Commentary on terror against France – attack by totalitarian authorities

The horror intensifies: on September 25, two young employees of a television production company in Paris were attacked in the street with a butcher’s ax. They stopped in front of the building where the editorial team of the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” had previously worked. On October 16, the director of history teacher Samuel Paty was cut off in the street in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Paty had talked about free speech in class and showed Charlie Hebdo cartoons about Muhammad.

This Thursday three people died with a knife in a church in Nice and another six were injured. A woman was praying when the perpetrator put the gun to her neck. These murders are not isolated acts of individual madmen. You are part of the Islamist attack on France.

Islamists should not be minimized as victims of an unjust world.

The current series of murders began with the “Charlie Hebdo” trial. As in a cruel second edition, what happened in 2015 is repeated. Cartoonists and all those who identify as their supporters in the broadest sense should, in the logic of fans, pay to make jokes about the prophet Muhammad. And the reaction of no less people is to point out that the cartoons are in bad taste and hurtful. He wonders if the French didn’t get a little too far with their right to blasphemy.

This argument misses the root cause of the violence. Totalitarian ideologues are behind the attacks. In “Charlie Hebdo” they found a target of their hatred. But if the drawings did not exist, the cause of the murder would be different. Islamism is based on images of the enemy. These include the European constitutional state and its representatives, as well as people of other religions, especially Jews. Like gays and lesbians. And the majority of Muslims who refuse to submit to this worldview.

Just as right-wing extremists, who are gaining ground in France and Europe, must not be minimized as victims of an unjust world, neither must Islamists. Their thinking is similar, as is the approach to dealing with them. You have to name their hatred of people, expose their lies and destroy their networks.

In the pandemic, the power of terrorists grows to sow fear and helplessness.

Accusing France of executing, according to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a “lynching campaign against Muslims” because President Emmanuel Macron has stepped up the tone against Islamists, is misrepresenting the facts. Shortly after the first attack in September, Macron delivered a differentiated opening speech on Islamist separatism. His approach is not to marginalize Muslims. He wants to turn them into pillars of the republic, into a kind of embracing patriotism that other countries do not know.

But the terrorists know it: patience is finite. That is why they kill so bloody and effectively in the media. France is exhausted. The second curfew of the crown begins without you having recovered from the first. Now that the good side of life is missing, unity, the power of terrorists to spread fear and helplessness is growing. A state that renounces hysteria can help. And European solidarity.

One consequence of the pandemic is that it revolves around one’s life, privately and politically. But France is not a provocateur, it has been the target of fanatical murderers. The amount of people looking the other way is irritating.

Published: 10/29/2020, 7:23 pm