The prosecutor’s office in Orléans, the historical site of Joan of Arc’s victory over the English, has launched an investigation into student rioters chanting a rap song honoring Islamist militants who massacred 137 French nationals, including three Jewish children.
That is what the victory of Islamization looks like: the target itself appropriating the language that ideologues seek to impose.
Emmanuelle Bochenek-Puren, public prosecutor at the Orléans judicial court, announced her inquiry on October 6 after videos of pupils storming the François-Villon high school in Beaugency while singing praise to jihadis Mohamed Merah and Salah Abdeslam went viral on X.
The rap song, titled M*R*H (a reference to Mohamed Merah) and performed by the rapper BORO700, has the French lyrics:
Bataclan, I shot him with my eyes, manhunt, Salah Abdeslam.
Bro, in hell, there’s a bounty on my head,
I’m unleashed like a hellhound.
Tell your rapper to let me do my thing,
Woe betide him if he doesn’t cooperate, bro; I’ll pull an Adolf Hitler on him.
The rap lyrics also target Christian Estrosi and Éric Ciotti, the former and current mayors of Nice. The prosecutor has filed charges of “apology for terrorism” and “apology for terrorism by a communications service.” However, at the time of this writing, police have not yet arrested any of the protesters.
Student rioters in several other French cities also sang the offensive rap song while protesting outside their schools. A video from Brive-la-Gaillarde showed the rap track blasting from a sound system as students protested.
Unprecedented student riots have rocked France since September 28, forcing hundreds of schools to close, as images of students setting alight trash cans, manning barricades, assaulting teachers and clashing with police have gone viral on social media.
Students have complained of understaffing and lack of funding. However, addressing parliament, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused the radical-left and pro-Islamist La France Insoumise (LFI) party of seeking to “sow chaos” ahead of presidential elections in seven months.
“What’s happening in France is nothing less than out-of-control mass migration. This isn’t about schools; this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great country!” U.S. President Donald Trump posted on social media.
Who The Protesters Are Lionizing
Between March 11 and March 19, 2012, Mohamed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin, carried out a series of jihadi attacks in Toulouse and Montauban, killing seven people, including two soldiers, a rabbi, and three Jewish children aged 3, 5 and 8 years old. Merah chased the 8-year-old girl, Miriam Monsonego, and grabbed her by the hair, paused to reload, then shot her in the head.
“The Islamic faith has nothing to do with the insane motivations of this man,” former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, responding to the murders, even though Merah had used a GoPro camera to record his attacks and make video of them set to music and verses from the Qur’an.
Salah Abdeslam was the only surviving member of the 10-man ISIS cell that carried out the November 2015 jihadi attacks in Paris, killing 130 and injuring more than 490. The deadliest attack was at the Bataclan, a historic theatre and concert hall, where 89 people were killed.
Jihadis with AK-47 rifles fired on diners at the Le Carillon restaurant and moved to Le Petit Cambodge, a Cambodian restaurant, killing 15 people. Militants also shot dead five and wounded eight at the restaurant La Casa Nostra, the Café Bonne Bière, and a laundromat. They then attacked the La Belle Équipe, a popular restaurant, killing 19 and critically wounding nine others.
Islamism’s Use of Jihadi Rap: A Growing Phenomenon
Explaining the use of the jihadi rap song, Yana Grinshpun, a senior lecturer at the Sorbonne University and author of The Making of Contemporary Propaganda Discourse: How and Why Does It Work?, told Focus on Western Islamism that “the Islamization of culture has been part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s project for years.”
“Rap, as a popular genre, is an ideal field for the Brotherhood’s ideologues to conquer. Initially a marginal phenomenon, it very quickly conquered the musical space aimed at French youth,” Grinspun noted. “Songs are an excellent means of indoctrination used by propaganda systems, because they act on the intellect, emotions, and body.”
“We can see the effects of the successful Islamization of consciousness through rap by watching young native-born French people repeat the lyrics of this call to murder and internalize them. That is what the victory of Islamization looks like: the target itself appropriating the language that ideologues seek to impose,” Grinshpun, a researcher at the Transatlantic Institute for the Study of Contemporary Ideologies (TISCI), warned.
Catholic Diocese Asks Parishioners Not to Conflate Attack on Church With Islam
Meanwhile, in a move that has shocked Catholics just days after Pope Leo XIV visited France, student rioters vandalized the Church of St. Hilaire in Soullans on October 6 in the Vendée district while singing the rap song M*R*H.
In a press statement, the diocese of Luçon announced that it had closed the church until further notice, “expressing its sadness and condemnation at these acts, which constitute a serious attack on a place of worship and on the peace of the parish community.”
A Mass of Reparation will be celebrated in this church on Monday, October 12. It will be presided over by Bishop Renauld de Dinechin of Luçon, the statement said, urging prayer for peace “in the spirit of the appeal launched by Pope Leo XIV from Lourdes” and asking Catholics not to conflate the attacks with Islam.
In a separate statement, the Mayor of Soullans Vincent Jolly emphasized that “the young people involved are minors. There is every indication that they did not fully grasp the implications of their actions or the meaning of certain lyrics that were played.”
“We urge people not to conflate this local incident with acts of terrorism or the tensions often seen in national news. Hasty comparisons or overblown interpretations would only serve to deepen divisions,” Jolly added. “Verbal abuse, threats, public accusations, and attacks on the families involved via social media do not help resolve the situation.”
Mainstream Media Reluctant to Link Riots to Islamism and Leftism
While mainstream media and left-wing politicians have refused to associate the riots with Islamist influence, Gilles Platret, Mayor of Chalon-sur-Saône, told Europe 1 television that the incidents in François-Villon high school and St. Hilaire Church were a result of “tolerating Islamist organizations on our soil for so long.”
In an October 6 interview with the French channel, Platret said that “the high school student movement—whose demands regarding issues like teacher shortages in certain parts of France are understandable—is being completely co-opted, hijacked, exploited, and radicalized by elements from the far-left as well as Islamist circles.”
“We mustn’t overlook these aspects; there is a tendency not to consider them systematically, yet I saw it happen very quickly last week in my town. An association close to the Muslim Brotherhood was working covertly alongside the far-left (LFI) to stir up the young people, particularly in the sub-prefecture,” Platret observed.
“Current events now show us the extent of this phenomenon: an Islamist-Salafist narrative—circulating among high school students and fully exploited by certain Islamist factions—is now being picked up by a segment of French youth,” he added. “I struggle to comprehend Islamism—how things could reach this point. At some stage—damn it—France decided to abandon its goal of national unity.”
