'Toulouse killer's anti-Semitism motivated attacks'

Mohamed Merah's brother tells of the family's hatred and racism, “odious atmosphere that accommodates itself to anti-Semitism.”

By JOSEPH STRICH
France 2 TV screengrab of Toulouse suspect Mohamed Merah 390 (photo credit: REUTERS/France 2 Television)
France 2 TV screengrab of Toulouse suspect Mohamed Merah 390
(photo credit: REUTERS/France 2 Television)
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.