by Michael Gurfinkiel
"Burning hatred against France and against Jews, and an orgy of domestic violence."
Originally published under the title "A Tale of Racism and Family Violence."
Abdelkader
Merah and his sister Souad are on trial in France for inspiring their
younger brother Mohamed (top) to go on a 2012 killing spree.
|
"Burning hatred against France and against Jews, and an orgy of domestic violence."
That
was how Anne Chenevat, a major witness, described the Merah family – a
divorced mother, three sons and two daughters – to the Special Criminal
Court of Paris last Tuesday.
Mohamed
Merah, the youngest of the family's sons, killed seven people –
including three Jewish children shot at point-blank range – and maimed
six others in the southern French towns of Montauban and Toulouse
between March 11 and March 19, 2012. He was himself killed by security
forces three days later.
The
main defendants in the present trial, which started three weeks ago,
are his older brother Abdelkader Merah and his older sister Souad. The
siblings are accused of inspiring the killing spree. Abdelkader was
arrested in 2012; Souad fled to Algeria.
Anne
Chenevat, a former partner of the eldest Merah brother, Abdelghani,
testified about the toxic influence of the family's Algerian-born
mother, Zuleikha Aziri. "I was routinely abused and spat upon by
Zuleikha for being 'a dirty French woman' and a 'dirty Jewess'."
|
Anne
Chenevat's importance as a witness stems from the fact that she was for
six years the partner of Abdelghani Merah, the eldest Merah brother.
According to her, Zuleikha Aziri, the Algerian-born mother, would use
electric wire to beat her children. Violence between the brothers was
rampant: on one occasion, Abdelkader inflicted seven stab wounds on
Abdelghani.
Hatred
for the non-Muslim French and antisemitism were held as self-evident in
the family." As a result, I was routinely abused and spat upon by
Zuleikha for being 'a dirty French woman' and a 'dirty Jewess',"
Chenevat said. A Catholic by birth, she once admitted to the Merahs that
she had a Jewish grandfather.
She
left Abdelghani because of his addiction to alcohol and drugs and
raised their son Theodore alone. Also called also as a witness to the
trial, Abdelghani concurred with his former companion about the Merahs'
ethnic and religious prejudices: "We all grew up hating France and the
Jews, it is a fact."
Abdelghani Merah: "We all grew up hating France and the Jews, it is a fact."
|
According
to him, Abdelkader turned to radical Islam in 2006 along with Souad and
frequently visited salafist mosques and madrasas in Egypt, and was the
main nefarious influence on Mohamed.
Theodore
Chenevat, the son of Anne Chenevat and Abdelghani Merah – now a
21-year-old business and economics student – chillingly told the Court
that in order to indoctrinate him into jihad, his uncle Abdelkader
shared with him videos of "Islamic beheading" and attempted to have him
visit mortuaries.
When
the counsel of Mohamed Merah's Jewish victims, Elie Korchia, asked him
whether Abdelkader and Mohamed should be seen as two heads of a single
terrorist beast, he answered that the fugitive older sister Souad should
be counted as a third and equally dangerous head.
The trial, which is expected to last until early November, continues.
Michael Gurfinkiel, a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, is the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think tank in France.
Source: http://www.meforum.org/6977/antisemitism-islamism-in-france
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment