A 15-year-old supporter of Islamic State who slashed a Jewish teacher with a machete in Marseille, saying he was “proud” of it, is to face terrorism charges for attempted murder.



The case, which has shocked France, has raised questions about how to deal with radicalised lone attackers. It has also sparked intense debate over how France’s Jewish community, which has become the target of an increasing number of violent incidents, should protect itself and whether Jewish men should stop wearing their kippas, or skullcaps, in public.

Teenager with machete attacks Jewish teacher in Marseille Read more

The teenage attacker, a high-school student who had no history of psychological problems or trouble with the law, struck at 9am on Monday, attacking Benjamin Amsellem, a 35-year-old teacher at a Jewish school in the southern port city of Marseille who was walking to work wearing traditional dress and a kippa.

The boy repeatedly slashed Amsellem with a machete, wounding him in the back and hand. Amsellem fell to the ground and protected himself with the Torah he was carrying. He later told the local paper La Provence that he had seen hatred in his attacker’s eyes. “I told him to stop hitting me but he carried on and I didn’t think I’d get out of it alive.”

The teenager, who comes from an ethnic Kurdish family who arrived in France from Turkey five years ago, told investigators he was proud of the attack and felt ashamed that he had not managed to kill the teacher.

Brice Robin, the Marseille state prosecutor, said the teenager told police he had acted “in the name of Allah and Islamic State”.

He also said he wanted to attack police and get hold of firearms. Another source close to the investigation told local media that the teenager had said: “I don’t represent Daesh [Isis], they represent me.”

Prosecutors described the teenager as a student with good grades from a normal family background who became radicalised via websites. His family and those around him said they were unaware of his radicalisation. No trace of radical websites was found on his computer, only on his mobile phone. He was not known to intelligence services.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People stand in front of the Jewish school in Marseille after the attack. Photograph: Bertrand Langlois/AFP/Getty Images

He first became interested in jihadi theories in March 2014 after seeing documentaries arguing that Muslims were persecuting westerners. A police source told local media that websites the teenager came across argued that westerners were persecuting Muslims and that he agreed with what he read.

A leader of Marseille’s Jewish community, Zvi Ammar, sparked intense debate after the attack when he urged Jewish men and boys to stop wearing their skullcaps in public for their own safety.



Ammar recommended Jewish men and boys stop wearing the kippa “until better days”. He told Agence France-Presse: “Unfortunately for us, we are targeted. As soon as we are identified as Jewish we can be assaulted and even risk death.” He added: “We have to hide ourselves a little bit,” saying that making such an appeal made him “sick to the stomach”.

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Ammar later told La Provence newspaper. “It really hurts to reach that point but I don’t want anyone to die in Marseille because they have a kippa on their head.”

In France, which is still marked by its second world war history when a collaborationist government helped round up and deport more than 75,000 French citizens and Jewish refugees to the Nazi concentration camps, the notion that Jews must take off their kippas and hide themselves has been difficult to accept.

Some Jewish leaders rejected the call, with France’s chief rabbi, Haïm Korsia, saying: “We should not give an inch, we should continue wearing the kippa.”

Roger Cukierman, the head of the country’s umbrella grouping of Jewish organisations, CRIF, agreed, saying the call reflected a defeatist attitude.

Joel Mergui, president of the Israelite Central Consistory of France, said of Ammar’s recommendations: “He knows as well as I do that wearing a kippa or not will not resolve the issue of terrorism. If we have to give up wearing any distinctive sign of our identity, it clearly would raise the question of our future in France.”

The attack was the third in recent months on Jews in Marseille, the Mediterranean city that is home to the second largest Jewish population in France after Paris.



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In October a knife-wielding, drunk assailant attacked three Jews near a synagogue in the city. In November, another Jewish teacher was stabbed by people shouting antisemitic slogans and support for Isis.

Last week, France marked the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo and Paris kosher supermarket attacks in January 2015 which left 17 people dead, including four Jewish people killed by a gunman in a bloody hostage-taking at a kosher grocery store. The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, told a commemoration for the Jewish victims of the supermarket attack: “Without the Jews of France, France would not be France.”

France’s Jewish community is estimated to number 500,000 and 600,000, the largest in Europe and one of the largest in the world.

