Yellow Vests mark 9 month anniversary despite media silence & police limb amputations

Tomorrow will mark nine months since the weekly Saturday protests of the Yellow Vest Movement began in France on Nov. 17 and which have continued despite European media silence and police usage of explosive lethal weapons.

Yellow Vest activists say so far 23 protesters have lost the use of an eye, five have lost a hand, and one has lost a testicle.

France is the only European country currently using explosive ammunition for “law enforcement”.

Antoine Boudinet lost his right hand when a GLI-F4 grenade – which contains 25 grams of TNT and has caused hand amputations, hematomas, and the formation of necrotic tissue among protesters – landed next to him on Dec. 8.

Yellow Vest spokesperson Jérôme Rodrigues was targeted with both a GLI-F4 grenade and a LBD-40 bullet which made him lose his right eye on Jan 26. The LBD-40, which has a red-dot laser pointer that ensures correct targeting of civilians, is the more sophisticated version of the flashball bullet and 10 times the speed of a paintball.

The French interior ministry estimated in May that 2,448 protesters and 1,797 police and gendarmes have been injured since protests began in November.

The demonstrations came about after a number of measures were introduced by president Emmanuel Macron including plans to increase fuel tax to a population already struggling to make ends meet every month.

On Aug. 10, they took to the streets in Paris for the 39th week in a row and on Aug. 3, demonstrations in Nantes resulted in clashes with police and dozens of arrests.

The protesters are called Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), or GJs, as many demonstrators wear the yellow vests which are required to be carried in all cars under French law.

Discredited with accusations of “antisemitism”

The Yellow Vest Movement was accused of antisemitism earlier this year after French-Jew philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was insulted by a handful of Yellow Vests during a protest on Feb. 16.

The incident sparked an outpouring of condemnation on mainstream media including the BBC, the Times of Israel and Le Monde, whose front page headline on Feb. 19 read ‘Antisémitisme: le face somber des gilets jaunes’ (Antisemitism: the dark side of the yellow vests).

Macron condemned the attack and a group of French lawmakers immediately proposed a new bill on Feb. 18 to make anti-Zionism a criminal offence in the same way that anti-Semitism is illegal in France.

The Church’s position

The Catholic Church in France has been cautious at siding with either the Yellow Vests or the French government.

Bishop Gilbert Aubry of the Diocese of Saint-Denis de la Réunion, underscored “we condemn the destructive violence, the riots, and in doing so, we must search for the causes of this violence as well as the necessary remedies.”

President Emmanuel Macron

Macron is a bureaucrat of the Rothschild bank. He joined the Rothschild Investment Bank 11 years ago where he was nicknamed ‘Mozart de la finance’ (the Mozart of finance).

He was put in power by the financial oligarchy and his mentor was Jacques Attali.

Macron’s mission was to crush “la France profonde” through mass migration strictly abiding by the UN’s Global Pact of Migration . The Pact has been agreed by all 193 members except for the United States, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Chile and Australia. The UN documents clearly state that its aim is  replacing Europe’s population -something that will unequivocally lead to civil war.

His second mission was climate change, the emerging global green regime. This energy transition is about forcing European workers to pay for the salaries of global bureaucrats.

The Yellow Vests began protesting in November after Macron’s government planned tighter emissions standards for cars and a further 6.5 cent tax increase on a litre of diesel and 2.5 cents per litre on gasoline. Fuel costs had already increased by about 23 percent in the previous year and the government had imposed a 7.6 cent-per-litre “carbon tax” on fuel as part of the government’s green agenda.

If this movement, which is beyond left and right, continues to lack leadership it will not go anywhere. In fact, it may probably lead to something worse than civil unrest.

In June, Macron admitted failure on how he handled the Yellow Vest Movement stressing that the working class rejected his economic agenda because it was “too abstract”.

He has recently vowed to focus his policymaking on social justice and affirmed it was time to relaunch the reform agenda, an indicator that he may run for re-election in 2022.