OUR ALLY COULD USE A FRIEND. TRUDEAU IS NOT ONE
French President Emmanuel Macron could really use some friends right now. He’s being burned in effigy, and blood-curdling vows to avenge the Prophet Muhammad have been shouted in street protests in Bangladesh, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and Palestine. The world’s theocracies are taking aim at him and at the economy of the French republic itself, the birthplace of liberté, égalité and fraternité.
It’s a shame no help is coming from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose point- missing incoherence has sidelined Canada in the effort to defend France in its current agonies. Expressions of solidarity and sympathy are all well and good, but Macron’s defence of the right of satirists to publish vulgar cartoons was not a defence of the right, as Trudeau absurdly suggested last Friday, “to shout fire in a movie theatre crowded with people.”
A target had been painted on Macron’s back long before the 47- year- old middle- school teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in broad daylight Oct. 16, the grisly culmination of a methodically organized incitement campaign orchestrated by France’s Hamas- affiliated Collective Cheikh Yassine. The pretext for the feigned outrage was Paty’s use of the contentious Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad from 2015, in a class discussion, to explore the disputes and arguments around free speech.
And those cartoons were not published in order to “arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet," as Trudeau put it. Specifically, the cartoons depicted Muhammad — a blasphemy all on its own, by some Islamic standards — lamenting the barbarism so often carried out in his holy name. For this, 11 Charlie Hebdo staff members were massacred on Jan. 7, 2015. To mark the beginning of the trial of those terrorists and their accomplices, Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons on Sept. 1. In anger, a crackpot wielding a meat cleaver attacked and seriously injured two people Sept. 25 on the street where the Charlie Hebdo office used to be.
Neither did it help — although it was perhaps some small mercy that he was being merely obtuse and oafish — in the way Trudeau classified the acts of beheading a 60- year- old worshipper and slitting the throat of a 55- year- old church sexton and stabbing a 44- year- old mother of three to death at the Notre- Dame Basilica in Nice last Thursday morning. These are “unjustifiable acts,” Trudeau asserted, “which have no place in our society.”
Was this really something any of us needed to be told? Is France “our society”? Is it just “our” society where Trudeau would want us all to refrain from such savagery?
Are there other societies where Trudeau considers head-chopping and the public disembowelment of innocents to be unobjectionable?
The jihadist charge sheet against Macron was drawn up well before these horrifying events. You’ve got to wind the clock back to April 30, when Macron’s government signed a decree unveiling the thrust of a wide-ranging reform program aimed at supporting the disaffected Muslim youth in France’s crowded banlieues and strengthening France’s civil traditions, all in one project. The plan, which enraged France’s “secular” right as much as it did the Islamists, calls for an overhaul of the French curriculum to include enhanced Arabic- language courses, and the study of Islamic history and civilization. Broadly supported by the French Council of the Muslim Faith, it’s this that’s got the Islamist fringe in a lather.
The shrill demands that French products should be boycotted around the world were being shouted a full two weeks before Samuel Paty was beheaded and mutilated on the street a short walk from the suburban school where he taught, in Conflans- Sainte- Honorine. “Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today,” Macron had said. “We are not just seeing this in our country.”
And that, all by itself, was the otherwise wholly uncontroversial statement Macron uttered on Oct. 2 that has been cited as the offence and provocation behind all the mayhem and clamour that was to follow — the stabbing of a guard at a French consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the imbecilities uttered by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, the 50,000 marchers in Dakha, Bangladesh, the stupid and utterly unoriginal claims that Macron is criminally guilty of “Islamophobia,” repeated ad nauseam in English, in Arabic, in Urdu, in Farsi and on and on.
Macron merely stated an undeniable fact that any number of Muslim intellectuals and Islamic scholars have repeatedly stated in recent years, in pretty well exactly the same lexicon: Islam is in crisis all over the world today. And certainly not just in France, where more than 250 people have been slaughtered in 27 jihadist atrocities since the 2012 attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse ended with seven people dead. Thousands of people are being butchered every year around the world in the name of Islam, and the victims are almost exclusively harmless, ordinary, decently pious Muslim people.
The very day that Samuel Paty was butchered on that street in the suburbs of Paris, the authorities in the landlocked African country of Burkina Faso reported that jihadists had killed at least 20 people in three villages in the northern part of the country. Jihadists killed 80 people in Burkina Faso in 2016. Last year, jihadists killed more than 1,800 people in that country in a region-wide cataclysm that’s beginning to match Syria in its savagery.
It’s all carried on in the name of the Prophet by butchers allied with Ansar a- Dine, al- Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, Ansarul-islam, Boko Haram and so on. Last year, 4,825 people were slaughtered in the region — the highest death toll in a decade. By October of this year, 5,365 more bodies were counted in the jihadists’ corpse heaps.
On Oct. 24, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for yet another of its suicide attacks on the Hazara ghetto of Dast- e Barchi in Kabul. This time it was an education centre. At least 24 people were killed, mostly students, and another 57 were injured. Three days later, a bomb killed eight people at a madrassa in Peshawar, Pakistan. It’s believed to have been a failed attempt to assassinate the Deobandist windbag Rahimullah Haqqani, beloved of the Taliban, carried out by some equally grisly Salafist faction.
Emmanuel Macron is determined that the cruelties endured by Muslims in Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Mali, Niger, Bangladesh and everywhere else will not take hold in the French republic. Whatever the faults of his efforts to address the existential crisis France is facing, this is not Islamophobia, and it is not in any way bigotry or discrimination against Muslims.
“In a pluralist, diverse and respectful society like ours, we owe it to ourselves to be aware of the impact of our words, of our actions on others,” Trudeau said.
Trudeau might start by taking his own advice, and by paying closer attention to his own words, and by being aware that his saccharine homilies will do nothing to ease the crippling burden the world’s Muslims are being made to carry, almost entirely on their own. And in their hour of need, he’s not doing the French any favours, either.
WE OWE IT TO OURSELVES TO BE AWARE OF THE IMPACT OF OUR WORDS.