Martine Gozlan

The cohort of exegetes of our new tragedies is as varied as the previous wave of followers of intellectual denial. They ranged from Emmanuel Todd, the first to challenge, as a fool of the sociological think piece, the “Je suis Charlie” that sprang from a million desperate voices on 11 January 2015, to the writer Virginie Despentes, famous for her declaration of love to the Kouachi brothers.

Let’s quote her again to give the measure of what was written at the time, without the slightest scum of guilt: “I also loved those who made their victims stand up and ask them to declare their identity before aiming in their faces…” Can we imagine, in democratic times, a fan of the Nazi executioners swooning over their crimes and continuing to weave its media spider’s web without a hitch? This is what happened.

The same Despentes reoffends by signing in the Obs of 14 November 2020 a column entitled “Wars and terrorism. Getting out of denial”. It must be said that in terms of denial, the text borders on the summits. It puts on a bloodthirsty equal footing the “war on terror” and the terrorism that strikes us: the cutthroats would react to the bombings by international coalitions on the Middle East and in particular to the war led by France in Mali. An old thesis whose ineptitude and bad faith are demonstrated every day by the massacres committed by the jihadists on their own civilian populations, whether in Afghanistan, Mali or Nigeria where the sinister Boko Haram sect operates, whose name sums up the Islamist universe: “The book is impure”.

Nevertheless, authors and publishers of books co-sign with Despentes this forum seeking false excuses for the “Nazis”, as these Algerians who fought against them between 1991 and 2000, in the indifference and sometimes the reprobation of the world, used to call them. Let us note without surprise among the beautiful petitioners’ consciences, the philosopher Alain Badiou, frozen in his lunar post-Marxism; the irremovable François Burgat, old companion of Islamism; the publisher François Gèze, who made it his duty, during the bloody Algerian decade mentioned above, to thicken the media fog maintained in France on those responsible for the massacres; his colleague from Editions la Fabrique, Eric Hazan, who publishes Houria Bouteldja, the antisemitic muse of the Indigenes of the Republic.

New feathers have been added to their dusty plume: the actress Adèle Haenel, to whom Metoo’s excesses have offered a parallel career, the teacher Laurence de Cock who demonstrated against “Islamophobia” on 10 November 2019, alongside the CCIF, who was little bothered by the “Allah Akbar!” proclaimed by the veiled, their mentors and their political godfathers of the far left. But also the novelists Alexis Jenni (Prix Goncourt 2011) and Annie Ernaux, who we would prefer to see confined to their literary writings rather than to their tribunals. We cannot name everyone. All the more so as in the register of the victim proclamation, things are in turmoil at the gate. Ségolène Royal, on Cnews, is piously letting loose : “I think some of the caricatures of Mohammed are insulting….” La dame à la rose is “not for banning but not for endorsing and saying that it’s good…”

Regarding the pseudo “Islam of France”, a furious campaign aims to censor Hassen Chalghoumi, the imam of Drancy, preferred target since 2005 of the committee “Sheikh Yassin” whose guru, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, played a role in the cabal that led to the beheading of Samuel Paty. Sefrioui is under lock and key and the collective has been dissolved, but the hatred against Chalghoumi, this too republican imam, too favourable to dialogue with the Jews and Israel, is spreading without limits. First of all, the religious is threatened with death by thousands of messages. A fatwa calls for his “execution”. Then, among those who call on the media not to invite him any more, we find some very beautiful linen: Bariza Khiari, former vice-president of the Senate, member of the executive board of En Marche and president of the Institute of Islamic Cultures, Ghaleb Bencheikh, president of the Foundation for Islam of France. The latter, who constantly presents himself as a moderate, does not hesitate, however, in an interview with the Algerian site TSA, to take up the false discourse of the worst enemies of France in countries under the obscurantist grip: “There is truly in France a hatred against Muslims as people.” dares Ghaleb Bencheikh.

With such enemies, Islamism still has good days ahead of it.

*  Journalist and essayist, editor in chief at weekly magazine Marianne, specialist in Islamism and Middle-East affairs..