French Shocked by Jewish School Shooting

There are potential connections to killings earlier this month, and the general sociocultural climate and the context of the current presidential campaign offer other possible explanations, but the French were left with a big tragedy and something of a mystery after three children and a rabbi were slain outside an Orthodox Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday.

The Christian Science Monitor:

The shooting deaths of three French children and a rabbi at an orthodox Jewish school in Toulouse today seems timed for maximum impact and shock value, coming in the midst of a French national election that has raised issues of security and national identity.

[...] In Paris, silent protesters are marching from Republic Square to the Bastille tonight. The leading candidates for president, current leader President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist challenger François Hollande, suspended their campaigns to travel to Tolouse and denounced the murders. They will also refrain from campaigning on Tuesday.

With ballistics reports linking today’s incident at the local Ozar Hatorah Jewish school school to two grisly slayings earlier this month that killed a total of three ethnic north African French paratroopers in the same region, the French are confounded by what the intended message of the killings is.

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AP / Jacques Brinon

French schoolchildren leave a Jewish school in Paris on Monday after the interior minister ordered security to be tightened around all of the country’s Jewish schools after an attack on one in Toulouse.