Unity for What?
French debate has only begun
DAYS of French demonstrations in protest against terrorist attacks that claimed 17 lives, including 10 journalists of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, culminated on Sunday in Paris with some 1.5 million people rallying under the slogan “Je suis Charlie!”
In the largest public gathering ever in France, the silent majority indicated it’s no longer prepared to tolerate terrorism in the name of religion, or pseudoreligious political ideology. The core message was that France and Western democracies in general — for all their shortcomings — are still worth defending against their newest enemies. Now the hard work starts. The demonstrations, as the word indicates, merely demonstrated readiness to fight back in what Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called a “global war on terror.”
Since 2001, French elites had mocked that phrase as an excuse by President George W. Bush to reas sert “American Imperialism.” Now, however, the French man in the street believes he is under attack in a war. But how to conduct this war?
First, note that all those “Je suis Charlie” marchers are not “Charlie” in the same way. And mercifully so. The beauty of democracy is that it allows people to build their “Charliness” in as many different ways as they wish.
So it is with strong, almost unanimous, support for the concept of pluralist “Charliness” that we open the debate on how to defeat jihadism.
We already see several camps on that issue. One, perhaps a majority, includes all who realize that a real, honest, noholdsbarred debate is needed to shape a new national consensus to protect and strengthen France’s democratic life.
Then there are those rushing to offer partial answers — or denials.
In one camp are those demanding greater efforts in intelligencegathering, security and military response. President Francois Hollande has thrown a few sops to these people, mobilizing 10,000 troops to guard sensitive targets and promising more funds for antiterrorist units.
Yet last week’s events didn’t reveal major weaknesses in those domains. On the front end, intelligence serv ices knew everything about the Kouachi brothers and their associate Amedy Coulibaly, if only because all three had served prison terms on terrorism charges. On the back end, French forces managed to locate, corner and “eliminate” the Islamist squad in just 72 hours.
Despite Prime Minister Valls’ hints of a French version of the US “Patriot Act,” France needs no new laws to fight back. If legislative action is needed, it is in repealing some rules imposed in the name of political correctness.
For that was the obvious failure: The police were ordered to stop surveillance of the Kouachi brothers so as not to violate their privacy. They were also asked not to listen to the private telephone of Coulibaly’s girlfriend, although he obviously used it frequently.
Vincent Olivier, a lawyer for the two brothers, spoke of them as “clueless kids” and victims of society. Such views are echoed in the second camp, best described as “partisans of the politically correct.” To them, what France needs is “fairer treatment” of its Muslim minority, although France has treated its Muslims much more fairly than Muslims are treated in any Muslimmajority country.
People in this camp want France to deemphasize its Frenchness and emphasize its “diversity,” as if the two were mutually exclusive.
Journalist Edwy Plenel, who has just published a pamphlet called “Pour les Musulmans” (For Muslims) is angry at those who talk of “French identity.”
“We are a kind of smaller America,” he says, insisting that one shouldn’t look to the “essence” (that is to say origin) of a person but his “existence” as a citizen. Yet this reading is contradicted by the book’s title: If there is no such thing as “Musulmans,” how can one be for or against it as a whole?
The politically correct camp also denies that the jihadis have any thing to do with Islam. “They are misguided individuals,” says Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the main mosque in Paris. It is as if we said trees had nothing to do with the forest in which they grew.
The camp also includes masters of equivocation. They suggest that the jihadi attacks came as a result of “Islamophobia,” which causes “anger.” Thus, France needs a new law to treat “Islamophobia” the as antiSemitisim has been since the ’90s.
Yet “Islamophobia” and antiSemitism are quite different. The first is a fear of or dislike for Islam or its politicalideological version.
One can find similar reactions against other religions (or, in the form of atheism, all religions). Despicable though such sentiments may be, they can be tolerated within a pluralist society, because they do not target the people who follow a religion.
AntiSemitism is different because it is fear of or dislike for the existence of individual Jews — not Judaism as a religion. Nazi thinkers didn’t challenge the Torah on theological grounds; they made and executed plans to send individual Jews to killing camps.
Even now, France’s antiSemitism law doesn’t ban critiques of Judaism as religion or pictorial representation of Moses.
The four Jewish shoppers executed by Coulibaly in cold blood in Vincennes last week were killed because they were Jews, not because Coulibaly had reservations about the Mount Sinai Tablets.
Finally, we have the camp that advocates business as usual. Their message is that, having shown a resolve not to surrender to terror, France must go back to normalcy — presumably until the next attack.
My fear is that this camp will prevail. That would mean continuing with an ostrichlike posture in a web of illusions. And that is the worst way of being “Charlie.”