The caricatures of Muhammad published by Charlie Hebdo have acted as a powerful force to reveal the various forms Islamist terrorism has taken over the years. The terrorist attack on January 7, 2015, perpetrated by the Kouachi brothers and orchestrated by Al-Qaeda, was purely jihadist in essence. The murder of Samuel Paty, accused of blasphemy by a school parent and an Islamist agitator before being beheaded on October 16, 2020, by a radicalized young Chechen, illustrated the continuum between Islamist rhetoric and jihadist action and the harmful consequences of certain uses of social media.
A few weeks before the murder of the history-geography teacher, another attack, outside the former premises of the satirical magazine, on September 25, 2020, left two people injured. Its trial opens on Monday, January 6, and it has highlighted a third manifestation of this threat: “cultural” terrorism. This attack was not inspired by a jihadist group, nor by a controversy, stirred up in France on social media, concerning the educational content of a middle school course, but by the penal code in force in a foreign country, Pakistan, where blasphemy is punishable by death.
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