Excerpt:
On May 25, a 21-year-old soldier named Cédric Cordiez was stabbed in the neck in the La Defense district of Paris. He survived, but the aggressor's intention was clearly to kill him (possibly even to sever his head). Four days later, a suspect referred to as Alexandre D., a 22 year-old-convert to Islam, was arrested. He confessed to having acted "on religious grounds."
The Cordiez case is quite similar to the public killing and beheading in London of Lee Rigby, a British soldier, on May 22. One of Rigby's murderers, Michael Adebolajo, a 28-year-old British-African convert to Islam, claimed to have acted in order to retaliate against the British military operations "against Muslims" in Afghanistan. "It is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," he said before being arrested by the police. "We swear by Allah Almighty that we will never stop fighting you."
Manuel Valls, the French interior minister, drew another, even scarier, parallel: he mentioned Mohamed Merah, the deadliest jihadist terrorist to have operated in France so far.