ISIS fighters target ‘Crusader coalition’ in Europe

CALAIS, France—Monday’s killing of Father Jacques Hamel at a parish church in Normandy could have been a parable on Western secularism confronting radical Islam, were the attack not so shockingly grisly.

Terrorists beheaded the 86-year-old Catholic priest in an assault during morning Mass at his St. Etienne-du-Rouvray church outside Rouen. The two knife-wielding men, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they stormed the church and took hostages, also seriously wounded a nun. A day after the attack, Islamic State (ISIS) released a video showing the two attackers pledging allegiance to the group. Both attackers were shot dead by police.

Hamel, who retired nearly a decade ago but remained active in the church, died on ground twice delivered by Allied forces from conquest. Not far away are buried nearly 10,000 Americans who died in the D-Day invasion at Normandy. The area is also near sites of the bloodiest battles of World War I, battlefields spanning northern France and Belgium known as “Flanders Fields,” which resulted in nearly half a million Allied casualties and marked the first use of poison gas in modern warfare.

A century later, France finds itself on the frontier of another new and bloody conflict. The Normandy attack came 12 days after a truck attack in Nice linked to ISIS killed 84. Eight months ago, coordinated ISIS attacks in Paris killed 129 and injured more than 352, and in January 2015, the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris killed 17. It also coincided with multiple attacks in Germany: a July 23 shopping center shooting in Munich that killed nine, a knife and ax incident on a train in Wurzburg, and a July 24 suicide bombing in Ansbach that injured about a dozen people. Each of the attacks involved perpetrators with alleged terrorist ties and Muslim backgrounds, and the Ansbach bomber was a recent migrant.

The Normandy attack highlights an underreported trend of targeting Christians and Jews in France.

“The two executors of the attack on a church in Normandy, France, were soldiers of the Islamic State,” read a statement posted by the Islamic State’s Amaq News agency the day of the attack. “They executed the operation in response to calls to target countries belonging to the crusader coalition.”

Sister Danielle, a nun who survived the attack, said one of the attackers took Hamel’s place at the altar “and started preaching in Arabic.” She said the two men then forced Hamel to kneel and filmed themselves as they cut his throat.

A long list of attacks against Christian worship sites and cemeteries in France is little noted outside Catholic media and some French language news sites, said Lela Gilbert, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute who lives in Jerusalem. According to her analysis, 810 such attacks took place in 2015. In 2016, clergy report three attacks in Martigues, where fire was set to the altar of a church and its priest was later beaten. Crosses were discovered shattered at a cemetery in Chapelle-du-Bard.

“For political and ideological reasons, whenever possible French politicians (along with many other European authorities) continue to downplay such attacks,” Gilbert writes.

France, like other EU nations, is housing an increasingly restive migrant population predominantly from the Middle East and North Africa and predominantly Muslim, taking in approximately 340,000 since 2014. That puts potentially radicalized ISIS adherents in the heart of France’s rural north, which has a long Catholic history and where churches still dominate every village skyline.

Illegal migrant camps, called “jungles” for their lawlessness, have popped up in northern France, including the infamous Calais Jungle not far from Tuesday’s attack. French police moved into the Jungle on July 20 during a visit I made to the camp, closing down several sectors. Someone reportedly killed a migrant there overnight only hours before the Normandy attack.

The French population hovers at 61 percent Christian, but in reality, Bible-believing Christians who are regular church-goers make up only about 1 percent of the population. The government of President Francois Hollande has tried to downplay the religious aspects of recent attacks, but Hollande acknowledged this week his country is now “at war” with ISIS.

On Tuesday, Hamel was leading the church service in the absence of its regular priest when the attackers burst in.

“He was very popular, a good man, simple and without extravagance. We benefited greatly from his experience and wisdom at the parish,” priest Moanda Phuati told Le Figaro. Sister Danielle told the BBC Hamel was “a faithful priest” and one “who loved much.”