Attack on church reverberates through France
stormed into the local parish with an unnamed accomplice and slit the throat of Jacques Hamel, a beloved 85-year-old priest who was in the middle of conducting Mass.
Kermiche had frequently posted to social media urging fellow Muslims in France to immigrate to Islamic countries or perpetrate attacks on French soil, according to an analysis by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
Almost immediately after the news broke, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s former president, on Twitter proclaimed the attack to be against the “soul of France.” Likewise, Marine Le Pen, the fiery leader of France’s far-right National Front, said in a statement that the attack threatened “the cultural identity of the nation.”
For her and others, the church assault, however small, was more of a threat to the French nation than other recent attacks that claimed many more lives.
After the November attacks in Paris, for instance, when 130 people were slain at a concert hall and at cafes, Sarkozy merely said that “the terrorists have declared war.” For Le Pen, November showed that “the center of France was struck by an exceptional barbarity.”
But the slaying of a priest in a country church was somehow an attack on what makes France French.
Although it has been officially secular since 1905, France is still a country of some 45,000 Catholic churches, and its public holidays are virtually all Christian holidays.
It is also a country with one of the largest Muslim populations in Europe, where wearing the veil in public is strictly prohibited and where controversy broke out last month when the education minister floated the idea of teaching Arabic to elementary students in public schools.
“In France, it’s French culture that one must study first,” Bruno Le Maire, a conservative member of Parliament, told BFM TV at the time. The underlying assumption: “French” culture includes neither Arabic nor Islam.