"France Will Not Surrender Its Core Values"

"Very clearly, it is France which is under attack, [all of France offers its support to Catholics] so that their religion can be exercised freely in our country. So that every religion can be practiced. If we are attacked once again it is for the values which are ours: freedom, for the possibility on our soil to believe freely and not to give in to any spirit of terror."I say it with great clarity once again today: we won't surrender anything." French President Emmanuel Macron

The suspect was detained minutes after the attack at the basilica   EPA

October 2020: French teacher Samuel Paty is beheaded outside a school in a suburb of Paris

September 2020: Two people are stabbed and seriously hurt in Paris near the former offices of Charlie Hebdo, where Islamist militants carried out a deadly attack in 2015

October 2019: Radicalised police computer operator Mickaël Harpon is shot dead after stabbing to death three officers and a civilian worker at Paris police headquarters

July 2016: Two attackers kill a priest, Jacques Hamel, and seriously wound another hostage after storming a church in a suburb of Rouen in northern France

July 2016: A gunman drives a large lorry into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 86 people in an attack claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group

November 2015: Gunmen and suicide bombers launch multiple co-ordinated attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars in Paris, leaving 130 people dead and hundreds wounded

January 2015: Two Islamist militant gunmen force their way into Charlie Hebdo's offices and shoot dead 12 people

That these attacks will continue to occur appears predictable and, it would also seem, unavoidable. A country that has long lost its sovereign right to declare what is lawful, seeing justice and legality overturned by the infiltration of extremists faithful to an ideology of fascist religious devotion that will not accept that in the Republic of France, blaspheme is as nothing averse, viewed as nothing less than freedom to express oneself as one will; nothing is sacred, no criticism, no vestige of pointed sarcasm or belittling of a religion is to be avoided in a purely secular society for which freedom of religion is guaranteed but what is not guaranteed is freedom from being mocked.

Another atrocity, this time committed by the illegal entry to France of a Tunisian ordered to return from Italy which he illegally accessed, to his country of birth. A Muslim majority country where Muslims can be assured no one would dare or even want to, mock the divine status of the Prophet Mohammad. Brahim Aioussaoi left Tunisia to travel to Lampedusa in September, an Italian island where he was informed he must leave Italy. Instead he made his way to Nice where he murdered three people, repeatedly screaming Allahu Akbar!

On Thursday morning another man brandishing a firearm in Avignon refused to surrender his weapon, ignored a warning shot by police and was shot and killed. In Saudi Arabia a man stabbed a guard standing sentry outside the French consulate in Jidda, wounding the guard before being arrested. This, one attack after another while France is still in mourning over the grisly death of French middle-school teacher Samuel Paty, beheaded by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee living in Paris. Who set out to murder the 47-year-old father of a six-year-old child to avenge the Prophet whose image in cartoons was used by Mr. Paty teaching a civics class. 

A French policeman stands guard near the scene of the knife attack at the Notre Dame church in Nice, France, on Oct. 29, 2020. (Daniel Cole / AP)

Mr. Paty often used those cartoons, caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad originally published by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Where, in 2015 Islamist jihadists stormed the offices of the magazine to slaughter eleven of its staff, claiming it their right to avenge the blasphemous mocking of the Prophet. Others with no connection to the magazine or the caricatures, simply shopping at a kosher market in Paris were also targeted; theirs was the sin of being Jewish, for which the Prophet was also avenged.

Suddenly -- just as happened long after the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published their cartoons a decade earlier, mocking the Prophet Mohammad, a time lag occurred between the event and the build-up of an purposefully incited reaction among Muslims worldwide, resulting in protests by mobs of enraged Muslims looting and destroying and boycotting Danish goods -- allegations began to surface in Paris around the class Mr. Paty taught. 

 

A French police officer stands next to a portrait of slain French teacher Samuel Paty in the city of Montpellier on 21 October 2020 (AFP)

 

Radical Islamists expressed outrage online on Facebook, Instagram and allied social media platforms, inciting to revenge the Prophet from unforgivable offence of lese-majeste. Officials with the education ministry were lobbied, police were called on to investigate the "Islamophobia" that teacher Paty was subjecting his Muslim students to, with insistence on disciplinary action. Mr. Paty responded by filing a libel case against one obnoxious parent of one of his students whose claims against him verged on malicious threats. 

Because of the growing threats he was receiving he began to alter his daily habit of walking through a wooded area from the school to his home which he shared with his six-year-old son, choosing instead to walk a direct course through public areas used by many pedestrians. His alertness failed to protect him from the fanatical violence of a stranger confronting him on a street near the school, beheading him, and mutilating his body. 

After which the murderer took pleasure in taking photographs of his handiwork, broadcasting photographs and videos on Twitter and Instagram, sending them to President Macron, boasting of having "avenged the Prophet". Until he was cornered by police, shot and killed when he threatened them. French police have thwarted 32 attacks by terrorist operators associated with al-Qaeda since 2017. Other atrocities have taken place irrespective of a state of constant vigilance.

Now, President Macron is considering enacting a new law banning home-schooling, in the recognition that evading the public school system and using home-schooling as a shield for radical Koranic schools represents one of the signal problems in France, channeling young Muslims into attitudes of hostility to the country they've been born to and grown up into -- without absorbing its values. Where the accusations levelled by such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan of French Islamophobia resonates.

Where Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan concurred with demands by his national assembly to recall the Pakistani ambassador to France, except that Pakistan currently has no ambassador in France. Instead Khan issued an open letter to the Muslim world leaders that they must "collectively counter the growing Islamophobia in non-Muslim states, especially Western states"; clearly 'Western states' have no business whatever reacting to the murderous violence Islamists foist upon them, for to do so is insulting to jihad.

 

France pays tribute to Samuel Paty (Photo: Pascal GUYOT / AFP via Getty Images)