Europe has a terrorism problem, not a Muslim problem
ONE of the policemen killed in the Paris attack, Ahmed Merabet, is believed to have been a Muslim. That’s important. Although Europe obviously has a terrorist problem, it sincerely does not have a Muslim problem.
That’s evident in the fact that Islamist terrorism is a strange and frightening thing to the vast majority of Muslims — and we shouldn’t swallow the claims of terrorists to represent anything other than themselves. The Irish Republican Army never spoke for Irish Catholics in toto. But the existence of the IRA did highlight certain social and economic tensions within British society that informed its world view.
And although France does not have a problem with Islam in the sense that Islamists would like us to believe, France does have social problems related to its Muslim population that bleed into the fundamentalist movement.
The assault on Charlie Hebdo is just the latest chapter in a long history of violence between Muslim revolutionaries and the French state.
The ability of a society to forget its recent past is like the amnesia that follows an accident — the body’s way of protecting itself against trauma. Yet in the ’50s and ’60s, as France tried to cling on to its African colonial possessions, political violence was far more common than today. Muslim Algerian nationalists bombed the mainland, assassinated officials and killed colonialists en masse.
The reaction of the state was shocking. In 1961, 12 000 Algerian immigrants were arrested in Paris and held in a football stadium. Many were tortured; more than a hundred disappeared. For days, bodies were found floating in the Seine.
After the French left Algeria in 1962, there was a period of relative peace. But Paris erupted again in the early ’80s as former French colonies in the Middle East fought bloody turf wars in the streets of the capital. From March to September 1982, 17 people were killed and 160 injured in nearly 20 attacks.
The list of current problems includes racism, poverty, radicalisation, military action in Mali and the ban on the burka. None of these excuses the growth of terrorism or even necessarily explains it — how does one really explain something sociopathic that operates beyond the bounds of reason? But aspects of French culture seem to be in timeless conflict with aspects of Islamic culture, creating a tension occasionally exploited by fanatics.
Charlie Hebdo’s attitude towards religion is also telling. It comes from a left-wing, republican, anticlerical tradition that sees all faith as born of the same bigoted distrust of human freedom. It would like to make Islam as banal as Catholicism.
But in a wider democratic context, the choice between secularism and faith is also false. Hallmarks of the West are the Enlightenment principles of rational inquiry and dissent, and the Christian principle of turning the other cheek. In a sense, we’ve won the war of ideas already because we’re happy to have it without resorting to bullets or discrimination. —©