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The accusation made by Turkish President Erdogan against France and against Europe, both guilty, according to him, of responding to the Islamist attacks (the last of them, the beheading of a professor on the outskirts of Paris) with “a campaign of lynching” against Muslims analogous to what, according to him, would have been unleashed against the Jews on the eve of the Second World War, sheds full light on the root of the difficulty that the West always finds in its relations with the Islamic world.
I say the Islamic world and not just Turkey because, as we know, Erdogan’s accusations immediately had a wide echo in all Islamic countries, just as his invitation to boycott French products was immediately accepted. It is obvious that when Erdogan spoke his words, he was reasonably certain that his Turkish and Islamic listeners would consider them to be true and well founded or at least plausible: and indeed, this is how they judged them. But this is precisely the problem. How is it possible? I wonder. How is it possible that public opinion in Islamic countries really believes that today in Europe there is a kind of Crystal Night against millions of Muslims, that millions of Muslims are discriminated against for something similar to the Nuremberg laws and perhaps about it? be taken to a concentration camp?
The answer can only be one. And it is that all this is possible because in reality the public opinion of the Islamic countries or at least the great majority of it knows nothing or almost nothing of what really happened in Europe in the last century. In particular, he doesn’t really know anything about the Shoah. Similarly, you know of very few or only deeply distorted versions of what is happening to us today. He knows very little about terrorism and its actors, about the response that our democracies give it. And he doesn’t know about all these things for a reason: because his books don’t talk about it, because his school doesn’t teach him, his media is quiet or misinformed. And they behave in this way not by chance or by choice, but mainly by obeying provisions from above, at the orders of diverse and despotic governments, which have an interest in keeping their citizens in a state of intellectual minority. and cultural to better condition or manipulate them.
The confrontation between the West and the Islamic world, more generally between the West and non-democratic countries, thus ends up looking like a party always rigged. With a player obliged to respect more or less certain rules of the truth and to move under the control of the public who acts as referee, and the other who, on the other hand, can say and do what he likes the most without having to answer for anything to nobody.
October 28, 2020 (change October 28, 2020 | 10:12)
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