France ‘so afraid of being accused of Islamophobia, it refuses to name the ideology that motivates these attacks’
JUN 22, 2024 3:00 PM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
11 COMMENTS
Carine Azzopardi is right: the West is so afraid of charges of “racism” and “Islamophobia” that it is neither comprehending nor mounting any effective resistance to the global jihad. Yet she is also wrong, and is engaging in exactly the same denial and willful ignorance that she is criticizing. Her careful language in this piece makes it abundantly clear that she would explain, if asked, that the ideology of “Islamism” and “Islamist terrorism” was something quite different from the benign and cuddly religion of Islam itself. But if you asked her to provide specifics about the differences between the two, neither she nor anyone else who speaks about “Islamism” would be able to do so convincingly.
In reality, “Islamism” is a Western construct with no basis in Islamic tradition, theology or law. It is designed solely to separate Islam from its political, supremacist, aggressive, and violent aspects. Azzopardi is right: the West is cowed and cowardly, and has staked its future on fantasies. But she, too, and others like her, are going to have to be attentive and studious, and awaken to some harsh realities about Islam, before any effective defense can be mounted.
“Islamism Killed My Partner. Why Won’t the West Fight It?,” by Carine Azzopardi, The Free Press, June 18, 2024:
On the evening of November 13, 2015, I recorded a video of my partner, Guillaume, laughing and dancing round the living room with our two daughters, aged four and seven. Just a few minutes later, he left our apartment in eastern Paris to go to the Bataclan concert hall.
A rock critic who wrote under the name Guillaume B. Decherf, he loved nothing more than good music, and was excited about seeing Eagles of Death Metal that night. In his review for Les Inrockuptibles, he had praised the band’s latest album. Its “sole aim,” he wrote, was “to give pleasure,” before signing off with a flourish: “Plaisir partagé!” A pleasure shared….
Shortly before noon the next day, a journalist friend of mine called from the morgue, with the terrible news I’d been waiting for: Guillaume, 43, was one of the 130 people murdered by Islamists in a series of coordinated attacks that day.
After Guillaume’s death, I needed to know exactly why he was taken from us. So I dedicated my journalism career to trying to understand the ideology of the people who killed him. Between 2015 and 2017, I covered attack after attack: a Catholic church in Normandy, a supermarket in Trèbes, a Bastille Day celebration in Nice. I was still grieving when, in September 2021, I started reporting on the trial of the twenty men accused of orchestrating the Bataclan attacks. The biggest trial in French history, it lasted ten months and heard from over 2,500 plaintiffs. For some reason, I assumed the court would examine how the ideology of Islamism had contributed to the deaths of so many innocent people. But day after day, as expert after expert took the stand, this important factor almost never came up.
I couldn’t stay silent. A couple of months into the trial, I wrote a column. “Ideology has an essential place in a terrorist trial,” I argued, “because terrorism is the choice to use violence in pursuit of a political cause, in this case Islamism.” I explained that the terrorists believed Islamic law should govern all public life, including in France. I said they directly opposed our country’s constitutional secularism, its laïcité.
The column resulted in an invitation to testify at France’s parliament. In a room full of experts, I gave the facts: over the last 40 years Islamist terrorism has caused the deaths of over 210,000 people, and France is the European country most often targeted: we have experienced 82 attacks since 1979. And yet, I said, “our country is so afraid of being accused of xenophobia or Islamophobia, it refuses to accurately name the insidious ideology that motivates these attacks.” The following year, nineteen of the 20 men were found guilty of involvement in the Bataclan massacre, which was named for what it was: a terrorist enterprise.
What I said in the French parliament shouldn’t be controversial. But it was only in private that people dared thank me. Shortly after the trial, I was contacted by a man who taught at a school in a Paris suburb, whose colleague had been beheaded in October 2020 on his way home from work. The murder of Samuel Paty made headlines around the world and should have been a cautionary tale—but since then, French public schools have continued to incubate Islamist ideology. So many of Samuel’s students were vulnerable to indoctrination, growing up in communities of poor Muslim immigrants where Islamist views had gained a foothold. A parent had once told him: “The laws of my religion supersede those of your Republic.”… |
