The trial of six teenagers for complicity in the beheading of a teacher, Samuel Paty, in 2020 has begun in France. Paty, 47, was stabbed and decapitated near his school in a Paris suburb by an 18-year-old ethnic Chechen, Abdoullakh Anzorov, who was later shot dead at the scene by the police. Anzorov was influenced enough by social media posts alleging that Paty had shown the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Prophet Mohammed to his class to want to kill him.
Ironically, Paty had used the cartoons as part of a lecture on free speech laws, which in France allow blasphemy. When the cartoons were first published in 2015, two France-born Algerian terrorists attacked the magazine office and murdered 12 employees and injured 11. Two days later, four Jewish shoppers were shot dead at a kosher supermarket in France by a Malian Muslim. A month later, a Palestinian with Danish nationality also killed two in Copenhagen.
In 2023, just a week after Hamas terrorists swarmed out of Gaza into Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 240 people, including infants, hostage, another 20-year-old Chechen, Mohammed Mogouchkov, stabbed another teacher, Dominique Bernard, to death in France after posting a video praising ISIS. He also allegedly mentioned “his hatred for France” in the video according to the police and expressed his support for Muslims in Palestinian territories and elsewhere.
In all these cases, the Islamist perpetrators were radicalised as teenagers, either in their own neighbourhoods or when they landed in jail for petty crimes. Their age was not a deterrent to their indoctrination or their willingness to plot and murder for their religion. European authorities have still not been able to accept this uncomfortable fact, allowing many such radicalised teenagers to stay below the radar until they become the perpetrators of some bigger crime.
Five of the six teenagers charged with criminal conspiracy with intent to cause violence in the Paty case were 14-15 at the time and will appear before a juvenile court, accused of identifying him to Anzorov for $350. The sixth, a girl then aged 13, is charged with falsely telling her father that Paty asked Muslim students to leave the class before showing the cartoons but she had refused to do so. Her father then whipped up anti-Paty sentiment that came to Anzorov’s notice.
The videos made Anzorov drive 60 miles to Paty’s school to kill him. Unable to identify the teacher, he asked for help from a local boy who roped in four more. Allegedly believing he wanted to just record a video berating the teacher, they stayed with him till Paty emerged, rather than discourage him or report him to authorities. No wonder the Paty family lawyer, Virginie Le Roy, said “the role of minors was fundamental in the sequence of events” that led to murder.
There is no information about whether the five male teenagers are Muslims or even immigrants, although they did spend a lot of time with the Chechen killer that day and learnt something about his views, as their subsequent debriefing revealed. And despite being part of France’s strictly secular school system and a society that traditionally upholds the right to offend (even religious sentiments) the five teenagers saw nothing wrong with Anzorov’s ostensible intention.
It may be remembered that the surviving bomber of the 2013 Boston Marathon, the Chechen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was also just 19 when he and his older brother Tamerlan detonated two loaded pressure cookers, killing three bystanders (one just 8 years old) and later also murdered a policeman. The role of even their mother Zubeidat in radicalisation was established by her conversations with them taped by Russian agencies that suspected them of Islamist sympathies.
Tamerlan died in a subsequent encounter and Dzhokhar was sentenced to death for his role in the planning and execution of the act. Photos and CCTV grabs showed that Dzhokhar, a college student, deliberately placed a pressure cooker filled with explosives, nails and ball bearings (to cause maximum damage) behind a row of children watching the runners go by. While on the run he also wrote notes outlining his jihadi beliefs, uncoloured by teenage ‘innocence’.
There is obviously an urgent need to examine the definition of children—as distinct from adolescents, teenagers or even young adults—within the broad term of “minors” or “juveniles”. There should also be much sharper guidelines on the establishment of the culpability and complicity of various categories of “minors” in crimes and now, sadly, terror incidents. That all women cannot be given a blank exemption from such culpability either also needs to be faced squarely.
In this context, as the release of hostages taken by Hamas happens in Gaza, Egypt and Israel this week, there is a move to project a false equivalence between them and the reciprocal freeing of three times as many Palestinians from Israeli jails. The specious narrative being forwarded is that it’s like-for-like: just “women and children” on both sides are being released, implying the reasons for their incarceration are also similar. But the two are not alike in any way.
The predominantly male crowd surrounding the buses carrying freed Palestinian women and “children”—in actual fact teenage males between the ages of 14 and 18—can be heard chanting Allahu Akbar, which cannot really be wished away as slogans for peace and amity. And many of those released teens are known to be affiliated with Hamas, Fatah, or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which also does not augur well for cessation of hostilities on any long-term basis.
Most of the freed Palestinian women committed acts of aggression against Israelis both civilian and military, although it is debatable whether those incidents merited jail as punishment. But the Jewish women snatched early in the morning from their homes or from a party in the desert by Hamas terrorists were non-combatants and were not aggressive. They did not protest, nor did they throw stones, shout slogans or even brandish kitchen knives at their attackers and captors.
Their ‘innocence’ did not stop or curtail the orgy of murder and violence carried out by Hamas terrorists and other Gazans who followed them into Israeli territory on October 7, 2023. It was even recorded by them to use as propaganda to encourage fellow jihadis and torment Israeli “enemies”. Many videos were recovered from the hundreds of Hamas attackers killed inside Israeli territory but many were also promptly aired on social media and TV channels.
In one sickening video of what we now know to be that of the German-Israeli peace activist Shani Louk, the crowds that spat on her splayed dead body in the back of a truck in Gaza were not just Hamas terrorists. They were “ordinary” Gaza residents, including women and teenage boys like the ones released by Israel over the last three days. The way “ordinary” West Bank Palestinians also cheered teenagers released from Israeli jails did not portend peace.
Besides the impact of radical Islam on young minds, repeated incidents of teenage American boys killing people, in many cases teachers and students of their own schools, underline the fallacy of using age as an extenuating circumstance for serious criminal intent and even use of weapons, which is why the 15-year-old shooter accused of killing four and injuring seven in a Michigan school in 2021 will now face trial as an adult for terrorism and first-degree murder.
People seem to have forgotten that the Moscow theatre attack in 2002 and the Beslan school attack of 2004—both with many hostages and high casualties including children—had male and female terrorists, including teenagers. The presumptive innocence of women and the fuzzy definition of children has exposed to Hamas and other terrorists the soft underbelly of their enemies. Unless the world acts, more attacks may be carried out by those still least expected to do so.
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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