He Liked Speed, Nice Cars

"Mohammed? We saw him on Saturday and gave each other a peck on the cheek. He was in great form. Last week, a friend was with him in a nightclub in the centre of Toulouse. He liked speed, nice cars, like all of us."

Surely no surprise to note hatred born of religious fanaticism festering in the banlieues of Paris? And in their European counterparts elsewhere?

Is it some kind of huge secret that the growth of immigrant populations throughout Europe has brought incessant problems to the accepting countries seeing their culture, their values and their prevailing social mores, let alone religion being shunted aside with disinterest by immigrants worshipping their own religion, practising their own heritage cultures?

There is no integration, not much of an attempt on the part of the welcoming countries to integrate their immigrants into the social and political fabric of the majority, and none on the part of the immigrants to accommodate themselves to the culture, priorities and values and laws of the welcoming society.

They live uneasily together in their own singular solitudes. It seems inevitable that resentment will arise on either side.

It's when resentment burgeons and festers and becomes an open social canker fuelled by suspicion, scorn and uneven opportunities that the gate opens to radicalism among Western-born but Eastern-cultured populations.It is estimated that there are currently 80 French nationals of Algerian descent training in North Waziristan, close to the border of Afghanistan in Pakistan, as agents of al-Qaeda.

And that is where, as it happens, a 'nice kid' whom all his friends are amazed to discover was a serial murderer was also trained. At the urging of al-Qaeda trainers he agreed to mount a jihad strike or two in Paris, but he was completely disinterested in becoming a suicide bomber. He had no interest in martyrdom. Life was sweet; he was involved with his friends in the usual pursuits; partying, drinking, fast cars.

But he was also an ardent jihadist. He liked that kind of excitement too, obviously. Although he wanted to kill, not to be killed. After all, he tried to enlist in the French Foreign Legion and in the French military, but his long prison record did not work in his favour. That too engenders resentment.

He liked being noticed, and he would be noticed when he posted the video of his victims' aghast fearful faces as he murdered them, three Jewish children and an adult at point-blank range at a Jewish school in Toulouse. To complement his earlier strikes on members of the French military. And he planned to add to that count, the following few days, had the police not tracked him down.

He felt free to do as he did, and why not? The French police hesitate to enter those banlieues where the youth enjoy barbecuing cars at night. The murders would be his part to play in the larger effort to destroy Jews who were, after all, responsible for the plight of the Palestinians, so he felt his compulsion to kill small Jewish children in vengeance for small Palestinian children killed by Jews quite justified.

Police psychologists had no success attempting to talk him into surrender to break the siege at the five-story apartment he had sequestered himself in. His mother, claiming she had no influence on him, refused to plead with him or for him. How to quite explain his murder of three French paratroopers of foreign extraction? It gave him a grisly satisfaction, though what they represented was what he had aspired to.

His older brother arrested on suspicion of being part of the Knights of Pride, another extremist Islamist group, offended by France's burka ban. Mohammed Merah was under surveillance by French secret service, had been for years. It was well known that he was part of a group of Islamic fundamentalists following the Salafist ideology. Despite which he was able to amass an armoury of weapons.

Just as the fiction of Israel preying on the Palestinians serves to furnish Islamists with the rationale for their fierce hatred of Jews and infidels works to stoke their anger and intentions to kill, so too does the identification with a group such as the 'Salafists' ideology. Just as false as is the Jewish-murderer rationale is the Salafist identification which cleaves to Islamist piety, and these al-Qaeda-dazzled French-Algerians do not.

A former neighbour who lived in Les Izards thought differently of Mohammed Merah than the fond testimony of his friends. "He was already a very dangerous individual and recently displayed al-Qaeda tendencies. He came to the neighbourhood dressed in a military-type uniform and a sword. The police were warned, apparently he was questioned. And I find it strange there was no follow-up at the time."