French teacher beheaded after showing Muhammad cartoons
PARIS ( Reuters) – A middle school history teacher in France was beheaded near the school where earlier this month he had shown his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, considered blasphemous by Muslims, French officials said on Friday.
The attacker was shot dead by a police patrol a few streets away from the scene of the attack late on Friday afternoon, in a residential suburb northwest of Paris.
The teenager, identified by prosecutors as Abdoulakh A., lived with his family and had never appeared on the radar of French intelligence agencies. The 18- year- old had a record of juvenile delinquency but was too young for police to have built up a file on him. He lived in a Chechen community that is not well understood by intelligence services.
French police have arrested nine people in connection with the attack, police sources said yesterday.
Investigators are trying to establish whether the attacker had acted alone or had accomplices. French media reported that he was an 18- year- old of
Chechen origin.
Witnesses heard the assailant shout “Allahu Akbar” or “God is Greatest,” a police source said.
Four relatives of the attacker, including a minor, were detained in the immediate
took place some five years ago indicated that nearly 8,000 distinct Jewish families in the district. However, she added that Jewish voters usually turn out to vote at a high rate.
“And so I consider it to be a really important part of my constituency, notwithstanding the relatively small size,” she told the Post.
“I have found that apart from Israel and antisemitism, which are two obviously huge topics for most Jewish voters, Jewish voters as a whole also have all the same interests that other voters do,” she continued. “How much is my healthcare going to cost? How good is my healthcare going to be? How much am I paying for prescription drugs? Are we taking care of our senior citizens? Those kinds of issues cross pretty much all political lines of religious and ethnic lines. Israel is important, and it’s certainly important in a race where you have two Jewish women running against each other.”
She said that one opinion she shares with Scheller is regarding Iran. “We both believe that a nuclear- free Iran is the only kind of Iran that we can tolerate. I don’t believe that Joe Biden’s position, by any means, is to just reenter the JCPOA as it existed previously,” she added.
“I don’t think that if we were as a country to reenter it, it would be under the same circumstances or terms. And I think that, frankly, a Biden administration would probably have a hard time getting the consent of Congress to reenter the JCPOA that previously existed.”
Scheller, in an interview with the Post, said she is convinced that Biden is going to reenter the Iran deal. “I believe that the Iran deal is an arrangement that provides a certain path to a nuclear Iran with missile capacity to destroy Israel and ultimately target the United States,” she said. “I think it was flawed from the very beginning, and it provided the means for Iran to officially continue to enrich uranium. And Obama and Biden let this happen. They were part of it. Biden was part of this deal. So I don’t see why he would want to get back into it. And you know what? When you aim missiles at Israel, you aim missiles at Jews. And that’s very concerning to me.”
Another area of disagreement, Scheller noted, is the position towards the two- state solution. “I think the two- state solution might possibly work, but I don’t believe it should be a mandate coming from the United States,” she said. “And there was a House resolution earlier this year that said the two- state solution is the only way to achieve peace in the Middle East. And when that happens, my concern then becomes that as it’s mandated, it becomes a basis for conditions to be placed on the support [ for Israel].”
Scheller said that the US- Israel relationship is a factor in the Lehigh Valley because the Jewish community wants to know their representatives’ values and their policies. “I think that the US- Israel relationship needs to be protected, and I don’t think what’s coming from the Left is working towards protecting that relationship, particularly when it comes to things like the Iran deal.”
Asked about whether she believes that the community could come together after the election, she said: “I hate to see politics in our houses of worship, so I hope that people can come together.” •