FRANCE’S LATEST BOUT OF JIHAD JITTERS came in September when two
small homemade bombs were thrown into a crowded Jewish grocery
store in suburban Paris. The attack was largely symbolic—windows
were broken, a few patrons injured—but it was yet another wake-up
call to a country still in denial about the extent of the Islamist
threat. Police tracked the bomb-thrower to Strasbourg, where he
welcomed them to his apartment with fire from a .357 Magnum before
being shot. Raids in Paris, Nice, and Cannes netted 11 others ready
to kill for love of Allah, one of them arrested as he returned home
from his local mosque carrying a loaded rifle. Along with a list of
targets and jihadist literature preaching war against France, the
police found a small arsenal for that purpose: an assault rifle, a
12-gauge shotgun with 800 cartridges, and materials for making time
bombs. An investigator said it all amounted to “an operational unit
that was much more dangerous than we had thought.”
The authorities’ surprise at the extent of Islamist
determination to take down France is itself surprising. Only a few
months before, Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian
descent, had shot three French soldiers in the south of France,
then slaughtered a teacher, the man’s two young sons, and an
8-year-old girl at a Jewish school in Toulouse before gendarmes
satisfied his desire for a martyr’s death. Despite his declared
goal of “bringing France to its knees,” his proclaimed affiliation
with al Qaeda, and his training trips to Afghanistan, Egypt,
Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, the government preferred to
describe him as a lone fanatic. “For heaven’s sake,” it said in
effect, “don’t blame terrorism on France’s peace-loving Muslim
community.” The dozen jihadists arrested in the raids knew better:
They praised Mohamed Merah as their role model.
Like him, they typify the new French jihadist, who no longer
arrives on strike missions from the Middle East but is home grown.
(And there are plenty of potential recruits. If America’s Muslim
population were proportionate to France’s, it would number nearly
40 million.) Most come from the festering public housing projects
surrounding all major cities, the banlieues that have been
turned into zones de non-droit, lawless neighborhoods
where police dare not venture for fear of provoking violent,
stone-throwing, car-burning riots. Far from the glittering Champs
Élysées and trendy Saint-Germain-des-Près, these areas are seen by
neither tourists nor the French bourgeoisie. The conservative
British writer Theodore Dalrymple aptly calls them “threatening
cities of darkness” surrounding the City of Light. They come, too,
from France’s overloaded prisons. Impressionable young convicts,
disproportionately Muslim, are easily radicalized by self-appointed
imams.
But if bomb-throwing jihadists are the cutting edge of militant
Islam’s campaign to conquer France, cowing the population and
instilling a climate of fear, a more insidious danger is the
temptation to self-censorship and appeasement. Running scared,
French authorities are trying to avoid anything that might possibly
offend Muslims.
The recent flap over caricatures of Muhammad published in a
French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, revealed the
government’s pusillanimity in all its glory. The cartoons,
showing The Prophet in, shall we say, compromising positions in the
buff, were the paper’s way of mocking the overwrought Muslim
reaction to the amateurish online video “Innocence of Muslims.” The
authorities had pleaded with the paper’s editors not to publish the
cartoons for fear of offending the Arab population; when they went
ahead in the name of press freedom, the government cravenly rebuked
them for lacking “good judgment.” In his rejoinder, the paper’s
editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, neatly summed up the poisonous double
standard in today’s France: “It’s officially okay for us to attack
conservative Catholics, but we can’t poke fun at Islamist
fundamentalists,” he said. “It shows the climate here. Everyone is
driven by fear, which is exactly what this handful of extremists
wants.” Significantly, only 51 percent of French citizens supported
the paper’s position.
THIS IS DHIMMITUDE. Coined by the writer Bat Ye’or from the
Arabic
noun dhimmi, meaning a
non-Muslim citizen
of an Islamic
state, dhimmitude describes the submissive condition of
second-class citizens subject to special taxes and other
humiliations. What they say and do must be approved by Islamic
authorities. In her prescient book Eurabia, Ye’or
predicted that some European nations would adopt “a strict
political correctness that brooks no criticism of Arab governments
or Muslim immigrants, and that, in deference to Arab prejudices,
promotes anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel attitudes.”
That’s a pretty fair description of France today.
In the case of Charlie Hebdo, Sunni Islam’s highest
authority, Ahmed Muhammad Ahmed el-Tayeb, grand imam of
Al-Azhar and president of al-Azhar University in Cairo, quickly
slapped down the French upstart. Said el-Tayeb (who just happens to
hold a PhD in Islamic philosophy from none other than the Sorbonne)
in a communiqué, “Al-Azhar expresses its and all Muslims’ utmost
rejection of a French publication’s printing caricatures offensive
to Islam and its Prophet, the prophet of humanity.” A cyber attack
from Pakistan soon blocked the paper’s website “because of its
blasphemous contents.” In some communities, men appeared at
newspaper stands early on the morning of the issue’s publication
and bought up all copies—a form of de facto censorship.
Optimists point out that France should get some credit for
banning the Muslim head scarf in schools and other public
institutions. But it would have been a more convincing act of
independence from Islamic pressure had authorities not enacted a
corresponding ban on wearing yarmulkes and large crosses, too, in
an attempt to protect themselves from Arab reaction. It didn’t
work. As Christopher Caldwell reports in his important
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the Sunni mufti
of Egypt threatened that the anti-veil law would “destroy the
social peace of French society.” The Muslim Brotherhood bored in,
calling it “interference in the realm of Muslims’ personal and
religious liberty.” In a telling display of advanced dhimmitude,
Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of the interior, humbly made a hajj
to Egypt’s al-Azhar. To the vast relief of France’s dhimmis, he
returned with the good news that the grand imam had authorized
France to ban the veil. The government could go ahead with its
project, and excuse us for troubling you, sir.
The country’s growing dhimmi status skews its foreign
relations. As protests and demonstrations swept the Arab world
during the “Innocence” kerfuffle, it was quick to cower. Even
though France had nothing to do with the video produced by a
nutcase in California, the government found discretion decidedly
the better part of valor. Without receiving any known threats, it
preemptively closed its embassies, consulates, cultural centers,
and schools in 20 countries of the Muslim persuasion. So
internalized is the country’s dhimmi attitude, it seemed
perfectly normal to close up shop and hunker down to avoid the
painful consequences of Arab displeasure.
A month later, President François Hollande made unbidden
conciliatory gestures to Algeria over an incident that occurred
half a century ago and is now remembered only by Arab fanatics.
Referring to the police actions during an October 1961 Paris riot
by thousands of Algerians demanding independence from France,
Hollande officially recognized the “bloody repression” and paid
homage to the “victims.” Whether he was responding to pressure from
the Mali-based group al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which
has designated France as its main enemy, can only be surmised. As a
French diplomat put it recently, “Its threats have become pressing,
immediate, and multifarious, a real problem of national
security.”
When incipient dhimmitude clashes with traditional French
culture, guess which wins. Intellectuals and teachers already live
in fear of saying or writing the wrong thing. When a philosophy
teacher wrote a newspaper op-ed piece criticizing Muhammad as a
“master of hatred,” he received death threats and had to go into
hiding under police protection. Guy Millière, a professor of
cultural history at the Sorbonne, writes in despair, “France will
become a Muslim country. French leaders know it. They will never
take a decision that could make young Muslims angry….They have
accepted too many things to go back now.”
IN HIS REVEALING 2006 BOOK,
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West
from Within, Bruce Bawer cites a study by a French
ministry of education inspector that was leaked but never
officially released. It’s easy to understand why it was kept
secret. After investigating 61 schools, he reported that Muslim
pupils increasingly refuse to sing, dance, participate in sports,
draw a human face, or play a musical instrument. They shun school
cafeteria food that isn’t halal, refuse to draw a right angle in
math class because it looks like part of a Christian cross, won’t
swim in pools to avoid polluted “infidels’ water.” They reject
Voltaire and Rousseau (anti-religion), Cyrano de Bergerac (too
sexy), Madame Bovary (promotes women’s rights). Other
studies note that dhimmified French lycées are often
dropping whole areas of their curricula, e.g., in history and
geography, for fear of angry reactions by Muslim students or their
parents.
Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut says Islamists’ hostility toward
schools and other state institutions is due not to the frustration
of feeling deprived, but to hatred for symbols of France itself.
Out of political correctness—or dhimmitude—“We translate their
cries of hatred into cries for help, and their vandalism of schools
into demands for education,” he writes. Schoolyard hatred surfaces
when Muslim pupils talk about “the French” and “us,” and sneer at
their French classmates as les Gaulois. Told by their
teachers they are French, they respond, “that’s impossible, we’re
Muslim.” Despite symptoms like this, the left-leaning Le
Monde tries to put the best face on the situation. “France can
make its singularity—the fact of its having, and accepting, the
role of the first Muslim country of Europe—a peaceful weapon,” it
editorializes, hoping the country can “surpass ideological and
religious confrontation.” The only way there will be no
confrontation is if it capitulates completely.
Meanwhile, the world’s most famous museum, the Louvre, is doing
its dhimmi best to confirm France’s enviable position as
Europe’s first Muslim nation. In September it opened its new $130
million wing devoted entirely to a lavish display of Islamic art.
Virtually on bended knee, the curators have expressed the timid
hope that it will offer a suitably respectful alternative to the
grossly unflattering depictions of Muhammad in Western media that
have met with such justified Muslim displeasure. Still, one of them
acknowledged ruefully that some of Allah’s faithful could possibly
be shocked by three discreet images of The Prophet’s exposed face
that somehow got included among the 18,000 artifacts on
display.
Scimitar-wielding Arabs of the Ummah, take note: The Louvre
curators might have made a mistake, but they are good dhimmis at
heart and really, really didn’t mean to offend you. So please don’t
issue a fatwa and lapidate or behead them.
