After attacks, French PM says radical Islamism is the ‘enemy’
At Nice memorial for killing victims, Jean Castex says the ideology ‘distorts the Muslim religion by twisting its scriptures’

NICE, France — French Prime Minister Jean Castex on Saturday lamented the killings of three people murdered by a knife attacker in the Mediterranean city of Nice, and named “radical Islamism” as an “enemy” of the country.
“We know the enemy, it has not only been identified but has a name, it’s radical Islamism,” Castex told a memorial service in Nice, recalling that the city had already paid a “heavy toll” when 86 people were killed in a 2016 truck ramming attack against a crowd on France’s July 14 national day.
Radical Islamism is “a political ideology which distorts the Muslim religion by twisting its scriptures,” he added.
“Every time it’s France that’s in the sights, is the target of terrorism,” Castex said.
In response to the Nice attack, believed to have been carried out by a recently-arrived Tunisian migrant, French President Emmanuel Macron has begun pushing for tighter security at the external borders of Europe’s Schengen free-travel zone.
With the continent also stunned after a gunman killed four in the Austrian capital Vienna on Monday, France has already doubled the number of guards on borders with its EU neighbors, to 4,800, and raised its terror alert level to the highest setting.
Ministers are also pressing North African former colonies Tunisia and Algeria to take back their citizens convicted in France of terrorism offenses.

The Nice attack echoed the killing two weeks earlier of schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee after showing his class cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed during a lesson on freedom of speech.
In September, a man had attacked people outside the former offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, which originally published the caricatures.
In a country on edge, 200 investigations were opened last week alone for supporting terrorism, death threats, insults or hate speech related to Paty’s killing.
Numbers were “exploding,” a judicial source said. “We have many threats targeting politicians, the president, the prime minister, several ministers, MPs, teachers,” with many referring to “decapitation.”
But Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz noted that the probes target “all kinds of people, radicalized people but also people with mental health problems or who send a message without realizing how serious it is.”
A number of schoolchildren have been targeted in probes over support for terrorism, some after joking about or sharing pictures of Paty’s death.

In October, French President Emmanuel Macron called Islam a religion “in crisis” worldwide, and insisted that “no concessions” would be made in a new drive to eradicate extremist religious teaching in schools and mosques.

At the same time, Macron said France must do more to offer economic and social mobility to immigrant communities, adding radicals had often filled the vacuum.
He said extremists were seeking to indoctrinate new converts across France, which has one of the largest Muslim populations in Europe.
He denounced a trend of “Islamist separatism” that flouts French rules and seeks to create a “counter-society” holding its own laws above all others.
Macron’s drive against radical Islamism led to mass protests in Muslim countries. Hardline Islamic groups seized on the French government’s staunch secularist stance as an affront to Islam, rallying their supporters and stirring up rage.
Caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, republished by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to mark the opening of the trial for the deadly 2015 attack against the publication, have stirred the ire of Muslims across the world who consider depictions of the prophet blasphemous.

Macron’s staunch support of free speech has led tens of thousands to protest against him across the globe, with many burning his photos and calling for his death.
Calls to boycott French products have also spread, and social media has been pulsing with anti-France hashtags. Muslim leaders have loudly criticized France for what they see as the government’s provocative and anti-Muslim stance.