It was supposed to be the turning point in our response to violent Islamism. This week marks six years since more than a million people marched through the streets of Paris waving “Je Suis Charlie” placards in a show of defiance, echoed across the world, against the slaughter of satirists by a pair of jihadist brothers.
Today, with most Western countries reverting to type and responding to jihadist terror with obscurantism and denial, it looks like far fewer people were Charlie than was actually claimed. Not so in France, though, which is more or less united behind President Macron’s decision to confront the country’s domestic Islamist movement. In one poll at the end of last year, a staggering 79% of French citizens agreed that “Islamism has declared war on the Republic”.
To his critics, Macron’s hard line was a cynical manoeuvre designed to reduce the electoral threat to his right posed by Marine Le Pen and National Rally. But such a claim ignores the threat that Islamism does pose to France. It is also to misread who is directing the country’s conversation on extremism. For the truth is that the impetus behind France’s skirmish with Islamism doesn’t come from the Right, but from the Left.
This shift did not happen overnight. Way back in 2002, the left-wing feminist collective Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives) was founded following a series of high-profile organised gang rapes known as tournantes – or “pass-arounds”. They soon became vocal advocates against escalating misogyny and violence against women. But they were particularly concerned with the French authorities’ empowerment of Islamist and Salafist groups to tackle the social ills of drugs and crime, which to the feminists culminated in an Islamist culture of sexual repression, misogyny and extremism.
This was famously attempted in the commune of Trappes, some 30km from Paris, where the Salafist community was enlisted to steer young members away from criminality and delinquency. One resident gushingly described how “mothers saw their children return to religious practice. It was a relief.” By 2013, however, it became starkly clear that this experiment in activist Salafism had all but failed. Trappes was seized by religious rioting and the commune set an ignominious national record in sending 80 jihadist recruits to Syria. At the time, Ni Putes was denounced for being “Islamophobic”. But, if anything, the riots acted as a vindication of their warning.
Yet Ni Putes was hardly an isolated example, a fringe outlier on the peripheries of French debate. In the same year as its launch, a collection of essays titled Les Territoires Perdus de la Republique, or The Lost Territories of the Republic, was published, which warned of rising antisemitism and radicalisation among second and third generation Muslims. In the book, a number of schoolteachers – those tasked not just with imparting knowledge, but the values of the Republic – pointed out that classrooms were disintegrating along ethnic and religious lines, that the ideals of secularism and universalism were facing an unprecedented challenge.
That isn’t to say that the teachers’ sense of urgency — or that of Ni Putes — was widely shared on the Left, or even the centre. In fact, as late as 2014, national discussion surrounding Islamism was still, to an extent, plagued by cringe-inducing naivety. In April of that year, journalist David Thomson appeared on a typically French news programme to assess the steady exodus of jihadist recruits to ISIS’s nightmarish project in Iraq and Syria. Thomson, who by this point had interviewed dozens of French jihadis, calmly explained that that French jihadis see France as a legitimate target, as an “enemy of Allah”.
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