Outside the school at Toulouse
Outside the school at ToulouseReuters

The Toulouse Jewish day school terrorized by a radical Islamic jihadist has received a wave of anti-Semitic phone calls and emails following the attack.

Last week Mohammed Merah murdered Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, a teacher, his two young sons Aryeh and Gavriel, and the young daughter of the principal of the Otzar HaTorah day school. In the previous week, Merah had also shot to death three French paratroopers, all Muslims of North African descent.

Merah told French media and police during a 30-hour siege on the apartment in which he was finally trapped that his only regret was not having time to carry out more murders. He had killed the soldiers in retaliation for French participation in NATO operations against terrorists in Afghanistan. The slaughter of Jewish children and the rabbi was, he said, vengeance for “the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza.”

Police prosecutor Michel Valet told reporters Wednesday an investigation into the latest threats has been launched to track down the "origin of these calls and letters and the identities of those behind them." CRIF, the Jewish umbrella organization in France, is monitoring the situation closely.

Istanbul-based Islamic scholar Adnan Oktar immediately condemned the murders in a statement on his worldwide A9 satellite television talk show as Toulouse police commandos were trying to corner the terrorist, who told a Paris-based journalist that he had received instructions for the murders from Al Qaeda.

Oktar, who regularly hosts Israeli rabbis on his program and has played a back channel role during tensions between Ankara and Jerusalem, noted “it is the same if you kill someone or if you encourage their being killed.”

The Muslim scholar pointed out that radical Islamist jihadists “claim that the stones, trees and rocks will give orders to them and they say that they will kill the children, women and all of them, all the Jews that exist. They say: 'this is the command of Allah upon us, not even one single Jew, one single People of Moses should remain on earth.” Dismissing the claim as ludicrous, Oktar observed that terrorists believe their murders are “an act of worship.”

Calling such behavior insanity, the Islamic scholar noted that such people shoot down others who believe that “Allah is One.” This, he said, is “a grave ignominy – psychopathy. This is the way of the anti-messiah... The provision of the Koram regarding the People of the Book is clear; why do you go and fight with them?”

Instead, he admonished, “On the contrary, you should be forming an alliance with the People of the Book against those Godless ones, those who deny the existence of Allah.”