Comment: Let's not forget: this is an 8-year-old. It should be obvious to anyone that a child that age would say things they would not really understand, or learned from someone older, and should not be considered a threat or a criminal based on vague statements. This boy may well have been psychologically traumatized by this encounter with the police and school officials.
Just when it seemed that the crackdown on free speech in France could not get worse, French police today questioned a second grader on suspicion of "defending terrorism."
BFMTV says that administrators at a primary school in Nice reported the child to police on 21 January after the boy allegedly said that he "felt he was on the side of the terrorists."
"A police station is absolutely no place for an eight-year-old child," the boy's lawyer Sefen Guez Guez told BFMTV. He said that the incident showed that France was going through a state of "collective hysteria."
Guez Guez said that on 8 January, the day after two French gunmen attacked the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, the boy, whose name has been reported as Ahmed, was in class when he was asked if he was "Charlie."
"He answered, 'I am on the side of the terrorists, because I am against the caricatures of the prophet,'" the lawyer said.
Comment: Just another reflection of how shallow and totally lacking in insight the Western worldview is when it comes to pretty much everything. It's no wonder the Western media (at least those who don't receive explicit directives on what or what not to write) has fallen hook, line and sinker for the official party line on the conflict in Ukraine, for example. They can only see the situation through their narrow American lenses. And those lenses tend to blur out any insight into humanity and the reasons these conflicts are erupting worldwide.