Islamist Terrorism in France

"This evening, it's the Republic which is under attack with the despicable assassination of one of its servants, a teacher."

"Our unity and our resolve are the only responses, faced with the monstrosity of Islamist terrorism."

French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer

"A citizen has been murdered today because he was a teacher and because  he taught freedom of expression."

"The whole country stands behind its teachers. Terrorists will not divide France, obscurantism will not win."

French President Emmanuel Macron

 

France, its leaders appear not to have noticed -- has already been divided. Long since. Any society that is riven as France is, by a religious devotion so fundamentally extreme that a segment of the population views others with supreme contempt, and holds itself apart from the majority, has been divided. Divided means that in enclaves specific to certain ethnic/religious/tribal groups, other citizens of France dare not enter for to do so is seen as an unacceptable intrusion and there are consequences for such intrusions.

Consequences that municipal and federal services are not spared. Public emergency workers like police and firefighters, much less ambulance paramedics enter at their own risk. And the risk is high for the population within seethes with rage and hatred. It also seethes with crime and criminal activities. Not the least of which are plots against the Republic. From time to time episodes of contemptful rage rise front and center through the night-time bonfires of vehicles, a tradition of the banlieues.

But there are also much more life-destructive rampages where atrocities by Islamofascist groups target symbols of the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that allowed them entry to the country of freedom and opportunity. As when nightclubs and sports arenas, piquant newspaper and magazine enterprises, along with Jewish businesses and synagogues are targeted, when shouts of 'Allahu Akbar' ring out presaging violent attacks.

 

People gathered at the site of the attack on Saturday. The 18-year-old suspect was shot to death by police on Friday, about 600 metres from where the teacher died. (Charles Platiau/Reuters)

 

In the aftermath of which a magazine known for its irreverence to all that take themselves seriously, and which paid the ultimate price for its casual but determined airing of Islamist-insulting cartoons of Mohammad, led Charlie Hebdo to write: "Intolerance has crossed a new threshold and does not seem to give ground to anything in imposing its terror on our country." Rather understated, given the recent history of Islamism in France and Belgium.

In a classic episode of trust in law and order and commitment to one of the Republic's most prized qualities of free speech entitlements, A middle-school teacher, 47-year-old Samuel Paty in Conflans Sainte-Honorine, a suburb north-west of Paris, invited his Muslim students to temporarily leave the classroom, advising them that what he was about to discuss and illustrate might be distressing to them. Those who chose to remain in the class were treated to a 'disrespectful' image of the Prophet Mohammad.

That teacher paid for his belief in the sanctity of free speech in a free country, through the classic Islamist penalty of beheading when an enraged young man still in his teens, incited by his indignant father, attacked and slaughtered the teacher, after having asked pupils exiting the school at the end of the school day, to identify the teacher for him. The young man had loitered around the school causing someone to alert police, but their arrival was too late to prevent the murder.

 

When the assassin's phone was examined there was a text wherein he claimed exultantly that he had succeeded what he set out to accomplish; penalize a teacher who had exposed students to the unthinkable, a disrespectful cartoon of Mohammad. Along with the text was the victim's photograph illustrating the depth of the unspeakable the faithful will go to in pursuit of their mission. A Twitter account in the name Abdoulakh A posted the decapitated head following the attack: "I have executed one of the dogs from hell who dared to put Muhammad down".

 

When the murderer turned his knife to threaten police, he was shot repeatedly and died soon afterward. Members of his family were taken into custody for questioning. In fact, police were tardy in other ways since the teacher had received a number of death threats, and in retrospect it might have been a good preventive measure to post a guard to protect him from retribution for showing his pupils cartoons assaulting the divine status of Prophet Mohammad.

Born in Moscow of a Chechen family, the 18-year-old attacker was spurred not only by his fundamentalist faith but also by his father's incitement. A young girl student in the family had reported back to her family the class discussion of freedom of speech where the Mohammad cartoons were being illustratively used. She reported back in evident distress to her family. Her father posted a video stating his daughter to be shocked and upset by the teacher's class in speech freedom in France. 

The paterfamilias posted the teacher's name, the school, and the teacher's home address, agitating for others to join  his protest to remove the teacher from his teaching position, by posing pressure on school authorities who had already dismissed the man's demands when he had approached them directly on an earlier occasion. President Macron plans to combat "Islamist separatism", speaking of Islam as "a religion that is in crisis all over the world" with problems stemming from a "very strong hardening" among Muslim views of Islam's relationship with the world at large.

It is not, however, 'Islamist separatism' that should concern France; that is the issue that concerns China. France (and Europe and much of the rest of the world) is faced with an Islamofascist agenda of conquest, of raising the flag of Islam everywhere; it is an ambition exemplified by Turkey's Islamofascist Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his Islam-first war with all non-Islamic countries, in his relish of the phrase, "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers".

 

Girls light candles on Saturday outside the school where a slain history teacher worked in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northwest of Paris. French President Emmanuel Macron denounced what he called an 'Islamist terrorist attack' against the teacher, who was decapitated on Friday, urging the country to unite against extremism. (Michel Euler/The Associated Press)

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