My overwhelming feeling was: may this spirit of resistance last. May this be a tipping point of Never Again. May this also be the start of a reckoning. Not only for France, but also for a Europe where we know jihadi networks – however much of a minority they may be – are growing, and where populism and xenophobia are also on the rise.
How did it come to this ? Unlike 9/11, unlike the Nazi occupation, this was not an attack from afar, from beyond a nation’s borders. It was a murderous danger that appeared from within France. The fanatical, indoctrinated, armed Islamists who assassinated 17 people in Paris were young French nationals, they were born and educated in France. This key aspect goes a long way in explaining why there was such an outpouring of grief and anger, and the need to reclaim France’s identity by a show of grassroots democratic strength.
Just as important was the presence of many European leaders and officials. It was not only about solidarity, but about restating what Europe is supposed to be about: tolerance, fundamental rights, rule of law. The antidotes against war.
“Je suis Charlie, je suis flic, je suis Juif” – this was the best, the strongest and most complete slogan that demonstrators brandished. I am Charlie, I am the police, I am Jewish. The terrorist attack had indeed three dimensions. First, they targeted not only freedom of speech but the right of blasphemy. The Charlie Hebdo cartoons may not have pleased everyone but they were about exercising a right that the French revolution of 1789 introduced. Before that, blasphemy was a crime.
Nothing Charlie Hebdo did ever violated democratically entrenched rights. In 2007, when the satirical magazine was prosecuted by Muslim organisations in France for supposedly inciting hatred and insulting Islam and Muslims at large, the court ruled that the magazine, even if it ruffled sensitivities, had not gone beyond “the admissible limits of freedom of speech”.
Secondly, the gunmen targeted police officers, shooting three dead in cold blood. Doing so, they attacked those whose mission is to uphold the rule of law. This was an attack on an institution of the republic as much as on individuals who were risking their lives as they attempted to stop the assailants.
Thirdly, the jihadi fanatics went for Jews. They committed a massacre inside a kosher shop, and hours before the start of the sabbath, making sure there would be many customers at hand. So it happened that on French soil, French citizens assassinated Jews just because they were Jewish. It was a tragedy that could only reignite the memory of second world war horrors. And it came less than three years after a bloody antisemitic attack in the French city of Toulouse, where three children were killed in a Jewish school.
Beyond Sunday’s spectacular display of unity against terror, questions must be asked: was enough done, in recent years, to fight back against the evil phenomenon that is now so vocally condemned? Was there enough solidarity when Charlie Hebdo was criticised and attacked for daring blasphemy? Or when it was abusively labelled racist, or anti-Arab, in a manner that completely distorted the very spirit of this magazine rooted in France’s 1968 movement of leftwing, progressive, free thinking? Was there a sufficient understanding of what it meant when police officers, in some French suburbs for instance, were greeted with stones being thrown at them, or even guns being fired? Was there enough reckoning of why some Jewish people in France have felt threatened, or ill at ease, and with emigration to Israel growing? And has there been enough clarity about how France’s social fabric is challenged when an antisemitic show, that of the so-called comedian Dieudonné, gathers millions of positive messages on social media, much of this coming from young people? I fear not.
These are the questions that will have to be addressed. These are problems to which durable solutions will need to be found. Make no mistake. Everyone was mobilised, determined and emotional in Paris on Sunday, but the deeper fault lines of French society, and the weakness shown in the recent past by its political parties, governments and institutions in dealing with them, will not have disappeared in one day, not through the magical wand of a massive and necessary demonstration.
