Emmanuel Macron’s appeal for France to unite has not been heeded. Barely 12 hours after the president made his address on primetime television, a 20-year-old of Chechen origin stabbed a teacher to death and wounded two others in a high school in the northern city of Arras.
The assailant, now in custody, is reported to have shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ during his rampage. Interior minister Gérald Darmanin announced that the knifeman was on an extremist watchlist, a revelation that is politically explosive. Yet again, someone known to be radicalised has been able to commit bloody murder. Just this week, the trial concluded of an accomplice of Larossi Abballa, who in 2016 fatally stabbed a married police couple in their home south of Paris. He, too, should have been under surveillance.
The assailant, now in custody, is reported to have shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ during his rampage
The motivation for the attack has yet to be revealed. Was it, as Eric Zemmour, leader of the right-wing Reconquest, suggested ‘in response to a call from the founder of Hamas on Friday?’ Or was it a macabre way of marking the third anniversary since an 18-year Islamist of Chechen origin beheaded the schoolteacher Samuel Paty. That murder, in a suburb of Paris, occurred on Friday October 16 2020.
Either way, the latest Islamist outrage to strike France could not have come at a worse time for Macron. As I wrote only this morning, the country is tense after Hamas’s savage attack on Israel, and France’s Jewish population are frightened. Ten thousand police stand guard outside their schools and places of worships, but there are not enough law enforcement personnel to guard all the Republic’s schools.
Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, offered his condolences to the family and stated on twitter that ‘Everything must be done to eradicate Islamism, its soldiers and its proxies.’
To that end, one of the pressing challenges facing Macron’s government is what to do about radicalised people from the Chechen community in France. These extremists are fast gaining a reputation as the most violently fanatical of all the Republic’s ethnic minorities; not only are they responsible for the murder of at least one schoolteacher, but a young Chechen acting for the Islamic State killed one person and wounded four others in a Paris knife attack in 2018. He was also on an extremist watchlist.
France’s intelligence services and police are doing the best job they can, but they are simply overwhelmed by the numbers of extremists at liberty. There are, according to a report in Le Figaro last week, ‘5,273 would-be Islamists roaming the country’.
That figure may have risen in recent days, the situation in Gaza inflaming impressionable and immature minds. In an interview with a newspaper in September, Gérald Darmanin admitted that the intelligence services ‘believe that these people are likely to act or are in contact with others who could act.’
Unaffiliated to any organised Islamist terror group such as Islamic State, Hamas or Al–Qaeda, these extremists belong to what the Islamic extremist expert Gilles Kepel has dubbed the ‘Jihad of Atmosphere’; social media is where they are inculcated, exhorted to act by Islamists in France or overseas. This was the case with the teenager who murdered Samuel Paty.
On learning of today’s attack Macron rushed to Arras, only 35 miles from his home city of Amiens, where he offered his support to staff and pupils.
‘France’s Jews Are Afraid’ I wrote this morning; make that all of France is now afraid. Once more the Republic is under attack from Islamic extremists.
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