On June 8, the picturesque city of Annecy, nicknamed “the Pearl of the French Alps,” was convulsed with terror when a knife-wielding man attacked a group of preschool children in a park, at least one of whom was sat strapped into a pram. Four children and two adults were seriously injured. The attack, which was partially filmed by bystanders, horrified France—and the world. The attacker was a Syrian asylum seeker.
In recent years, France has seen a number of attacks by migrants, but to call them “attacks” minimizes the nature of the brutality involved. People aren’t just physically assaulted in the sense most Europeans are familiar with: a punch, a kick, or a push. They are stabbed repeatedly without warning or mercy. They’re run over at high speed while walking on the sidewalk. Some are even beheaded in public. In October of 2020, a French secondary school teacher by the name of Samuel Paty had his head chopped off on the streets of Éragny-sur-Oise, a Parisian suburb. The Chechen attacker in that case was an Islamic extremist called Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov. He attacked Paty with a meat cleaver.
