Police Question 8-Year-Old Over Shocking Support For Charlie Hebdo Terrorists


An eight-year-old was questioned in Nice, France, after saying the Charlie Hebdo journalists “got what they deserved.” France has instituted a crack-down on terrorist sympathizers, but the child is by far the youngest person to be detained for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

According to the New Zealand Herald, Ahmed, a third-grader in the southern part of Nice, said, “the French must be killed. I am with the terrorists. The Muslims did well, and the journalists got what they deserved,” referring to the Charlie Hebdo writers and cartoonists.

Afterwards, police came and took the child away for questioning.

NPR reported that the local security head, Marcel Authier, explained the action.

“In the current context, the principal of the school decided to report to police what had happened. We summoned the child and his father to try and comprehend how an 8-year-old boy could hold such radical ideas.”

He added that no formal charges have been filed against the boy or his parents, since “obviously, the child doesn’t understand what he’s saying.”

Whether or not he understands, he’s part of a growing number of French immigrant young people who refuse to condemn Islamist terrorism. Some even support the Charlie Hebdo attackers.

A BBC News report illustrated the challenges faced by French teachers in high-immigrant areas. One teacher, Anne, was shocked by the students’ reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

“It hit me in the guts, I heard: ‘They [the journalists] got what was coming to them. You do not mock the Prophet.'”

BBC also reports that Muslim children were reenacting the Charlie Hebdo shootings in a number of schools, and observing a minute of silence for the dead was difficulty for many teachers.

For other Muslim adolescents in Saint-Denis and other areas around Paris, the Charlie Hebdo attacks seemed more like a conspiracy against Muslim populations rather than a heart-breaking massacre.

“Of course it was staged,” according to a 17-year-old girl in eastern Paris, “All my friends know that.”

The theory is that right-wing government officials created the Charlie Hebdo attacks as a way of discrediting Muslim communities and raising support for their anti-immigrant policies.

Meanwhile, French authorities have been cracking down on supporters of Islamist terrorism, like 8-year-old Ahmed.

As previously reported by Inquisitr, French President Francois Hollande arrested at least 54 people for making statements supporting Islamist terrorists in one form or another — including the arrest of comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala.

In the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo, France seems to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Is free-speech an inalienable right, even if that speech is in support of terrorist acts? And does the government have the right to detain people based on speech alone?

[Image Credit: Valentina Calà/Wikimedia Commons]

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