We Weep But Never Fear: France Terror Attacks: : Ugly Face of JIHAD

Five years ago, I was trying to analyze in several workshop papers, interviews and a book chapter the main actors' discursive strategies occasioned by the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Back then, the quasi-unanimity of the French Muslim organizations' representatives took a clear stance against radical islamist terrorism and there was almost no sympathy expressed in favour of the perpetrators. Unfortunately, the recent beheading of a schoolteacher near Paris was not only followed by a less solid and clear wave of condemnations by the Muslim organizations' leaders, but was marked by an unprecedent coming-out of the radical islamist voices, embodied by some preachers, informal leaders, parents or pupils who did not hesitate to call for the pursuit of the punishment of those who "insult the Prophet" and to distribute the horrific images of the teacher's head. The knife attack in the southern French city of Nice on Thursday that killed three people and injured many more has left the country, which has barely recovered from the beheading of a schoolteacher in a Paris suburb by an 18-year-old Chechen two weeks ago, in shock and pain. The suspected Nice attacker, a 21-year-old Tunisian who is now in hospital with injuries, killed two, including an elderly woman, in a church; the other escaped to a pub nearby but later died of injuries.