France

Fear, loathing and the French police

In the elegant commuter town of Rambouillet, south of Paris, last Friday, a Tunisian immigrant, identified as Jamel G, approached a uniformed, unarmed female police administrator from behind. She was returning to the police station after feeding the metre of her parked car. He trapped her in the entrance lobby, stabbed her in the abdomen and then sliced her throat, hollering ‘Allahu Akbar’. A policeman tried to unjam the door to stop him. When he was finally able to, he fired on the attacker after he refused to comply with an order to relinquish his weapon, killing him. For Stéphanie Monfermé, a mother of two, it was already too late. A tweet from President Macron, within hours, linked the attack to Islamist terrorism.

Thousands of protesters have rallied in Paris and across France after the killer of a Jewish woman was declared unfit to stand trial because he was judged to have suffered a psychotic episode caused by cannabis use.

Kobili Traoré is accused of beating 65-year-old Lucie Attal – better known as Sarah Halimi – and throwing her from the balcony her Paris apartment in 2017.

French courts have recognised the killing as an antisemitic crime but declared that 32-year-old Traoré, currently in a psychiatric hospital, could not be tried as he was in the grip of a drug-induced “delusional fit” and not in control of his actions.

A female police worker in France has been killed by a knifeman who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ before he was shot dead by her colleagues.

The 49-year-old mother-of-two was slashed in the throat by the Tunisian on Friday afternoon as she worked in the main police station in the Paris suburb of Rambouillet.

The administrative agent, who had worked for the police since 1993, had recently returned from her lunch break and had ‘popped out of the station to change her parking disc on her car’ when she was pounced on by the attacker in the lobby.

The family of Sarah Halimi — the French Jewish woman brutally murdered in her Paris apartment by an intruder who bellowed antisemitic slogans as he beat her relentlessly — lost their final court attempt to have her killer tried on Wednesday, as the country’s top appeals court upheld an earlier decision that he could not be held criminally responsible because his intake of marijuana on the night of the killing had rendered him temporarily insane.

November 1, 2020. Didier Lemaire, a high school teacher who works in Trappes, a small town west of Paris, published an open letter in the left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. He spoke of the murder of Samuel Paty, another teacher, savagely beheaded two weeks earlier by a Muslim extremist. He denounced the submission of the French authorities to religious intimidation and the impossibility of the French school system being able to transmit any real knowledge of history or to give students the intellectual means to think freely. He said that in just a few years, the situation in the city where he worked has deteriorated markedly Lemaire wrote…

French counter-terrorism police have arrested a family of five women after one of them was suspected of planning to attack a religious site. A sword and dangerous chemicals were reportedly found in their home.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin confirmed the operation in a tweet, thanking counter-terrorism agents for their work.

Several French news outlets reported earlier that authorities had learned a woman – who has not been publicly identified – was planning a terrorist attack on a religious site in the southern city of Montpellier during the Easter holidays. She was said to have been radicalized by watching videos from Islamic State.

The French government has rejected the use of the term “Islamophobia”, saying Islamists use it to silence criticism of radical Islam.

The French Interministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalisation rejected the term earlier this week, stating: “To speak of hatred against Muslims, the term ‘Islamophobia’ is inappropriate since it confuses the stigmatisation of believers with criticism of Islam.”

PARIS (AFP) – A row has erupted in France over plans to build a mosque in Strasbourg, with the interior ministry on Wednesday (March 24) accusing the municipal authorities there of using public money to fund “foreign meddling” on French soil.

While President Emmanuel Macron wants to crack down on Islamic extremism, which he blames for a series of deadly terror attacks in France since 2015, the planned mosque in the eastern French city has found itself in the government’s crosshairs because it is backed by a leading Turkish Muslim group.

On Monday, municipal officials in Strasbourg, run by a Green mayor, approved a grant of 2.5 million euros (S$3.98 million) to the Milli Gorus Islamic Confederation (CMIG), a pan-European movement for the Turkish diaspora. But the CMIG is one of three Muslim confederations in France that have refused to sign a new anti-extremism charter championed by Macron.