France has endured an appalling sequence of Islamist terror assaults lately. One would possibly really feel a way of reduction that the nation esc
France has endured an appalling sequence of Islamist terror assaults lately. One would possibly really feel a way of reduction that the nation escaped comparatively evenly final Friday. That can, after all, be no comfort to the household of the person who was killed by 22-year-old Nathan C, a latest convert to Islam, who stabbed his sufferer to loss of life as he defended his spouse within the Parisian suburb of Villejuif.
She is recovering in hospital, as is one other girl, whereas a passer-by apparently has his faith to thank for his survival. Confronted by the killer who was wearing a djellaba and shouting ‘Allah Akbar’, the person pleaded for mercy, declaring that he was a Muslim. The terrorist ordered him to recite a prayer in Arabic, which he did, and so off he went in the hunt for different victims.
Some media retailers have cautioned that the perpetrator, who was shot lifeless by police and whose surname hasn’t been disclosed, had a historical past of psychological sickness. However arguably of higher relevance is his obvious adherence to the ultra-conservative Salafism, the ideology that hyperlinks a lot of France’s Islamist terrorists.
That the attacker reportedly spared a Muslim will ship a chill by the French authorities. Already a lot is being made from this by right-wing teams on social media. The technique of the Islamists in France is to fracture the nation, turning Muslim in opposition to non-Muslim and within the course of drawing within the left and the correct on opposing sides.
They failed to attain that with the assaults in 2015 and 2016, through which they dedicated atrocities in opposition to symbolic targets such because the church (the homicide of the aged priest as he took mass), the Republic (the Bastille Day assault in Good) and freedom of expression (Charlie Hebdo). In doing so, their victims included French Muslims, who had been gunned down as they loved a meal in Paris or run over by the truck that careered down the Promenade des Anglais in Good.
Has there been a change in technique? A realisation from Islamists that if they’re to plunge France right into a civil battle then a extra a nuanced terror is required? It’s not sufficient to kill; what they have to additionally do is create a local weather of concern, suspicion and hostility between non-Muslims and Muslims.
The technique started with the killing of 4 police personnel in October, butchered with a knife wielded by one in all their colleagues, one other convert to Islam. The Islamic State was jubilant: if we are able to infiltrate police HQ in Paris, the place else would possibly we goal? Subsequently it emerged that lately a number of law enforcement officials and troopers have both been fired or abandoned due to their allegiance to Islamic extremism.
And now the assault in Villejuif the place a lethal distinction was drawn, through which faith saved one man and condemned one other. For a few years, the political class in France has championed ‘vivre ensemble’, the Gallic equal of multi-culturalism’, however that’s anathema to the Islamists. They don’t need the French to ‘stay collectively’, they need them to struggle one another. The chances are there can be extra assaults between now and the presidential election in 2022 through which an individual’s faith may decide in the event that they stay or die.
That is one in all two strands of the Islamists’ technique to splinter the nation, what the French name the ‘coupeurs de têtes’ [cutting the heads]; the opposite is the ‘coupeurs de langues’ [cutting the tongues], whereby anybody who speaks negatively of Islam is branded an Islamophobe.
In his 2016 guide, ‘The Fracture’, political scientist Gilles Kepel, defined how Islamists, with their assist of the gullible on the French left, have used Islamophobia to show Muslims into perpetual victims. Looking forward to the 2017 election, Kepel wrote that regardless of the end result, the president could be confronted within the 5 years that adopted with a “very profound social and cultural disaster”, one that will require a rare “political imaginative and prescient” to keep away from a disaster.
France continues to be ready for this political imaginative and prescient, and time is working out.