A man shouting Allahu Akbar killed two women in the French city of Marseille on Sunday. On Monday, a French Muslim went on trial, the first arising from the wave of Islamic terror attacks that have hit the country recently
First terror suspect on trial
Five years ago, Mohamed Merah went on a nine-day shooting spree in southern France, gunning down a teacher and three children at a Jewish school and killing three soldiers before being shot dead by police. The March 2012 attacks were the first Islamic terror incidents on French soil since 1995, according to AFP. On Monday, his brother Abdelkader Merah’s trial opened under tight security in Paris, where he faces charges of helping to plan the assault
Anti-Semitism in Europe:
This time it’s Islam
Nearly 300 Jewish families have since left Toulouse for Israel or other countries, AFP quoted a Jewish federation CRIF as saying—adding to the estimated 20,000 who emigrated from 2014-2015, spurred by fears over anti-Semitism. And In January 2015, two days after the attack at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, an Islamic State gunman murdered four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris
Operation Sentinelle
After that, 10,000 troops were deployed across France under an anti-terrorism operation known as Sentinelle, guarding sensitive sites including synagogues and Jewish schools. This is credited with contributing to a 58.5 percent drop in reports of anti-Semitic attacks in 2016 compared to a year earlier
Yet French Jews continue to worry over their security. There was outrage over the murder of a Jewish woman in April, pushed from a third-floor window by a Muslim neighbour, and over an attack on a Jewish family in their home in the capital’s suburbs earlier this month