Illustration: Eric Lobbecke Source: Supplied
ONE swallow doesn’t make a summer, but how many swallows, exactly, do make a summer? Are two, or possibly three, terrorist attacks by Muslims in France in as many days, in three cities, killing one and injuring 27, a statistical blip or a sign of things to come?
In the first, a man aged 20, born in Burundi and a convert to Islam, walked into a police station in a suburb of Tours, drew out a knife and attacked the police, injuring one seriously and two others less seriously, before being shot dead by a fourth. The culprit accompanied his acts by the now familiar declamation, Allahu akbar — God is great.
The next day in Dijon, a man of North African origin aged 40 deliberately drove a car into pedestrians, injuring 14 in five different locations, while shouting Allahu akbar.
And the day after that, in Nantes, a man aged 37 drove a van into a Christmas market in the middle of the city, injuring nine and killing one. According to witnesses he too extolled the greatness of God. He then stabbed himself several times with a knife but failed to kill himself.
Considerable effort in France has gone into denying the significance of the religious exclamation of the perpetrators, for fear no doubt of stirring a primitive or visceral reaction by the French population. Unfortunately, official evasiveness is just as likely in the end to evoke violent rage as would downright incitement to hatred.
The authorities appear now to be constantly walking on the eggshells that — rather than good intentions — pave the road to hell.
The newspaper Liberation headed its report of the first of the episodes with a quote from an acquaintance of the perpetrator: The affair has nothing to do with religion. This was despite the fact that the perpetrator’s brother was a known extremist and he himself had become notably more religious recently, having posted a picture of himself with the flag of Islamic State, which has repeatedly called for Muslims in France to kill whomever they can.
Incidentally, a sentence in Le Monde’s account was very revealing about the social milieu from which the perpetrator emerged: “He was known for petty crimes — robberies, drug-dealing — but had never really drawn attention to himself in the quarter where he lived.” Robberies and drug-dealing are nothing unusual, and therefore unworthy of remark.
The second perpetrator was a man with a long psychiatric history who had been released from hospital only weeks before what I dare say will soon be called his “accident”. The police reported that after his arrest he spoke incoherently of the children of Palestine, Islamic State and so on, his incoherence — a symptom of madness — coming as a relief to those who want to hear or see no evil. It allowed them to dismiss him as an isolated lunatic, such as there have always been and always will be. It did not occur to them that madness and political or religious fanaticism are not contradictory or even incompatible.
For now, there is more mystery about the third perpetrator. The prosecutor of Nantes said his attack was an “isolated” event with no terrorist intent. Absurd though this sounds, she might be right. Clusters of unusual events do occur, coming and going without signifying any long-term trend or common origin. Moreover, bizarre or sensational crimes often evoke imitation by the weak-minded. But no one in France is likely to believe this, even if true.
The political class is so wedded to political correctness, which it expresses in language of almost Soviet woodenness, that people are now inclined to assume that it is lying even when it speaks the truth. And since 1200 young French Muslims gone to Syria to kill for Islamic theocracy, which is more fun than working for a living or long-term unemployment in a soulless and soul-destroying HLM (Habitation a Loyer Modere, rent-controlled housing), there are certainly enough Islamists in France to commit three acts of terrorism in quick succession.
At the very time these attacks took place, the writer and journalist Eric Zemmour, a ferocious opponent of what he believes to be the creeping Islamisation of France (with the connivance, willing or unwilling, of the political and intellectual elite), was sacked from the television program on which he had appeared for several years because of an interview he gave to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Having evoked the dangers of Muslim separatism in France, he was asked whether he thought Muslims could or should be deported from France. He replied: “I know it’s unrealistic but history is surprising.
Who would have said in the 1940s that, 20 years later, a million pieds-noirs (French colonists) would have left Algeria to return to France? Or that, after the war, five or six million Germans would have left central and eastern Europe, where they had lived for centuries?”
While Zemmour (who is of Berber Jewish origin) could claim that he was not actually advocating the kind of violent ethnic cleansing that the pieds-noirs and Germans suffered, his words could certainly be construed as encouraging or at least as wishing it. Nor is it true that his dismissal by the TV station was censorship, as he and many supporters claimed. A man’s right to free speech does not entail the duty of any particular publisher or broadcaster to disseminate his views; and in practice his dismissal has led to more publicity for his views than if he had not been dismissed. Millions of people have now read his interview who would not have read it otherwise.
In France on the one hand there is a cowardly denial that there is any problem; on the other more and more people dream of a radical or even brutal solution to it. I am reminded of the description by the Tsarist minister of justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, of the situation in Russia in 1915: The paralytics of the government are struggling feebly with the epileptics of the revolution.
Theodore Dalrymple is the author of more than 20 books and a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist.
