Pension

After Annecy knife attack, French politicians stoke anti-immigrant hatreds


Last Thursday, a 31-year-old man armed with a knife attacked a playground in the French town of Annecy. He stabbed four children aged between 2 and 4, as well as two adults. The attacker, identified as Syrian refugee Abdelmasih Hanoun, was shot in the leg and then arrested by police. Following emergency surgical interventions, all the victims of the horrific attacks have survived and are out of intensive care.

According to witness reports, as Hanoun carried out the attack, he shouted the names of his wife, child and Jesus Christ. In his asylum request to French authorities, he identified himself as a Syrian Christian. On Saturday, he was charged with “attempted murder” and “rebellion with a weapon.”

Right-wing The Republicans (LR) party leader Éric Ciotti spoke in the National Assembly minutes after the attack and was reported stating, “It seems that the author has the same profile that we often find in these attacks, it will be necessary to draw all the consequences, without naivety, with force, and in lucidity.”

While the precise motives of the attack are unclear, by the time of the attack Hanoun was clearly a highly distressed individual. Hanoun fled the Syrian war in 2013, in which France and its NATO allies backed Islamist militias facing off against Syrian government troops. After spending time in Turkey he was granted asylum in Sweden. After several failed attempts to gain Swedish citizenship, he left in 2022 and arrived in France. By early 2023, he was reduced to homelessness; four days before the attack, his application for asylum in France was rejected.

This incident has been seized on by the French ruling class to stoke anti-immigrant hatred amid the explosive political crisis caused by Macron’s imposition of pension cuts opposed by the vast majority of the French people and by millions of workers who struck against the cuts.

There are now growing efforts in the political establishment to revive far-right Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin’s immigration bill and escalate attacks on immigrants and Muslims. Darmanin’s law was initially scrapped by Macron amidst the pension struggle. Macron feared that another round of deeply unpopular and repressive legislation could lead to a social and political explosion that the union bureaucracies and allied pseudo-left parties like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI) party could not control.



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