A group of French Muslims decided to stand guard outside their town’s cathedral to protect it and show solidarity with Catholic churchgoers.

Muslim residents in the southern French town of Lodeve organised the initiative as a gesture of peace after a deadly Islamic extremist attack on a church in the French city of Nice.

They stood guard outside the Lodeve cathedral for the All Saints’ holiday weekend, and hope to do the same for Christmas.

The cathedral’s priest and churchgoers welcomed the gesture, which also comes amid tensions between France and the Muslim world.

French-born Muslim Elyazid Benferhat said his stomach turned when he heard about the attack in Nice.

A self-described man of peace and pragmatism, Mr Benferhat and a friend gathered a group of young Muslim men to stand guard outside their town’s cathedral.

Parishioners at the 13th-century church were deeply touched. The parish priest said their gesture gave him hope in a time of turmoil.

Mr Benferhat identified himself as “more French than anything”. While his mother was born in Algeria, he was born in France and grew up speaking only French.

“But I am also Muslim… and we have seen Islamophobia in this country, and terrorism,” he said.

“In recent years, I’ve had a pit in my stomach,” because every time Islamic extremist violence strikes France, he said, French Muslims face new stigmatisation, even though “we had nothing to do with it”.

He called the beheading of a teacher near Paris last month an act of “unbelievable, unprecedented cruelty”.

Then when three people were killed last Thursday in the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice, Mr Benferhat said he was so sickened that he wanted to do something “so that everyone wakes up”.

Mr Benferhat, who works for French oil company Total and coaches at a local football club, talked to a Muslim friend who was in Nice that day. He said: “We had this idea. We needed to do something beyond paying homage to the victims. We said, we will protect churches ourselves.”

They recruited volunteers among their friends and at his football club, and guarded the church that night and again for Sunday mass. He said they also co-ordinated with local police, after France’s government promised to increase security at sensitive religious sites.

“It’s very good, these young people who are against violence,” said the cathedral’s priest, Luis Iniguez.

When a local newspaper published a photo of parishioners posing with their Muslim guards, the priest hung it inside the Gothic cathedral, which serves as an anchor for town life. “People were happy to see that,” he said.

The small-town gesture drew national attention, and with it, online invective from some far-right voices.

But Mr Benferhat said the response has been “90% positive”.

His group is considering how to take the idea forward, and would like to do it again for Christmas, and for other towns to follow Lodeve’s lead. But for now all religious services in France are banned at least until December 1 to try to slow the fast-rising coronavirus infections.

Whatever he does next, he said “it will come from the heart”.

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Former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad defends his widely condemned comments on attacks by Muslim extremists in France, saying that they were taken out of context as he criticised Twitter and Facebook for removing his posts.

The 95-year-old sparked widespread outrage when he wrote on his blog on Thursday that “Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”.

Twitter removed a tweet from Mr Mahathir containing the remark, which it said glorified violence, while France’s digital minister demanded the company also ban Mr Mahathir from its platform.

“I am indeed disgusted with attempts to misrepresent and take out of context what I wrote on my blog,” Mr Mahathir said in a statement.

He said critics failed to read his posting in full, especially the next sentence which read: “But by and large Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t. Instead the French should teach their people to respect other people’s feelings.”

He said Twitter and Facebook removed the posting despite his explanation, and slammed the move as hypocritical.

“On the one hand, they defended those who chose to display offending caricatures of Prophet Mohammed … and expect all Muslims to swallow it in the name of freedom of speech and expression,” he said.

“On the other, they deleted deliberately that Muslims had never sought revenge for the injustice against them in the past”, thereby stirring French hatred for Muslims, he added.

On Twitter, however, that sentence was not deleted. A staff member for Mr Mahathir said the entire posting was removed by Facebook.

Facebook Malaysia said in an email that it removed Mr Mahathir’s posting for violating its policies, adding: “We do not allow hate speech on Facebook and strongly condemn any support for violence, death or physical harm.”

The comments by the two-time prime minister were in response to calls by Muslim nations to boycott French products after French leader Emmanuel Macron described Islam as a religion “in crisis” and vowed to crack down on radicalism following the murder of a French teacher who showed his class a cartoon depicting the prophet of Islam.

His remarks also came as a Tunisian man killed three people at a church in the southern French city of Nice.

The US ambassador to Malaysia, Kamala Shirin Lakhdir, said on Friday that she “strongly disagreed” with Mr Mahathir’s statement, adding in a statement: “Freedom of expression is a right, calling for violence is not.”

Mr Mahathir has been viewed as an advocate of moderate Islamic views and a spokesman for the interests of developing countries.

At the same time, he has pointedly criticised Western society and nations as well as their relationships to the Muslim world, while he has been denounced in Israel and elsewhere for making anti-Semitic remarks.

Read more: New arrest by French investigators probing church attack in Nice

Demonstrations across France to pay tribute to murdered teacher

Knife-wielding attackers interrupted a church service in France, forced the priest to his knees and slit his throat on Tuesday, an attack that President Francois Hollande said showed the threat from Islamist militancy was greater than ever.

Police shot and killed the attackers as they emerged from the church, freeing three hostages, one of whom was seriously wounded.

The knifemen arrived during morning mass in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen, northwest of Paris, where the 85-year-old parish priest Father Jacques Hamel was leading prayers.

“They forced him to his knees and he tried to defend himself and that’s when the drama began,” Sister Danielle, who escaped as the attackers slayed the priest, told RMC radio.

“They filmed themselves. It was like a sermon in Arabic around the altar,” the nun said.

Speaking at the scene, Hollande called it a “dreadful terrorist attack,” adding that the attackers had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, the militant group that he said had declared war on France.

News agency Amaq, which is affiliated with Islamic State, said two of its “soldiers” had carried out the attack. Police said one person had been arrested.

Tuesday’s attack came less than two weeks after a Tunisian ploughed a truck into a crowd in the French Riviera city of Nice, killing 84 people. Islamic State claimed that attack.

France is a major partner in the U.S.-led military coalition bombing Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria. The White House condemned Tuesday’s attack and commended the French police’s “quick and decisive response.”

Several French media reported that one of the assailants was a local who had spent a year in jail on his return from Turkey after being intercepted trying to travel to Syria, but had been freed on bail with an electronic tag pending trial for terrorism offences.

The prosecutor’s office said the identification of the two suspects was still under way.

MERCILESS

A horrified local resident, Cecile Lefebre, said: “I have no words. How do you arrive at this point, killing people in cold blood like this? It’s pure barbarity.”

Since the Bastille Day mass murder in Nice, there has been a spate of attacks in Germany, some of which appear to be Islamist-inspired.

“In the face of this threat that has never been greater in France and Europe, the government is absolutely determined (to defeat) terrorism,” Hollande said in a televised address.

But former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is expected to enter a conservative primary for next year’s presidential election, accused the Socialist government of being soft.

“We must be merciless,” Sarkozy said in a statement to reporters. “The legal quibbling, precautions and pretexts for insufficient action are not acceptable. I demand that the government implement without delay the proposals we presented months ago. There is no more time to be wasted.”

The centre-right opposition wants all Islamist suspects to be either held in detention or electronically tagged to avert potential attacks.

Far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who is also expected to run for the presidency, said both Sarkozy’s and Hollande’s parties had failed on security.

“All those who have governed us for 30 years bear an immense responsibility. It’s revolting to watch them bickering!” she tweeted.

Hollande said France should “use all its means” within the law to fight Islamic State.

Pope Francis condemned what he called a “barbarous killing”.

“The fact that this episode took place in a church, killing a priest, a minister of the Lord and involving the faithful, is something that affects us profoundly,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said.

In a telephone call with the pope, Hollande expressed “the sorrow of all French people after the heinous murder of Father Jacques Hamel by two terrorists,” and said everything would be done to protect places of worship, the presidential palace said.

Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a former conservative prime minister who now heads the Senate’s foreign affairs committee tweeted: “Everything is being done to trigger a war of religions.”

Little is known about the perpetrator and more information will no doubt, come to light. Many of us have visited the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and have celebrated the fireworks show which makes up part of the celebrations. This attack brings home how terrorism affects all our lives, but yesterday evening, it directly affected hundreds of families who have lost loved ones just trying to celebrate their country and its heritage.

We hope that communities may come together and re-enforce the very values that were being celebrated in France. Equality, liberty and fraternity underpin all that we regard as being central to our societies and communities and this means that we cannot allow extremists and terrorists to divide us. When we grieve for those who have died and suffered in Nice, we must honour them by holding onto these values and cherishing them, whilst we redouble our efforts against extremism and terrorism.

Our thoughts are with those in France and those in Iraq, Turkey and the many countries that have been affected by terrorism. Their lives matters and their memories will remain alive when we think of those three words – ‘Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite.‘