France, Under Siege

"I'm from Nice and this is a tragedy once again."

"We're a free country. Let's love freedom -- that's a message to the world. No god should kill."

Frederic Lefevre, 50, Nice, France

 

"Macon is leading Islamophobia."

"The Muslim world will not let this go in vain. We'll rise and stand in solidarity against him."

Akramul Haq, Dhaka Bangladesh demonstrator

 

"We want the truth about how my son carried out this terrorist attack. I want to see what the surveillance cameras showed."

"I will not give up my son's rights outside the country. I want my son, dead or alive."

Mass Murderer Ibrahim Issaoui's mother Gamra  

"We are Muslims, we are against terrorism, we are poor."

"Show me that my brother committed the attack and judge him as a terrorist. If he was the attacker, he will take his responsibility."

Mass Murderer Ibrahim Issaoui's brother Wissem

 

"Obviously, we give precedence to people who are signalled by law enforcement or by Tunisian authorities."

"The number of spots are not infinite, and he could not therefore be placed inside a repatriation centre [in custody, after Issaoui was issued  an Italian expulsion order when he arrived at the island of Lampedusa, the closest European point of entry from Tunisia]."

Italy's interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese

A policeman stands guard in front of the Notre Dame church in Nice, France, Friday, Oct. 30, 2020. A new suspect is in custody in the investigation into a gruesome attack by a Tunisian man who killed three people in a French church. France heightened its security alert amid religious and geopolitical tensions around cartoons mocking the Muslim prophet. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Thousands of soldiers have been deployed by President Emmanuel Macron to protect places of worship and schools in France with the country at its highest level of security alert following the second deadly knife attack in two weeks. A Tunisian extremist group not previously known has claimed responsibility for the knife attack on Notre-Dame Basilica following on the grisly murder and beheading of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty the week before. That the assassin who murdered a 60-year-old woman praying a the Nice church and beheaded her, slaughtered the church sextant and mortally wounded a 44-year old woman, a mother of three, committed an act of Islamist terrorism is clear enough. He had with him a copy of the Koran, and shouted 'Allahu Akbar!' repeatedly.

 

French, Italian and Tunisian investigators are attempting to investigate whether the accused, Ibrahim Issaoui, acted with collaborators and whether the attack was premeditated. Overnight yesterday a 35-year-old man was arrested, while a 47-year-old who had met with the assailant the night prior to the attack was already in custody. More latterly, a third suspect was placed in French custody. The attacker himself is in a French hospital, critically wounded when he was shot by police.

France is host to the largest Muslim population in Europe. It also has the largest Jewish population in Europe, although Jews are increasingly leaving France for Israel, where they feel they will be safer. The influx of Muslims in France has resulted in ever growing anti-Semitic attacks against the country's Jews. Jewish social centres, schools and synagogues have for years lived under protective police presence, the result of deadly Muslim attacks. Interior Minister Gerald Damarnin stated "We are in a war against an enemy that is both inside and outside".

"We have to be vigilant, we have to be attentive", said Nice Police chief Richard Gianotti, pointing out that increasingly any symbol of Christianity or the Republic must be considered now a potential target for Islamist jihadists. In Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Palestinian territories tens of thousands emerged from Friday prayers to stage anti-French riots. Police in Islamabad briefly fired tear gas at protesters breaking through security blockades to reach the French embassy.

Raging marchers in Dhaka chanted "Boycott French products", carrying banners pronouncing Macron "the world's biggest terrorist", while burning effigies of the French present. Protests in India, Lebanon and Somalia saw the Islamic world condemning France for effectively identifying Islamist terrorism as a threat against civil non-Muslim society whose cultures and values are clearly at odds with those of Islam. In its secular embrace of free speech and the European nation with the greatest number of Muslims where constant displays of violent anti-Western rejection take place, France is indeed between a rock and a hard place; challenged both externally and internally.

The French government, well aware of the threat that French Muslims pose to the French Jewish population sent 7,000 troops to be deployed for Yon Kippur at synagogues, schools and social centres after the September stabbing at the former offices of Charlie Hebdo. Now it is clear that the enormous number of churches and cathedrals in France will also require protection. In essence, it is as though France is succumbing to martial law to protect its citizens. It is, in fact, how French Jews feel they have been living for years. 

And for years attacks have taken place on French churches with graffiti and vandalism and arson, with between two and three incidents taking place daily on an annual basis. The second-largest church in Paris, St.Sulpice, was torched last year. President Macron is perfectly right; he said it before and he's saying it again: France is under attack. And he promises to take action. Perhaps at this point it is futile. France may be under attack but an attack of another kind long preceded the violent attacks when France absorbed millions of Muslims.

Islam is a religion that demands full and total surrender to its divine precepts, its sharia law, its expectation that the faithful must commit without question or qualm to Islam's demands of its faithful. As such it was never a good candidate to join the citizens of a Western, democratic, secular nation -- for Islam will never  surrender its authority to those of a non-Muslim government, bringing with it all the traditional founding values of ultimate conquest by any expeditious means.

"So I understand and respect that people could be shocked by these cartoons, but I will never accept that one can justify physical violence over these cartoons, and I will always defend the freedom in my country to write, to think, to draw."

"My role is to calm things down, which is what I’m doing, but at the same time, it’s to protect these rights."

French President Emmanuel Macron

A policeman carries flowers in front of the Notre Dame church in tribute to the victims of a deadly knife attack in Nice, France, October 30, 2020. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard