How One of France’s Most Notorious Terrorists Came to Be Venerated as a Hero

March 21 2023

During nine days in March 2012, Mohammed Merah killed three French soldiers in his native Toulouse and the nearby city of Montauban, before attacking a Jewish school where he murdered one adult and three children. Earlier this month, a French court convicted two men of “terrorism apologia” for posing on social media with a mock soccer jersey bearing Merah’s name and the number 7 (an apparent reference to the number of his victims). The stunt, writes Liam Duffy, is symptomatic of Merah’s status as a hero in the eyes of some Frenchmen:

Nicole Yardeni, a deputy mayor in [Toulouse], tells me that his name is sometimes viewed positively even outside of jihadist circles as “a symbol of rebellion” against society. After all, Merah is the man “who brought France to its knees,” as one local youth reminded the mother of his first victim. Even at the time of the police manhunt [for Merah] and siege [of his apartment], Facebook posts and pages honoring the gunman attracted thousands of likes, while police prevented people from laying flowers at his apartment.

Merah was no black sheep: his extended family nurtured an intense hatred of French society and Jews. His own brother, nicknamed locally after Osama Bin Laden, is thought to have joined the jihad in Iraq. His sister Souad was active in militant Salafist networks. She was part of an independent school established to raise model Muslims as defined by Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood—whose ideas had cross-pollinated in the densely populated housing estates. Souad, who declared she was “proud, proud, proud” of her brother for massacring Jews, would—like so many of Merah’s associates—eventually join Islamic State. Meanwhile, Merah’s stepbrother was the only Frenchman formally accused of crimes against humanity for his role in the Yazidi genocide.

Merah’s impact on the jihadist movement and European counterterrorism was profound, but so was his impact on Toulouse. I briefly moved to the city in the aftermath of the rampage, and the attack seemed to loom over its residents. It also weighed heavily on Toulouse’s Jewish community, as Yardeni, who headed a Jewish organization before joining the mayor’s office, estimates that hundreds of families took the . . . decision to leave.

Among those inspired by the attacks, notes Duffy, was one Mehdi Nemmouche, who eagerly followed them on television from a jail cell while they were happening, and would later fight with Islamic State in Syria before returning to Europe to kill four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels.

Read more at UnHerd

More about: Anti-Semitism, European Islam, French Jewry, ISIS, Jihadism

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023