French violence

A rather depressing article in the latest number of the NYRB about the ongoing conflict between the radicalised & marginalised Moslems, mostly born in France, but mostly having north African if not Algerian roots, and the French civic values of postcolonial today. In particular, and I quote: ‘its more recent tradition of laïcité - the particularly French version of secularism that guarantees the right of all religions to exist, yet denies the right of religion to control public life. There are laws against hate speech and against insulting people for their religion, but the concept of blasphemy is not recognized, as it would mean that a religion was sanctioning speech’. A conflict which spreads, amongst other places, to the teaching of history and biology, with lots of teachers in schools with lots of Muslims on their rolls trading this recent tradition in for a quiet life. A conflict which has also stirred up anti-Semitism again, giving rise to curious links with National Rally, formerly the National Front.

All this resulted in some savage terrorist attacks, culminating in the particularly savage murder of a teacher in a school in the north western outskirts of Paris in the autumn of last year. Apart from anything else the charge of his insulting the prophet was quite unfair. With the whole sorry story being stirred up by what read like very unpleasant people - and with the actual murderer having had Chechen rather than north African roots and having only learned about the teacher he went on to murder in the media. Nothing to do with him personally.

That said, the behaviour of the satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’, the subject of the offending lesson on the proper limits of free speech, does seem to be gratuitously provocative – although in their defence it should be said that their attacks on Christian and Jewish figures are just as robust, not to say tasteless and tactless.

And then there was the long, sorry and very bloody history of the French in Algeria. A colonial outrage of the first order: a bloody and protracted conquest followed less than a century later by a bloody and protracted withdrawal, leaving Algeria to make a not very good job of cleaning up the resultant mess. And France to make not a very good job of taking in the many displaced Algerians, many of whom went on to do all the dirty work that proper Frenchmen don't want.

Not easy to see a way out of all this.

Maybe the French of today would be similarly shocked if they read of our doings in, for example, Kenya, at about the same time that they were getting badly embroiled in Algeria. See reference 2 for some notice.

PS: two factlets. First, we are told that around half the imams in France were trained in Turkey. Perhaps not the best place to learn about French values. Second, HyperCacher – literally 'Super Kosher' – is a chain of kosher supermarkets in France and Italy. A chain which appears to be without web site. Maybe they do Facebook.

Reference 1: A Rising Tide of Violence in France: The roots of radicalization in the country’s colonial past - Marc Weitzmann/NYRB - 2021.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/07/elkins-and-out.html.