Samuel Paty’s murder has still not been reckoned with

Two years ago on Sunday Samuel Paty was brutally murdered by an 18-year-old outside his school in a Parisian suburb. The teacher’s crime was to have shown an image of the prophet Mohammed during a class discussion on the freedom of expression.  

Paty’s killer was a Chechen, and it’s noteworthy that the two other major Islamist terror attacks in France in recent years – the murder of three worshippers in a Nice church and the killing of a policewoman in Rambouillet – were also the work of foreign-born terrorists.  

Homegrown Islamic terrorists are now a rarity in France. They were responsible for most of the horrific attacks that traumatised the Republic between 2012 and 2016, although these were organised by either al-Qaeda or Isis; in other words by men who had little understanding of France.  

In the immediate aftermath of the coordinated attack on Paris in November 2015, which left 130 dead, Isis released a statement exhorting French Muslims ‘to fight the infidel wherever you find him…What are you waiting for?’

But several Muslims were among those killed in Paris.