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More than 30 years have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I remember that day in February 1989 when the news reached me; how absurd, yes, almost comical, it seemed. A British author “sentenced to death” by Iranian leaders, accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a novel. Excuse me, are we living in the 1980s or not?
Then you understood that it was serious. The democratic world mobilized in defense of Salman Rushdie, not without success. His life was never the same again. But he has been able to continue writing and publishing, still doing so three decades later.
At the time, in the late 1980s, militant Islamism was no big deal. Almost nothing, dare I say. The Iranian death threat against Rushdie marked a paradigm shift in this regard. At the same time, it was a drama that in a sense still played out on a limited and somewhat elevated stage. The threat came from a state, a rogue state, no doubt, which should therefore be able to pressure, negotiate and control. The threat was directed at a named person, already famous, whom it must therefore be possible to protect.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify both potential killers and their potential victims in advance.
Last Friday, a 47-year-old The French teacher slit his throat when he was coming home from work at an elementary school in a suburb of Paris. The perpetrator was an 18-year-old boy, so unfamiliar with his victim that he first had to ask some students at the school to identify the teacher, Samuel Paty. After the murder, the 18-year-old posted a photo of his victim on Twitter. Later, the police shot him dead.
An unknown victim before the act. An unknown perpetrator before the act. This is how terrorism has spread beyond all borders. It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify both potential killers and their potential victims in advance. This makes the latent threat increasingly terrifying.
However, terrorism has always been perpetrated that also required victims other than the primary targets, celebrities or symbolic buildings. A bomb does not ask for identification before killing. In the last decade or so, we have experienced a series of terrorist attacks in which the main objective has been to kill indiscriminately. Drottninggatan in Stockholm in April 2017 is a typical example.
By all accounts, Paty was an ambitious and much loved history and geography teacher.
The Conflans-Saint-Honorine writing it could be said that it is a synthesis: a terrorist act directed and indiscriminate at the same time. Samuel Paty was not killed because he was in the wrong place. He was assassinated for being a teacher, representing one of the pillars of an open and democratic society: the school. The pain and anger now manifesting in France must also be understood in that context.
By all accounts, Paty was an ambitious and beloved history and geography teacher. During a lesson in early October, he showed a “cartoon of Muhammad.” Not with a provocative purpose, but as an apparently recurring element in “Éducation moralé et civique” (ethics and civic knowledge), a subject that in its current form was introduced into French schools after the Islamist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo 2015 .
Terrorist acts, not only Islamist but also right-wing extremist and racist, in recent years it has increasingly been led by the so-called “lone wolves”. Thus, apparently, also the writing of Conflans-Saint-Honorine. But no one commits an act of terrorism in a vacuum. It takes a lot for the park fanaticism slide.
This is exactly what terrorists of all stripes and stripes want to achieve.
Samuel Paty had been posted on YouTube before the murder. A well-known Islamist hate speech is among the people the police are now interested in. It is essential that the concrete and specific context of the murder is clarified. Not only for legal reasons, but also because the terrorists have won a partial victory.
An article in the newspaper Libération claims that the French extreme right at this time, in their eagerness to take political points on the murder, seems to want to suggest that the murder of Samuel Paty is not strictly an actual terrorist act, but simply a work of “a Angry Muslim “, wants They say that Muslims precisely because they are Muslims are also serious threats and potential killers.
This is exactly what terrorists of all stripes and stripes want to achieve: lock us up in prisons of fear with imaginary fetuses as prison guards.
Read more texts by Per Svensson.
