A mother in denial over her monster of a son . . .
The mother of one of the jihadists who cut the throat of an 85-year-old priest as he conducted Mass in a church in rural France has rushed to defend her son. She insisted 19-year-old Abdelmalik Petitjean, who was shot dead by police, was a ‘good’ lad. ‘I didn’t produce a devil,’ she added. ‘he’s a good Frenchman. he’s soft. he’s not implicated in any of this. I know my kid. he’s not the monster people want us to believe.’
The truth, sadly, is that he was nothing less than a monster.
Along with his accomplice Adel Kermiche, 19, he forced an elderly parishioner to film the savage murder of Father Jacques hamel on his iPhone, and took nuns hostage to use as human shields when he was trying to escape.
It is inconceivable that such fanaticism could grow in the heart of a young man unnoticed. Yet we are being told by Yamina Petitjean that he was just a normal kid and there was never any inkling that something was wrong.
This is not the first time the parent of a teenage jihadist has protested the innocence of their child.
When three British schoolgirls fled to Syria to become jihadist brides last year, the father of one blamed police for failing to stop her and said he could think of ‘nothing’ to explain why she had run off to join IS.
Yet it soon emerged he had taken her to an extremist rally held by banned terror group Al-Muhajiroun when she was 13, and he was forced to concede it might have influenced her.
In the case of the French murderer, he was known to the security services and had been on a watch list because he had tried to join IS in Syria.
But if he was on the intelligence radar, surely his mother must have spotted something was amiss as he turned into an fanatic under her nose.
The majority of Muslims set great store by the family and their community, doting on their young and caring for elderly relatives in a manner that, in some ways, puts many of us in the West to shame.
Perhaps it was Yamina Petitjean’s devotion to her son that blinded her to the reality of his radicalisation.
Perhaps she just refused to believe that she was, indeed, rearing a monster.
Of course, most Muslims in the West are decent people, but I am afraid the truth is that jihadists come mostly from Muslim backgrounds. This means parents like Yamina Petitjean and the father of the British schoolgirl who fled to Syria cannot afford to remain in denial about their responsibilities.
If they continue to do so, the West will never be safe from Islamic terror.