114 people for an inmate population of 68,000 and 235,000 parolees.

The report highlights “All the French citizens who struck within the nation’s territory in 2015 were known, in one capacity or another, to judicial, penal or intelligence services.” The researchers emphasize, “They have all been on file, watched, listened to or incarcerated along their path of delinquency toward violent radicalization.”

The French law enforcement bureaucracy claims to have been in “a permanent state of reform.” But the report found that the diverse elements of the security services still often “work in their own silos,” such as the cooperation gap between the gendarmerie, which polices rural France, and domestic intelligence forces.

The French security services in 2015 were watching several “radical Islam” parolees who later committed horrific attacks — such as the Kouachi brothers, who massacred the police guard and staff of Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly magazine and Amedy Coulibaly who timed the taking of hostages in Paris following that attack.

Fabien Clain, who took credit for the Paris Bataclan Theater attack in November 2015 that killed 90 and masterminded the Brussels Airport bombings in March 2016 that killed 32 people, was known to security services for recruiting inmates to fight in Syria while serving a 2009 to 2014 prison term in France.

Clain was writing letters from prison to Mohamed Merah in March 2012, who killed 3 soldiers as well as a professor and 3 children in a Jewish school in Toulouse.

Samy Amimour, who also participated in Bataclan Theater attack, had traveled to Syria, possibly with Clain. He had been questioned and placed under “administrative surveillance”; but nothing was done after he missed several weekly checks in a row. The lack of security service coordination made sure he wasn’t tracked.

Although the National Assembly report found that the French security agencies had the resources for “a quota to intercept the communications of 2,700 people” suspected of terrorist links in 2015, the actual monitoring never even approached that number.

It is not known yet how Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Tunisian with a French residency permit who killed 84 when he ploughed a 19-ton Renault refrigerated truck through July 14 Bastille Day crowds in Nice, was radicalized to serve ISIS.

Although Bouhlel did not serve time in prison, he was a petty criminal that beat his wife and had plenty of run-ins with the law. Bouhlel was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison in March for road rage and assault with a weapon. But the Court suspended the sentence.

Although French law requires anyone not a naturalized French citizen that is convicted of crime to lose their residency permit and be deported, the law is not enforced. As the Nice evidence is sifted, Breitbart News expects that a prison connection will appear.