Musab Younis

The point-blank shooting by police officers of 17-year-old Nahel M. during a traffic stop in Nanterre last Tuesday was not a unique occurrence. On 7 June, three weeks before Nahel’s death, police in Paris killed a 21-year-old passenger in a car that had allegedly refused to stop for a check. The passenger was not named in media reports; she was described only as a ‘young woman’. On 14 June, two weeks before Nahel’s death, a 19-year-old Guinean supermarket logistics worker, Alhoussein Camara, was shot dead near Angoulême at a roadside checkpoint.

There was an illegal demonstration for Palestine in northern Paris on Sunday, 15 May. It was quelled by 4200 police officers under the command of the city’s police chief, Didier Lallement. Protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza had been banned on the direct order of President Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin. They might be composed of ‘risky elements’, Darmanin warned. He asked the police to be ‘particularly vigilant and firm’.

It might seem bizarre to blame the murder of the French schoolteacher Samuel Paty on a nebulous conspiracy of leftist academics, given that the perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, was an 18-year-old who had never been to university. But earlier this month in Le Monde, 100 French academics gave their backing to Jean-Michel Blanquer, the education minister, when he responded to the murder with a flood of invective against universities. ‘Islamo-leftism is wreaking havoc,’ he said. Paty’s murderer had been ‘conditioned by people who encourage’ a type of ‘intellectual radicalism’ and promote ‘ideas that often come from elsewhere’, i.e. from across the Atlantic. ‘The fish rots from the head,’ he added darkly. Blanquer was following the example of the president of the republic.

A year ago today, a boat carrying about 145 people, almost all of them Somalis with official refugee documents, was on its way to Sudan from Yemen. It was passing through the narrow Bab el-Mandeb strait when it came under fire. The shots, a confidential report to the UN Security Council confirmed four months later, were ‘almost certainly’ fired from a machine-gun mounted on a helicopter. Only ‘the Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces,’ it added, ‘have the capability to operate armed utility helicopters in the area.’ (They are Apache helicopters, made in the United States.)

Muhammad Rabbani, the director of the advocacy organisation Cage, was charged on Wednesday at Bethnal Green police station with 'wilfully obstructing or seeking to frustrate a search examination' under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Detained at Heathrow Airport in November 2016 on his way back from the Middle East – where, he says, he ‘had secured instructions from a client of ours to take legal action in a case involving torture’ – Rabbani refused to provide border guards with the passwords to his electronic devices. He faces three months in prison and a £2500 fine.