Horreur in France
The ISIS murder of a priest is pure savagery
The murder Tuesday of an 85-yearold Catholic priest while offering Mass in a village church in France, promptly claimed by the Islamic State for its “soldiers,” probably takes to a whole new level the global conflict with that organization.
The immediate repercussions of the act will be felt in French politics, with presidential elections to take place next year. For French President Francois Hollande and his beleaguered Socialist government, coming on the heels of the recent Nice attack, the Paris Bataclan massacre and the earlier Charlie Hebdo assault, the new attack couldn’t be worse.
The French are not tolerant of, but are slightly hardened to, attacks in sophisticated environments such as Paris and Nice, with lots of nationalities mingling. After the savage attack in Nice, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said France must “learn to live with terrorism,” a fatalistic sentiment that was widely denounced, even if the French character is accustomed to shrugging off hardship. But a public murder in a 17th-century village church in Normandy, with an elderly priest’s throat cut while a nun is held hostage, drills into the fundamental identity of the French. Some of it may be mythology looming up, but they all — even the Parisians — will find what happened at Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray close to impossible to bear.
The killing of the Rev. Jacques Hamel puts Mr. Hollande’s government between a rock and a hard place. He has pledged now to have places of worship guarded more closely. France has some 25,000 working churches, synagogues and mosques so that measure becomes so costly in terms of resources as to be close to absurd. His farthest-right opponent, Marine Le Pen and her National Front, will not be able to resist hopping onto the attack for current and upcoming political advantage. The French will be frightened by the reality that a person is not safe even while at Mass in a village church on a Tuesday morning.
The major threat of this piece of escalation is that the events spiral into a real live war between Christians and Muslims, taking us all back to the 15th century. Practical people understand that the Islamic State does not represent the majority of Muslims by any means. But fear is contagious. Politicians seeking election are sometimes practical only in their choice of means for getting on top.
It is necessary, if there is any reliable communication between the leaders of countries like France and the United States and the heads of organizations like the Islamic State and al-Qaida, to try to reach them with something other than drones. There is no reason to believe that they will see the light, but they should be able at least to understand that an enraged French or American population will hurt them badly, not yield to them.