France: Muslim who stabbed woman to death was in touch with pro-jihad Islamic cleric

What’s that? A Muslim cleric? How did a man who has dedicated his life to understanding Islam properly and communicating it effectively so spectacularly misunderstand the Religion of Peace? Why does no one other than me ever ask this question?

“Rambouillet attack: Jamel Gorchane was in contact with a Salafist imam,” translated from “Attaque de Rambouillet : Jamel Gorchane était en contact avec un imam salafiste,” Reflets, April 27, 2021:

This preacher, Béchir Ben Hassen, has a particularly disturbing profile.

The terrorist who carried out the Rambouillet attack was perhaps not totally a “lone wolf”. According to a source in Tunisia, Jamel Gorchane had been exchanging emails for several months with Béchir Ben Hassen, an imam already appeared in the radars of the French intelligence services.

On April 23, Jamel Gorchane, a 36-year-old Tunisian delivery driver with no criminal record, stabbed an administrative assistant at the Rambouillet police station in Yvelines. Stéphanie Monferme was the mother of two teenage daughters. Jamel Gorchane is similar to the profiles of the perpetrators of attacks in France since 2020: little linked to the Islamic State, using knives, easily accessible weapons, sometimes mentally unstable, little or not known to the intelligence services.

On his Facebook profile, Jamel Gorchane reposts numerous messages demonstrating his interest in political Islam and over time, claims that it is forbidden to attack the Prophet. But we are far from the profiles of radicalized at the time when the Islamic State was triumphant.

However, on his Facebook page, one of the “friends” of the terrorist from Rambouillet draws attention: it is Sheikh Bashir Ben Hassen, a Tunisian Salafist imam with a rather worrying background. And according to a source interviewed in Tunisia, Gorchane and Ben Hassen had been exchanging emails for several months.

Bashir Ben Hassen is one of the main figures of so-called “scientific” Salafism (Salafia îlmia). Born in 1973 in M’saken, he studied at the Umm Al Qura Institute in Mecca, as well as at the American International University of Islamic Theology and completed training courses at the Islamic and Cultural Center of…