France

Last October, I reported here that French president Emmanuel Macron had just “delivered what, on the face of it, seemed to be a remarkable speech on Islam.” Having previously been wishy-washy on the topic, he now promised a new program “intended to defend French laïcité, or official secularism, from ‘Islamist separatism,’” which he explicitly characterized as an existential threat to the Republic. Acknowledging that “one reason why ‘Islamist separatism’ had been allowed to fester was the ‘cowardice’ of French authorities,” Macron proclaimed that a new day had dawned. In public services, in cultural and athletic associations, in schools and universities, and in other sectors of society, Islamic indoctrination would be officially, firmly, and comprehensively resisted, and Islam itself modernized into an “Islam of the Enlightenment.”

In France this week, 20 retired military generals, 80 officers, and 1,000 lower-ranking soldiers signed an open letter expressing concern over “mortal dangers” they say face the Republic. President Macron’s government has instructed the army chief of staff to discipline the signatories for inciting insurrection.

The letter bears close attention on several grounds. Although the signatories warn they wish to act only after  the outbreak of civil conflict, Macron’s response shows the government understands the situation has already deteriorated to a point where a true coup or uprising—an event quite unlike the shambolic ordeal in Washington on January 6th—might erupt at the slightest provocation.

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…