Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Associated Press
PARIS
When militants loyal to the Islamic State group seek to inflict pain on Europe, France is their preferred target, a grim reality borne out yet again with Tuesday’s knife slaughter of a Catholic priest.
Since January 2015, IS-inspired attackers have killed at least 235 people in France, by far the largest casualty rate of any Western country. French citizens or French-speaking residents have committed the overwhelming majority of strikes, often employing suicide tactics alongside command of their home surroundings.
President Francois Hollande argues that France is their top enemy on the continent because of his homeland’s reputation as a cradle of human rights and democracy.
“If terrorists strike us, it is because they know what France represents,” Hollande said after this month’s Bastille Day truck attack that killed 84 people on Nice’s crowded waterfront.
Analysts agree that Islamic State propagandists particularly target France as a land anchored in secular values, liberal freedoms and life’s pleasures. But its colonial history, demographic tensions and interventionist policies against militant Muslims abroad point to deeper reasons why anti-Western killers seek so ruthlessly to bring grief to France’s door.
The IS group crossed a new threshold Tuesday in its war against the West, as two of its followers targeted a church in Normandy, slitting the throat of an elderly priest celebrating Mass and using hostages as human shields before being shot by police.
It was the extremist group’s first attack against a church in the West, and fulfills longstanding threats against “crusaders” in what the militants paint as a centuries-old battle for power. One of the attackers had tried twice to leave for Syria; the second was not identified.
“To attack a church, to kill a priest, is to profane the republic,” Hollande told the nation after speaking with Pope Francis, who condemned the killing in the strongest terms.
The Rev. Jacques Hamel was celebrating Mass for three nuns and two parishioners on a quiet summer morning in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray when the attackers burst in and forced the 85-year-old priest to his knees before slicing his throat, according to authorities and a nun who escaped.
The nun described seeing the attackers film themselves and give a sermon in Arabic around the altar before she fled.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the other hostages were used as human shields to block police from entering. One 86-year-old parishioner was wounded.