PARIS ATTACKS AFTERMATH: Migrant danger narrative dumped in favour of Euroarmy plan

A Star is born?

Exclusive: how Paris attacks have handed top EC security spook Federica Mogherini a carte blanche to invoke Article 42…even though it isn’t applicable. Huge potential spanner in Vote Leave/UKIP works

No don’t stop the Carnival. The Paris suicide bomber whose body was found next to a Syrian passport may have been a Frenchman who had usurped a refugee’s identity, Le Monde reports’. You read it here first.

This has obviously been given to the media as an explanation of  Federica Mogherini’s assertion (follow link above to read it at The Slog earlier today) that “all the assailants were EU citizens”  -a complete volte-face from Saturday’s “migrants full of Islamists” line from Parisian officials eagerly taken up by UKIP’s Nigel One-Note.

Ms Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy [aka Top Spook] has been pushing very hard for a joint EU army. She writes:

There’s a small point to note in this extract, however: Mogherini wrote it, in a release to the European Parliament….in September 2014.

At precisely 8am this morning, she told media representatives that “EU treaty Article 42 might be required to be activated in the coming days”.

Article 42 commits all EU Member States to come to the aid of any fellow-member that is ‘attacked by external forces’.

So then: all the assailants were EU citizens….but we might have to invoke Article 42. Mixed messages there….but there’ll be another one along in a minute, and by Thursday you’ll have forgotten what we said last night.

This is how the snow-job works in the digital age: everything is in transition, and all things pust pass. But as Tuesday proceeds, it is clear that if the EUNATO alliance has gone all Buddhist on us, then it’s doing it on amphetamines. And Russia is joining in.

Having remained in neutral about the Egyptian plane crash, Putin has now come clean and said it was a terorist attack. This feels like part of the thawing of Russo-NATO relations over the last 72 hours: for over that brief time period, Vlad the Lad has gone from zero to hero. Yes, the ‘deranged’ (Hillary Clinton) ‘evil’ (John McCain) and ‘aggressor’ (John Kerry) who heads up Russia but could fall from power at any minute is now become the Strong Man we need who bombed ISIS with more precision in a fortnight than the US managed in six months….in order to help his ally Basshar Assad, who as you know has been himself imminently falling from power for the last two years.

It is, of course, pure Orwellian 1984 diplomacy:

The arrival of 24/7 multi-sourced news, allegations, blogs and universal disinformation alongside distraction has turned this seemingly surreal description by George Orwell into plausible, terrifying reality.

Be that as it may, we must (being fair) mark this one down as a beneficial spin-off from the Paris attacks: if nothing else, World War III has moved a little further away.

But for UKIP, this is both an opportunity and a potential disaster. The weak dimension of the EU has always been its complete inability to generate any respect from its citizens – let alone solidarity or, God forbid, suprapatriotism.

The Union is in crisis, with the Eastern States in open revolt, ClubMed simmering beneath the heel of austerity, and Britain on the verge of secession. The immediate urgency of the spook bureaucracy, described above, shows that preparations formerly waiting quietly in the wings are now on stage and receiving wild applause.

Unless Vote Leave and UKIP can dramatise the extreme danger to liberty inherent in this development, support for ‘safer IN than OUT’ could quickly reverse their fortunes.

Yesterday at The Slog: Why questioning the Establishment does not require excavation of the rabbit hole

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