The service in Arras cathedral for 57-year-old Dominique Bernard was broadcast on a large screen in the city’s Heroes’ Square, where hundreds watched in the rain.
Bernard, married to another teacher and father of three adult children, was posthumously awarded the Legion of Honour by Macron.
The award is France’s highest civilian decoration.
A teacher has been killed and two others seriously injured during a knife attack at a school in France on Friday morning as the suspect allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar,” according to local media.
The knife-wielding suspect stabbed the assistant principal of the school and a gym teacher at the City School Gambetta-Carnot, French outlet BFMTV reported.
The suspect is believed to be about 20 years old and his brother was also arrested.
Attacco con coltello al grido di “Allah Akbar” in un liceo francese, ad #Arras. Ucciso l’insegnante, a cui va la nostra preghiera.
Terroristi islamici, da stanare e annientare, sempre e ovunque. pic.twitter.com/HUZSHoDFG4— Matteo Salvini (@matteosalvinimi) October 13, 2023
French police are guarding the homes of leading MPs as fears grow of antisemitic violence triggered by Israel’s war with Hamas.
Police have said they are protecting National Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet and MP Meyer Habib.
France’s interior minister said 100 antisemitic acts had been recorded since Saturday.
In a separate move, Germany’s chancellor declared “zero tolerance” for antisemitism.
He told parliament a pro-Palestinian group that had celebrated the murders of Israeli civilians on Saturday would be banned.
Last week the European Parliament hosted an event in Brussels entitled ‘Close Guantanamo’. It was hosted by two Irish left-wing MEPs, and among the invites were representatives of Cage, which has been described by the French government as an ‘Islamist’ organisation, an allegation Cage denies. Cage was briefly infamous in Britain in 2015 when its director Asim Qureshi called Islamic State butcher Mohammed Emwazi, aka ‘Jihadi John’, who made a living hacking off Westerners’ heads, a ‘beautiful young man’ and blamed security services for his radicalisation. Qureshi later said he regretted his ‘inappropriate description’ of the Isis fighter.
In 2016, there were 12,820 rapes in France; in 2020, this had risen to 22,770; by 2021, the latest year for which records are available, there were 30,780 rapes, an increase in one year of 40%. This catastrophic rise corresponds to the rise in the number of Muslim migrants.
If visitors to the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris are impressed by the lack of homelessness on the city’s streets, this will not be because the issue has been resolved. It is instead being brushed under the carpet—or, rather, shifted temporarily to nearby towns.
According to CNN, between 50 and 150 people have been carted out of the city every week during the summer, and removed to one of ten locations across France. Officials in these areas were asked earlier in the year to establish “temporary regional accommodation facilities.”
There are said to be six million rats in Paris. I met one last week when I was retrieving some winter clothes from a bag in my cellar. Neither of us was particularly keen to make the other’s acquaintance.
Such a brief encounter may not please the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. In the summer her office announced the establishment of a committee to study how the city’s three million human inhabitants can learn to ‘cohabit’ with their furry neighbours.
Marseille: a new shooting leaves two dead and one injured
An investigation was opened for assassinations and attempted assassination by an organized gang after a shooting on Thursday evening in Marseille , during which two men were killed and another injured, the prosecutor’s office said on Friday September 29. The shooting took place on a public highway, around 7:40 p.m., in the Chutes-Lavie district, in the 4th arrondissement.
“ The cases found on site corresponded to 7.62 caliber ammunition ”, those of assault rifles such as Kalashnikovs, said the prosecutor. A 41-year-old man was “ found deceased, affected by multiple impacts ”, indicates the magistrate, specifying that this forty-year-old had been “ involved in 2019 in acts of violence with a weapon against a young woman collateral victim, as part of ‘a brawl outside a discotheque ‘. A 24-year-old man, known to the courts for common law offences, died a little later “ as a result of cervical injuries ”.
Another brutal execution in Marseille, France.
France is no longer France. pic.twitter.com/yMObu4gTLi
— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) September 29, 2023
h/t Mauser via Fdesouche
The fact that the left-liberal government of Germany and the centrist leadership in France are hoping for a less confrontative government in Warsaw after the Polish elections on October 15th should come as no surprise, but they may be more actively engaged in bringing about such a change, according to a pro-government Polish journalist and a former Polish Prime Minister.
France’s appetite to accommodate the never-ending torrent of illegal migration flowing into their country appears to have soured. While the state has introduced border controls along the Italian border, turning away some 200 migrants each day, a new poll has found that nearly 70% of the French population supports a military blockade in the Mediterranean Sea to stop the influx.
Frail and fading in his suburban Paris home, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 95-year-old patriarch of France’s hard right, could not have been cheered by the family news this week.
His granddaughter Marion Maréchal has returned to front-line politics and taken up arms against the party of his daughter Marine Le Pen at the head of a rival right-wing outfit in elections to the European parliament.
A man whose daughter was sent home twice allegedly threatened to kill the headteacher for imposing an abaya dress ban at a French school.
The father of the high school student is suspected of making the death threats over the phone.
According to C News, the daughter attends Ambroise-Brugière High School in Clermont-Ferrand, which has nearly 1,300 students.
France’s top administrative court has upheld a government ban on girls in state schools wearing abayas, rejecting complaints that it was discriminatory and could incite hatred.
The government announced just before schools reopened this week that the abaya, a long, flowing dress worn by some Muslim women, would no longer be allowed because it violated the French principle of secularism, or laïcité.
An association representing Muslims – Action for the Rights of Muslims (ADM) – had filed an urgent motion with the state council, France’s highest court for complaints against state authorities. They called for an injunction against the ban, saying it was discriminatory and could incite hatred against Muslims, as well as racial profiling.
Dozens of girls who turned up for school in France on Monday wearing abayas in defiance of a ban on the Muslim garment were sent home when they refused to remove them, a government minister told French broadcaster BFM on Tuesday.
The abaya, an over-garment covering the body from shoulders to feet that some Muslim women wear, was banned in schools by the French government last month.
The government says the abaya constitutes a display of religious affiliation, banned at schools under a 2004 law.
… My wife, a teacher in a state school in a deprived suburb of northern Paris, tells me that until the start of this year she had never seen an abaya in her classroom. Within weeks they became commonplace. In some cases they were worn by body-conscious girls, a way of concealing anxieties about their weight.
But religion is the main reason the abaya has taken off. Its popularity spread on TikTok, as part of a campaign aimed at challenging the Republic’s secularism. Jean-Éric Schoettl, secretary general of France’s constitutional council from 1997 to 2007, wrote in Tuesday’s Le Figaro: ‘To dismiss the abaya as a mere ‘cultural’ fad, or to put it down to an adolescent crisis, is to deny that it is an expression of adherence to a political Islam that pursues a hegemonic goal.’
