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.

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.