French Youngsters Chant Rap-Hymn to Islamic Terrorists While Profaning Church

A video that is making the rounds in French social media and that reportedly originated on Snapchat shows a group of French youngsters profaning a church while chanting a rap song that glorifies the Islamic terrorists Mohamed Merah and Salah Abdeslam. Merah went on a killing spree in 2012 that culminated in a massacre at a Jewish school in Toulouse in which he killed four people, including three children, and wounded many others. Abdeslam, who is presently serving a life sentence in a French prison, is one of the authors of the November 13th 2015 Paris attack that killed over a hundred people. The rap also makes approving reference to the attack on the Bataclan concert hall: the bloodiest of the November 13th attacks, in which 92 concert-goers were slaughtered.

Church authorities have acknowledged that the profaned church is the Saint-Hilaire church in Soullans in the Pays de la Loire.  The incident reportedly took place on Sunday.

The youngsters chant:

Like Mohamed Merah, I dodge the cameras.

Bataclan, I shot him in the eye.

Manhunt, Salah Abdeslam.

Merah famously managed to escape detection while on his killing spree. The lyrics of the song ‘M*R*H*’, by the rapper BORO700, continue:

In hell, there’s a price on my head.

I’m out of control like a hell hound.

Tell your rapper to let me do it.

Too bad for him if he won’t cooperate.

I’ll do an Adolf Hitler on him.

What might surprise foreign observers is the demographic of the young people chanting the lyrics. They are not young men of Arab origins, but rather young women of evidently quite European origins.

A second video likewise making the rounds shows a second group of youngsters – this one more of the expected demographic – chanting the same lyrics, apparently in Beaugency. The exact circumstances of the second video are unclear, and it is not clear if there is any connection between the two videos or incidents.

(Translations from French by the author.)

John Rosenthal is a journalist and political analyst who writes on European politics and transatlantic issues. You can subscribe to his Transatlantic Intelligencer Substack here.