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NICE, France – A terrorist attack that killed three people in Nice on Thursday left France increasingly under siege at home and abroad as the government called for tougher measures against Islamist extremism amid mounting tensions with Muslim nations.
An assailant with a knife left two people dead in Nice’s imposing neo-Gothic basilica, including a 60-year-old woman who was nearly beheaded, and a third victim died after taking refuge in a nearby bar.
The attack in Nice came less than two weeks after the beheading of a teacher shook the nation and led President Emmanuel Macron to suggest that Islam needed an Enlightenment.
Jean-François Ricard, France’s top counterterrorism prosecutor, said the suspected killer was a Tunisian, born in 1999, who had entered France after arriving in Italy on September 20. He said the man, who was unknown to French authorities, was arrested after lashing out at police officers while shouting “Allahu akbar”, and was hospitalized with serious injuries.
“Clearly it is France that is under attack,” Macron said after quickly traveling to Nice. The French authorities placed a nervous country at its highest level of terrorist threat.
The killings came at a time when the government’s recent words and deeds have pitted it against Muslims in France and abroad, including heads of state such as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. What many French see as their country’s uncompromising defense of their security and freedom of expression, is seen by many Muslims as a scapegoat and a blasphemous insult to their religion.
Just a few weeks ago, Macron called for an “Islam of the enlightenment” and “an Islam that can be at peace with the republic,” in what he described as a renewed struggle against radicalism and challenges to the nation’s secular ideals. Since the teacher’s assassination in a Paris suburb, his government has deployed a wide network against what it has characterized as Islamist extremism, irritating many French Muslims and provoking a strong rebuke from Muslim nations.
The measures have included the expulsion of imprisoned foreigners suspected of having terrorist ties, the carrying out of raids and the recruitment of a Muslim group whom he accuses of “defending radical Islam” and hate speech. But few of those affected by the measures had any direct connection to the beheading of the teacher, who was killed by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee.
The scope of the government’s response and the sharp language of some of its leaders have left Macron exposed to criticism that he is politicizing the attack and playing with voters who might otherwise defect to his rivals on the far right. His education minister has described left-wing politicians as apologists for Islamists. His interior minister has linked “political Islam” to terrorism and has even disparaged Muslim-oriented food aisles in supermarkets.
The Palestinians have called for a “day of rage” against France. Protests and boycotts of French products have gained ground from Bangladesh to Qatar. And Muslim leaders have condemned Macron for what they describe as a kind of collective punishment of Muslims in France.
On Thursday, French officials were particularly outraged by comments on Twitter from Mahathir Mohamad, a former Malaysian prime minister, who said that Muslims had the right to “kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.” The French government quickly asked Twitter to suspend Mr. Mahathir’s account for inciting hatred and violence. The post was later removed.
None of that has shaken the determination of the French government, or much of its public, that the crackdown is justified in a country that has been the target of dozens of attacks, large and small, by Islamist extremists since 2015 that have left more 200 dead. The most recent murders in particular, first outside a public school and then in a church, have struck two central pillars of French identity.
“If they attack us once again it is for the values that are ours,” Macron said, including freedom of worship and freedom of expression. “We won’t give up anything.”
Yet both inside and outside France, the attacks have ignited a significant and tense moment in the life of a country that has long struggled to integrate Europe’s largest Muslim population.
Thursday’s attack had disturbing echoes of that assassination, and immediately strengthened calls among some French authorities for even tougher measures that could further polarize the country.
“Enough is enough,” Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi told BFM TV. “Now is the time for France to waive peacetime laws to permanently wipe out Islamo-fascism from our territory.”
In Nice, as dozens of people stood in front of the Notre Dame de l’Assomption basilica on Thursday afternoon, tensions were tangible, and perhaps worsened by the fact that France is about to enter a blockade of a month to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
As a local imam spoke to reporters and asked people not to mistake Muslims for terrorists, a resident of a local building shouted “Go away!” from your balcony.
Imen Gharbi, a 24-year-old Tunisian who has been studying art history in Nice for two years, said she was concerned about the atmosphere in recent days. “This attack shocks me, it is disgusting and like everyone else I condemn it, but we must not group Muslims and terrorists together,” he said.
Ms Gharbi, who is Muslim, said she felt attacked by people’s comments about Islamic terrorism. “People are angry and I don’t feel safe anymore.”
Christian Aucler, a retired tax adviser, said the teacher’s beheading and murder on Thursday were evidence that the pillars of French society were under attack.
“It is clear that there is a religion that is trying to take over our principles,” Aucler said, adding: “The French are very attached to their history, to their culture. Seeing parts of their civilization attacked and questioned is something they experience very badly. “
Ricard said the suspect in Nice had been recorded by surveillance cameras Thursday morning at the city’s main train station, where he could be seen turning his jacket inside out and changing his shoes before heading to the basilica. . Inside the church, he said, the man slit the 60-year-old victim’s throat so deeply that he nearly beheaded her.
The series of attacks in the last five years has brought France to the political right. The Charlie Hebdo cartoons, which many French would have once considered youthful, provocative and even intolerant, have become proof of France’s commitment to its secular ideals, while for many Muslims they are inherently offensive.
In 2006, when Charlie Hebdo first published the cartoons, then-Conservative President Jacques Chirac denounced the publication, saying that the founding of the Republic was also based on “the values of tolerance and respect for all religions.” . Macron defended his reissue as the “right to blasphemy.”
With his sights set on the 2022 presidential election, Macron, whose popularity has been hurt by the government’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic, has moved to the right on issues such as crime and the place of Islam in France.
“I think there are some issues where we can dilute our words,” said Morgan Manzi, a 42-year-old construction worker, who had arrived at the basilica on Thursday afternoon. “I think peace is sometimes better than freedom of expression.”
Manzi, who described himself as an atheist, said he was concerned about the rise in tension in recent days following comments from government officials and his uncompromising defense of the reissue of the cartoons. He added: “There will be retaliation.”
The long avenue in front of the Notre-Dame Basilica was a whirlwind of rumors and comments Thursday night, with passersby debating immigration, the government’s counter-terrorism response and the violence plaguing the country.
Some 200 members of a local far-right group protested loudly in front of the basilica, singing the national anthem, La Marseillaise.
Standing in the crowd was Abdelkader Sadouni, the imam the woman had yelled at on her balcony.
“Our religion is light years away from this, there is no way any Muslim will approve of this,” he said. But he was worried out loud that the terrorist attacks had instilled fear of Islam in the national psyche.
Mr. Sadouni said that the terrorists were “breaking this national union to which we aspire.”
“It worries me, that is what they are looking for and they are achieving it,” he said.
Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut reported from Nice. The reports were contributed by Aurelien Breeden in Paris and Elian Peltier and Megan Specia in London.
