France

French General Pierre de Villiers, the former chief of staff of the French armed forces, has warned that France could be heading for civil conflict, due to Islamist radicals and growing urban violence.

General de Villiers, who made headlines by quitting as armed forces chief of staff in 2017 over clashes on army budget cuts with President Emmanuel Macron, warned of a variety of factors that could see France heading to potential civil conflict.

I maintain my prediction: We will see France cede territory to the Islamists in our lifetime.

October 29. Nice, the main city on the French Riviera. A man in the Basilica of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption decapitates a woman and murders two other people while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” [“Allah is the greatest!”]

This is the second beheading in France by an extremist Muslim in less than a month. Two weeks earlier, on October 16, a middle school teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded in the suburbs of Paris after showing his students some Mohammad cartoons during a discussion on freedom of speech.

One of three Americans hailed as heroes for overcoming a gunman on a train travelling to Paris has told a French court his main aim was to survive.

Spencer Stone, a 28-year-old ex-serviceman, described via video from the US how he and his friends saw Ayoub El Khazzani pick up a Kalashnikov rifle and prepare to open fire.

He counted three separate attempts the gunman made to try to kill him.

Mr Stone was one of two people wounded in the August 2015 Thalys train attack.

The political ideology that feeds terrorist violence cannot be explained away by religion or colonial history

President Macron’s hate affair with the American media continues, if a recent New York Times article is anything to go by. The president is not happy, and thinks the Anglo-Saxon press fails to understand French laïcité and the universalist model, as opposed to the Anglosphere model of multiculturalism, with its distinct roots in the British Empire. While this is undoubtedly true, the more pressing issue might be the gulf in understanding of Islamism, the target of Macron’s campaign.

Four more people – all of them teenage students – have been charged in connection with the brutal murder of teacher Samuel Paty in France last month.

Three of the four students have been charged with identifying Paty to 18-year-old Chechen Abdullakh Anzorov, who beheaded him before being shot dead by police.

The fourth is the daughter of Brahim Chnina, leader of a campaign against Paty, who claimed to have been in class when he showed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed but is now charged with lying after it emerged she did not attend his lessons.