[ad_1]
The president of France signed the book of condolences of the diplomatic mission. “We will stand united in joy as in mourning,” he wrote in German. France has been the scene of Islamist attacks for years.
News like that from Vienna also shocks France, which has been massively terrorized. French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his solidarity with Austria. In the early afternoon, the 42-year-old made his way to the Austrian embassy on Rue Fabert in the 7th district of Paris, where he signed a book of condolences.
“The attack, Note“It shows the will of our enemies to attack what Europe is,” Macron said in front of the embassy building. Europe is a place of freedom, culture and values. The scourge of terrorism will be fought, the president continued.
In the book of condolences he wrote in German: “We will be united in joy as in pain.” And they will stick together, as he wrote in French, with a firm line under his signature. A few hours after Macron, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, makes a solidarity visit to the embassy.
Austria’s ambassador to France since 2018 is Michael Linhart (62), a career diplomat from Vorarlberg who was born in Ankara, where his father was a diplomat at the Austrian embassy.
“We will not give up”
Even before his visit to the embassy building near the Seine, Macron tweeted in German and French: “We French share the shock and sadness of the Austrians after an attack on their capital Vienna. After France, it is now a friendly country that is under attack. This is our Europe. Our enemies need to know who they are dealing with. We will not give up. “
The nation has only seen multiple attacks in recent weeks. Just a few days ago, a young man from Tunisia, who had apparently entered a refugee boat, stabbed three people in the southern French city of Nice.
Just two weeks earlier, a young Chechen man in a Paris suburb had brutally beheaded teacher Samuel Paty because of the Muhammad cartoons. And on September 25, a Pakistani seriously wounded two people with a butcher knife in front of the former offices of the satirical newspaper “Charlie Hebdo”. All of these were allegedly extremist Islamist attacks. Since then, in France there has been “the highest level of alert”. After Macron defended freedom of expression and the publication of the controversial cartoons of Muhammad after Paty’s murder, protests broke out in Muslim countries. Around 400 people demonstrated in front of the French embassy in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Monday. Thousands of Muslims also protested in Bangladesh.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had also added fuel to the fire. “As some in France say, do not buy Turkish brands,” I address my nation: do not pay attention to the products labeled in French, do not buy them. “
France has been waiting for new attacks for a long time. The country is in a “war against Islamist ideology”, as Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin recently put it. Therefore, there will be more incidents like “these terrible attacks”.
Memories of 2015
France was particularly shocked by the brutal murder of the teacher Paty. According to investigators, he was killed by an 18-year-old for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class on the subject of freedom of expression. His body was found decapitated.
The brutal act drew wounds for years: in January 2015, two terrorists allied with the al-Qaeda terrorist network assaulted the editors of the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo”, killing eleven people there and shooting another policeman as they fled.
(“Die Presse”, print edition, November 2, 2020)
