Summary: Right-wing extremists in the US warn of jihadists and creeping Sharia, with as little basis as their warnings of a 5th column during the Cold War). But it is a problem for France, with their larger Islamic populations and lower abilities to assimilate people from foreign cultures. Making a bad situation worse, France has alienated them, treating them as second class citizens fenced into communities ringing their cities. Today we have a status report on the small blaze burning there which might erupt into a wildfire. {2nd of 2 posts today.}
“France on Fire“
By Mark Lilla
From The New York Review of Books, 5 March 2015.
On January 13, two days after millions in France marched to commemorate those assassinated by Islamist radicals the week before, Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls gave a stirring speech in the French National Assembly that was celebrated by socialists and conservatives alike as among the best in recent memory. He was firm and balanced. He first praised the police and expressed the government’s resolve to put in place security measures to win what he was not shy about calling a “war on terrorism, jihadism, and Islamist radicalism.” He then insisted that France was not at war with a religion and must stand firm on its principles of toleration and laicity — that is, the separation of religion and state. He received a standing ovation. Then, to the nation’s surprise, the deputies broke spontaneously and unanimously into the Marseillaise, the first time this had happened since the signing of the armistice ending World War I in 1918.
On the question of security, this unity is likely to last. There is a solid consensus that more resources will have to be devoted to tracking suspected terrorists and monitoring the Internet for signs of trouble. Legislation will be required to give the government sufficient legal leeway to accomplish that, which it will get, since all parties recognize the deficiencies yet none wants to reproduce the American Patriot Act.
So firm has the government of François Hollande been that the leading conservative opposition party, the UMP, and its mercurial leader, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, have found few plausible grounds for dissent. Even his party’s more muscular demands — isolating Islamists in prison, stripping binational jihadists of their French citizenship, limiting the civil rights of nationals who get involved in jihadist movements (as was done with Vichy collaborators after World War II) — are under serious consideration by the government.
By the end of January, 117 people had been placed under indictment for making statements justifying terrorism, and 28 had been sentenced to prison terms. Among them is the poisonously anti-Semitic performer and activist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala.
On the questions of toleration and laicity, however, France is anything but united. For the past quarter-century a political and intellectual culture war over the place of Islam in French society has been bubbling along, and every few years some event — a student wears a burka to school, riots erupt in a poor neighborhood, a mosque is attacked, the National Front wins a local election — renews hostilities. Now, though, nearly one thousand French citizens are believed to have traveled to Syria to join other Islamist militants there, and heavily armed jihadists pledging allegiance to ISIS and al-Qaeda in Yemen have massacred 17 people in Paris.
Given the enormity of the crimes, it is hard to escape the feeling that a major battle is beginning and that it will overshadow economic and other issues here for months and years to come. And the battleground, as is typical in France, will be the schools.
Immediately after the murders the French press focused almost exclusively on the killers and their milieu: the poor neighborhoods, the radical preachers, imprisoned terrorists, and the international jihadist network that furnished arms, training, and indoctrination. While disturbing, none of this news was surprising (though the French had greatly underestimated the effect of the prisons, where young men who commit petty crimes fall under the spell of radical fundamentalists with terrorist connections). Western countries have had enough experience with Islamist terrorism to know how it breeds. …
Read the full article here. This is the first of three articles.
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About the author
Mark Lilla is a Professor of Humanities in the History Department at Columbia, and currently a Fellow of the Paris Institut d’Études Avancées. See his bio here.
He is author of The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics
For More Information
See all posts about Islam, and these posts about France:
- The Rioting in France and the Decline of the State. About the previous round of riots in 2005.
- France volunteers itself as a front line in the clash of civilizations.