We haven’t seen a lot of Islamic terrorism here in the U.S. lately, but yesterday a history teacher was decapitated in Paris:
A history teacher who had shown caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammed in class was on Friday decapitated and his assailant shot dead by French police as they tried to arrest him, police and prosecutors said.
The attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he was confronted by police, a police source said. The Muslim phrase, meaning “God is Great,” has often been heard in jihadist attacks.
The suspect’s identity was not made public. French media reported that the suspect was an 18-year-old Chechen, born in Moscow.
There may have been a connection to a terrorist group:
Prosecutors said they were treating the incident as “a murder linked to a terrorist organization” and related to a “criminal association with terrorists.”
President Emmanuel Macron visited the school and took a realistic line:
French President Emmanuel Macron called the beheading an “Islamist terrorist attack.”
Macron visited the scene of the attack, saying, “One of our compatriots was murdered today because he taught…the freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not believe.”
The linked article reports that last month, a 25-year-old Pakistani wounded two members of a news crew with a meat cleaver, ostensibly to protest the publication of Muhammad cartoons years ago by the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo. Further, a criminal trial of alleged accomplices of the Charlie Hebdo murderers is going on right now:
That attack came three weeks into an ongoing trial of suspected accomplices of the authors of the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket, which also saw a policewoman gunned down in the street.
Seventeen people were killed in the three-day spree that heralded a wave of Islamist violence in France that has so far claimed more than 250 lives.
The trial has sparked protests across France, with thousands of demonstrators rallying against Charlie Hebdo and the French government.
When thousands demonstrate against the prosecution of alleged murderers, you know you have a problem.
