Dealing with Islamist terrorism

 Terror or democracy

Victor Angelo

 

Almost two hundred and fifty years after his death, Voltaire remains one of the most influential thinkers in the history of France and Europe. He wrote abundantly and was an advisor to the great ones of his time. His political and philosophical thinking opened the path that would lead to the French Revolution and to the national motto that remains today: Freedom, Equality, Fraternity. His writings mocked religious dogmas, at a time when it was very dangerous to do so. They fought against intolerance, advocated freedom of expression and the separation of the church from the state. In 1736, he wrote a play against religious intransigence, which he entitled "Fanaticism or Mohammed the Prophet". In this tragedy, Voltaire criticized directly and with all the letters the founder of Islam. Personally, I read the work as an onslaught against religions, in one case, openly, in another, that of Catholicism, in a more subtle way, so as not to endanger his own skin.

Now it has become impossible to teach Voltaire in some schools in France, especially in the suburbs of Paris. Certain students, coming from radicalized Muslim families, prevent this from happening. For these people, Voltaire is the worst of the infidels, the one who dared to sully the name of the Prophet. In the past, the Holy Catholic Inquisition burned heretics in public. In the present of the Islamist maniacs, Voltaire would be beheaded. Besides Voltaire, it is a danger to talk about the Holocaust or condemn anti-Semitism, to quote the writer Gustave Flaubert and his novel Madame Bovary - a free and passionate woman, a terrible example for a radical who considers that women should be submissive and walk covered from head to toe - or try to discuss Charlie Hebdo and the caricatures of Mohammed. A good part of the French public-school system lives in a climate of turmoil, in which the violent reaction of certain students has replaced the debate of ideas. And the intimidation begins earlier and earlier. There are already stories of boys refusing to sit next to girls in maternal schools.

All this leads us to the criminal and absurd decapitation that took place last week. The victim, Professor Samuel Paty, was a brave man and aware that the mission of the schools is also to form future citizens, free, equal in rights, in solidarity, respectful and responsible. But in France, the secular school has been actively undermined by radical Islamists since 2005. A recent survey revealed that about 40% of teachers of literary, civic and humanities subjects censor themselves and do not mention in their classes anything that might provoke the anger of the most fanatical students. Therefore, my first reaction to the news of the mad act was admiration for Samuel Paty's courage and sense of professional duty. He also reminded me that the response to the terrorist threat is to behave vertically, unequivocally firmly.

But courage and firmness cannot be just individual issues. Terrorism is not the result, as some claim, of the actions of "lone wolves”. The old visionary Friedrich Nietzsche said that "everything that is absolute belongs to pathology," but in the case of terrorism, this is more the social context. We are facing an extreme identity phenomenon, a social ecosystem that makes thousands of families live in a Salafist ideological swamp. They are a minority fringe of European citizens of Muslim faith, but their actions are very destabilizing.

In situations like France - and in other European countries, notably Belgium and the Netherlands, which go in the same direction as France - it is essential to get the right appropriate political response. On another occasion, I will write about the security treatment of the issue. Politically, it is important to begin by recognizing that fanaticism, by placing a manipulated, primary, and ignorant interpretation of religion above the values of the republic, is a threat to democracy and social peace. If the democrats could not deal with terrorist radicalism, the extreme right, whether it be called Le Pen or something else, in some other country, would use that political bankruptcy to gain power. And then it would crush everyone, not just the exalted knife-wielders and their supporting communities.

(Machine translation of my opinion column of today, published in the Portuguese newspaper Diário de Notícias, Lisbon)