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COMMENTARY
March 24, 2012
Laicity & laxness
When a man is determined to become a martyr, it isn't easy to take him alive. This platitude was illustrated in Toulouse this week, where, after a nerve-racking siege, police finally broke into the flat of a self-declared jihadi.They'd been wondering why Mohammed Merah had been so quiet. The man had already killed three French soldiers in cold blood, a rabbi, and three little children at a Jewish school, maiming others, including policemen, along the way. And he had been quite voluble, once cornered. What was up? In the event, a classic commando operation, gone slightly wrong. Two more policemen were hurt when the man sprang from his hiding place, and was then killed by a sniper. Further forensic details may await the inevitable police investigation. French security already knew this man. Raised in Toulouse in the Muslim banlieues of Les Izards and Mirail, in highrise social housing estates, Merah was the child of divorced, third-generation Algerian immigrants. His older brother, Abdelkader, was known to belong to at least two violent Islamist cells, with pan-European connections; Mohammed had been tagging along from age 18. He had his own rich police file as a juvenile delinquent, with violent tendencies, and had himself twice served short jail terms. In the last two years he had been twice to Pakistan, on the former occasion being returned to France after the Americans stopped him trying to enter Afghanistan. It took French security little time to track him. His crimes were performed on a stolen motor scooter, and despite reports of his sophistication in leaving no fingerprints on spent ammo clips, he was, in fact, quite reckless. He had been accumulating lethal weapons, including an Uzi submachine-gun, an AK-47 assault rifle, numerous sidearms, and grenades. He had swapped one of his spare Colt .45s for a cellphone, on one occasion. He'd called further attention to himself when he took the scooter to a commercial garage, to have the GPS tracker disabled, and get advice on spray-painting it a new colour. One almost wonders if they have police in France. The above details I have skimmed from several French media sources, and any one of them may be subject to revision, but we get the gist. French security claims self-defensively they had no reason to arrest Merah beforehand, as he "had done nothing wrong." Actually he had done quite a few things. But then hundreds, perhaps thousands of French Muslim kids with known Islamist sympathies have been to Pakistan and back, so what was so special? This is once-Catholic France, home now of laïcité - where for centuries, Catholics and others have been under pressure both social and political to be understated about their religious affiliations. France, where the policy of multiculturalism, that has spread unchecked in the Anglo-Saxon world, was never encouraged. Race, colour, and creed were matters of indifference: you could be anything in French public life, so long as you spoke good French, knew how to eat, and did not raise "identity issues" beyond the common citizenship. President Nicolas Sarkozy has been trying to update "laicity," for our new age. In his view, the state must acknowledge the role of religion in determining the "ethical consensus" of society. This, in turn, serves as its excuse to intrude ever more intimately into the governance of religious institutions. The reality is that, over the past generation, the Left in France has abandoned this secularizing policy, which their socialist forebears imposed and developed. It was never mere American-style "separation of church and state," but involved anti-clerical hostility, only sometimes denied. It was founded, as each successive French Republic, on the "Enlightenment" tradition of the French Revolution, and is an embodiment of "liberté, égalité, fraternité." Today's "evolution of the revolution" is not a response to some revival of traditional Catholicism in France. The issue is, instead, the growth of an immigration-fed and increasingly welfare-dependant Islamic community which, with the passage of time, becomes more radical; which demands the apartheid of Shariah for Muslim-inhabited districts which are often already police no-go areas. Needless to say, all Muslims do not support this, and many are appalled. But the trend is not toward assimilation of the Muslim minority. Instead, with each generation, the Muslims of France become less, not more, "French" in their loyalties. Nor do all leftists wish this, but the radical Left, and radical Islamists, are now d'accord. They share an implacable hostility to western civilization, as such. They may be allies of convenience, but the old leftist "coolness" is now invoked on behalf even of an anti-Semitism that poses as "anti-Zionism" with disposable guile. It is against this background, and now the legacy of rioting and carburning around Muslim banlieues, that laicity is evolving into something more poisonous: something extremely selective, hypocritical, and violent; something which can neutralize even the security forces, who must handle obvious terrorists with kid gloves - until they start actually killing people.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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