Abdelghani Merah, the brother of Franco-Algerian Islamist Mohamed Merah, who
killed seven people in southwest France last March, has co-written a book on his
terrorist brother that will be published on Wednesday.
French news
websites published extracts from the book, Mon frère, ce terroriste: un homme
dénonce l’islamisme (“My brother, this terrorist: a man denounces Islamism”),
over the weekend, and Abdelghani Merah was interviewed on Sunday evening by M6
television.
He emphasized that the main motivation behind the attacks in
Toulouse and Montauban was the anti-Semitism of the Merah family.
“Hatred
and racism” explain the radicalization of his brother Mohamed, Abdelghani Merah
said. “The Salafists had only to harvest the flower of this hatred.”
And
of course their oldest brother, Abdelkader, the “tumor” who converted Mohamed to
Salafism, “had a lot” to do with the murderous direction he took.
The
book denounces the “odious atmosphere that accommodates itself to anti-
Semitism” in a family obsessed by hatred of the “unbelievers,” and of “every Jew
without distinction.”
In an interview to the left-wing daily Liberation,
Abdelghani Merah spoke about what happened to him in 2003, while he was going
out with a Jewish girl and one of his brothers stabbed him, saying: “Leave your
dirty Jewgirl.”
Abdelghani thinks Abdelkader probably knew the jihadist
intentions of Mohamed.
“My brother lived in a family that predestined him
at best to delinquency and at worst to terrorism. We were programmed to become
outlaws,” Abdelghani Merah said.
The Merahs, originally from Algeria,
used to spend every summers there, and the whole family supported the outlawed
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and Armed Islamic Group) (GIA) terrorist
organizations.
GIA was responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in
France in 1995-96.
The author described his relatives, who were
fascinated by the September 11, 2001, terrorists attacks on the US, as
“uncultivated, ignorant, permeable to retrograde ideas.”
Their
anti-Semitism is “cultural,” he concluded.