Published: 23 October 2017
Last updated: 4 March 2024
In 2015, 22-year-old Yohan Cohen was shot in the head while trying to protect the child of a customer in the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Eastern Paris. He was one of four Jewish hostages killed by the ISIS-inspired terrorist Amedy Coulibaly, who stormed the small kosher grocery shop armed with two Kalashnikov rifles and two Tokarev pistols.
The weapons Coulibaly used in this attack came from a seemingly unlikely source: an arms dealer who was a member of the extreme-right organisation Génération Identitaire in Northern France.
The connection between the jihadist Coulibaly, who had sworn allegiance to ISIS, and the far-right extremist Claude Hermant, who last month was sentenced to seven years in prison for arms trafficking showcases the paradox of extremism: a strangely symbiotic relationship between movements which at first sight appear diametrically opposed to each other.
Photo: A masked demonstrator at a "Freedom of Speech" rally of self-proclaimed white nationalists, white supremacists and alt-right activist in Washington DC, in June (jim Bourg/Reuters)
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