PARIS — It was bad enough when France learned that the minute of silence for victims of the nation’s deadliest terror attacks in decades was not respected by all students. Some children contested it; others walked out. But when an 8-year-old Muslim boy proclaimed, “I am with the terrorists,” the alarm bells sounded at full strength.
The chilling call from a child so young brought into stark relief the divide between mainstream France and a portion of the Muslim population, often from neglected neighborhoods. But the official reaction — hauling the boy into the police station for questioning — also triggered debate, with many seeing it as a sign of mounting hysteria.
The fierce official backlash against expressions of Muslim extremism in the wake of this month’s Paris terrorism attacks stems in part from the sheer numbers of homegrown jihadis.
More people from France have embraced jihad in Syria and Iraq than in any other European country — more than 1,000. Dozens of these fighters have returned, feeding fears they could turn their battle skills on France.
In early January, those fears were realized, as three Frenchmen with links to Islamic terrorists went on a murderous rampage, killing journalists at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, a policewoman, a policeman and shoppers at a kosher grocery.
The French government is desperate to prevent more bloodshed. This week, it started a “stop jihad” website that mimics the media tactics of the Islamic State group luring youths to the battlefront — while, crucially, adding a dose of real-life warnings about what the siren calls from Syria can mean. They range from being killed far from home to having a role in massacres of children.
President Francois Hollande held a day-long emergency meeting Thursday with school officials, associations and mayors of poor suburbs with crime-infested housing projects — widely thought to be filled with potential jihadis. The government is trying to devise a plan to bridge the divide between the haves and have-nots and bring the values that define French citizenship to this parallel world.
The 8-year-old’s pronouncement at a school in Nice in support of the terrorists who killed 17 people this month illustrates how the issues that divide may be seeded long before adolescence.
Police interrogated the boy and his father Wednesday after the school director informed them of the Jan. 9 incident.
“I said, my son, do you know what terrorism is. He said, ‘No,’ ” the father, Mohamed Kebabsa, said later on French television. He said he told his son the killings were “barbaric … not an act of Islam.”
