In two separate incidents in March, Mohammed Merah, a French-born French citizen who thought he was waging jihad, ambushed four soldiers around Toulouse, killing three of them. A week later, he shot dead three children arriving for morning classes at a nearby Jewish school, along with a young rabbi who was father to two of them. The children were aged eight, six, and three. Merah recorded the killings on a micro-camera mounted around his neck and sent the footage to Al Jazeera, which did not air it. Shortly before he died by gunfire, Merah told the soldiers who had surrounded his apartment that he regretted not having done more of what he did.
These were crazy deeds, and one can argue about what role insanity played in them, but something else needs to be candidly acknowledged: the killer was not a lone wolf. He had a measure of community support and a great deal of family support. His brother Abdelkader professed himself â??proudâ? of his relation to the murderer. His mother refused to convince her son to surrender to police. His father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit against the French state. The contemporary culture of politicized Islam, as deracinated Internet-surfers understand it, is what Merah believed he was fighting for. He was upset about French laws that limit the wearing of the Muslim veil among schoolgirls. Someone had whipped him into a frenzy over Israelâ??s occupation of the West Bank.
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