Guy Millière – I am, as many people in France and in the world, absolutely horrified by what happened Wednesday, January 7 at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, of course.
I am especially my route crossed that of many of those who died. We disagreed on many subjects, but I liked their impertinence and I say, they were people without malice, and able to be bold when it came to personal freedom.
What was murdered, it’s impertinence. It is also the right to be disrespectful vis-à-vis a religion I have no need to name here.
Charb, Cabu, Wolinski, Tignous were equally irreverent vis-à-vis Christianity: who can imagine that a Christian would have thought to kill for it?
One religion still provides the disrespect it deserves murder. And one religion involves acting out in such cases. One religion preaches in its sacred texts, the holy war.
A horror that I could feel was added, I must say, a form of nausea. Journalists who have shown many times that they had nothing to do with freedom of speech, which called, there a few more days, censorship against Eric Zemmour, which excluded Renaud Camus circles well pensance , which enclose the thought in France in the isolation of the “politically correct” and that would have remained silent and indifferent if the victims had been the seat of a conservative newspaper, appeared, in one go, like the followers uncompromising a freedom to say everything supposed characterize France, “free country.” In reality, the freedom of speech in France is restricted and suffocated, and these journalists have, consciously or not, contributed to this restriction and this asphyxiation.
Editor’s Note: A version of this piece appeared in the August 25, 2014, issue of National Review.
Twitter reached its most loathsome depths when, in late July, the hashtags “#HitlerWasRight” and “#HitlerDidNothingWrong” became global trends. It was not so long ago that Hitler was the unanimously agreed upon incarnation of evil. Now, not 70 years after exterminating half of the world’s Jewish population, he is finding a constituency beyond the usual skinheads and Klan holdouts.
In July, hundreds of Jews praying for peace in the Middle East were trapped inside a Paris synagogue. The mob outside — a group of Gaza demonstrators — lobbed bottles and bricks at the facility and shouted, “Death to the Jews!” and “Hitler was right!” “Hitler for president!” was the refrain days later as Gaza protesters rampaged through Sarcelles, a Paris suburb, torching cars and Jewish businesses.
There is, too, the equally insidious embrace of Holocaust denial: “Faurisson is right! Gas chambers are bulls**t!” So proclaimed many of the 17,000 protesters who marched through Paris on last January’s “Day of Anger.” Robert Faurisson is a French academic whose “scholarship” includes statements such as “Never did Hitler order or permit the killing of a person because of his or her race or religion.” Who should worry French Jews more: those who deny the first Holocaust, or those who call for a second?
The British press has never seemed as out of touch as it is today. All our broadsheet papers are packed with pleas to the people of France, and other European populations, not to turn into Muslim-killing nutjobs in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The Guardian frets over “Islamophobes seizing this atrocity to advance their hatred.” The Financial Times is in a spin about “Islamophobic extremists” using the massacre to “[challenge] the tolerance on which Europe has built its peace.” One British hack says we should all “fear the coming Islamophobic backlash.” And what actually happened in France as these dead-tree pieces about a possible Islamophobic backlash made their appearance? Jews were assaulted. And killed. “Don’t attack Muslims,” lectures the press as Jews are attacked.
Across Europe, among the right-thinking sections of society, among the political classes, the response to the massacre of the cartoonists and satirists has been the same: to panic about how Them, the native masses, especially the more right-wing sections of the French population, might respond to it. The blood on the floor of the Charlie Hebdo offices was still wet when brow-furrowed observers started saying: “Oh no, the Muslims! Will they be attacked?” It’s the same after every terrorist attack: from 9/11 to 7/7 in London to last year’s Sydney siege to Paris today: Liberals’ instant, almost Pavlovian response to Islamist terror attacks in the West is to worry about a violent uprising of the ill-educated against Muslims. The uprising never comes, but that doesn’t halt their fantasy fears. What’s it all about?
On Friday, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabian authorities began carrying out their sentence of 1,000 lashes for Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, co-founder of a web site, now banned, called the Liberal Saudi Network. The whipping began with 50 lashes, a process which according to various reports will be repeatedly roughly weekly until all 1,000 lashes have been inflicted — some 50 lashes per week, over the next 20 weeks. That’s just part of his sentence. As Amnesty International [1] summarizes the case:
Raif Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes and a fine of 1 million Saudi Arabian riyals (about US$266,000) last year for creating an online forum for public debate and accusations that he insulted Islam.
Reporters without Borders, which has been calling for Badawi’s sentence to be overturned, released a statement [2] that his “only crime was to start a public debate about the way Saudi society is evolving.” The BBC, drawing on AFP eye-witness quotes, summarizes the scene [3] of the lashing in Jeddah:
France’s terror rampage ended Friday as police killed three Islamists, but not before they had paralyzed much of the country, taken more hostages, and killed at least four more innocents. Europe and the U.S. had better brace for more such attacks, while reinforcing the antiterror defenses, moral and military, that have come under political assault in recent years.
***
The biggest question raised by Paris is whether it presages a new offensive by homegrown jihadists carrying European or U.S. passports who are inspired by al Qaeda or Islamic State. Officials say one of the killers was trained by the al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen, and we can expect other such links or sympathies.
It’s tempting but probably wrong to think that France has a unique jihadist problem because of its relatively large Muslim population (about 7.5% of the country) and the immigrant ghettoes where they congregate. These certainly are breeding grounds for radicalism. Yet the United Kingdom has Birmingham, the Islamist petri dish for the London subway bombers, and the U.S. sheltered the killer Tsarnaevs in Boston and the Somali immigrants in Minnesota who’ve gone to Syria.
Israel’s Minister Without ApologiesA rising conservative star says the old formulas for pursuing peace with the Palestinians are obsolete. The two-state solution? Not anytime soon.
Tel Aviv
It’s election season in Israel, and so far the most talked-about campaign ad features an Orthodox politician in an unorthodox role. In a YouTube video that quickly went viral, Naftali Bennett plays a fashionably bearded Tel Aviv hipster with a compulsion to say sorry—especially when he’s the one being wronged.
A waitress spills coffee on him: He begs her forgiveness. His car gets rear-ended: He steps out to tell the offending driver how sorry he is. He sits on a park bench and reads an editorial in a left-wing newspaper calling on Israel to apologize to Turkey for the 2010 flotilla incident, in which nine pro-Palestinian militants were killed aboard a ship after violently assaulting Israeli naval commandos. “They’re right!” he says of the editorial.
At last the fake beard comes off and the clean-shaven Mr. Bennett, who in real life is Israel’s minister of economy and heads the nationalist Jewish Home Party (in Hebrew, Habayit Hayehudi), looks at the camera and says: “Starting today, we stop apologizing. Join Habayit Hayehudi today.”
Notwithstanding the conventional claim that Israel is increasingly isolated, the multinational accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers determined that 2014 was a record year of overseas investments in Israel’s high-tech industries: $15bn in acquisitions of 52 Israeli startups (compared to $7.6bn in 2013), in addition to $9.8bn raised by 18 Israeli companies in overseas stock exchanges (compared to $1.2bn in 2013). Once again, Israel’s impact on global medicine, health, agriculture, irrigation, energy alternatives, science, cyber, homeland security and defense, as well as Wall Street, supersedes the impact of Gaza Strip.
But, Israel is increasingly isolated…
Since 1948, a recycled assumption has maintained (e.g., the 1975 “Zionism is racism” UN resolution) that an anti-Israel global Tsunami is about to smother the Jewish State, triggering unprecedented isolation, the collapse of its international standing and the breakdown of its ties with the US, unless it committed itself – in the unpredictable, unstable, violent Middle East – to re-dividing Jerusalem, uprooting over 500,000 Jewish settlers, and retreating to a 9-15 mile sliver along the Mediterranean, which is dominated by the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria.
However, the demise of the USSR (which facilitated the 1991 revocation of the USSR-sponsored “Zionism is Racism”), the affirmation of the USA as the dominant super power, the upgraded US-Israel mutually-beneficial cooperation, and the emergence of Israel as a global commercial and military high tech power, have enhanced Israel’s global standing, dramatically expanding Israel’s global networking, beyond Europe, into India, China, Russia, the former Muslim Republics of the USSR, Latin America, all irrespective of diplomatic setbacks.
On the day when journalists were massacred in Paris, while blood still ran wet where they had fallen, and as eye witnesses described the killers’ shouts of “Allahu Akbar” – “Allah is great” – the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof asked the world not to judge the killers too quickly: most urgently, he said, don’t jump to the conclusion they are Muslims.
Really? Even when they sounded the Muslim prayer? Even when they called their deeds, loud and clear in the streets of Paris, “vengeance for the Prophet”?
Here’s what Kristof did not do: condemn the killings. Praise those who had been slaughtered. Express horror at their execution. And admit that men who praise Allah after committing mass murder are, religious profiling or not, probably going to turn out to be Muslim.
The Islamist massacre at Charlie Hebdo has understandably captured global attention because it was a barbaric attack on France and freedom of expression. In a moment of defiant moral clarity, “je suis Charlie” emerged as a popular phrase of solidarity with the victims. Hopefully such clarity persists and extends to those facing similar challenges every day in the Middle East.
Christians and other religious minorities have been beheaded by Islamists for years, but it wasn’t until US journalist James Foley was beheaded that the West cared. The Islamic State raped and slaughtered thousands of Yazidis — leaving the surviving refugees stranded on Mount Sinjar — before the West took notice. But one Islamist besieging a cafe in Sydney, killing two, dominated global coverage for the entire 16-hour incident.
Jeannette Bougrab was the girlfriend of Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier and she spoke out about the murders.
In emotional interviews, 41-year-old Jeannette Bougrab said: ‘I always knew he was going to die like Theo Van Gogh (the Dutch cartoonist murdered in 2004).’
‘I begged him to leave France but he wouldn’t. My companion is dead because he drew in a newspaper.’
Miss Bougrab, who had lived with Charb and her adopted daughter May for three years, added sadly: ‘He never had children because he knew he was going to die. He lived without fear, but he knew he would die.’
Proudly, Bougrab added: ‘He died standing.
‘He defended secularism. He defended the spirit of Voltaire. He, in fact, was really the fruit of this ideal of the Republic that we’ve almost forgotten.
‘He died, executed with his comrades, as he would say.’
Bougrab, a member of the French National Council of State who served under Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration has been described as a ‘hard secularist’.
