There is no point in trying to convince fanatics, emblems of the worst that religions can produce. No: those who need to be convinced are those of our compatriots who have not yet understood what war is being waged against the Republic and democracy – a war whose daily bread is social networks. And to better combat it, we need to name it: this war is the one waged by theislamofascism. This is how Daniel Cohn-Bendit had the intelligence and the courage to describe the perpetrators of the attack against Charlie Hebdo January 7, 2015. And it was yet another Islamofascist who tried to slit Salman Rushdie's throat.
Islamofascism: because wanting to impose by violence the most intolerant, most totalitarian forms of a religion, isn't that a form of fascism?
But why is it so difficult to make this diagnosis? It is because a part of the intellectual and political left seems to remain blind and deaf to this reality. It is in this connection that Pierre-André Taguieff coined the term “Islamo-leftism” with excellent historical and political arguments. However, this phenomenon, although well documented and widely proven, is the object of systematic denial by its representatives – it does not exist – while Islamist fascism is the object of an equally systematic denial – it is acted as if it did not exist. This denial and this denial feed off each other to form what must be called a new negationism.
These "Islamophobia crooks", as Charb forcefully called them the day after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, "convey criticism of a religion as hatred of its practitioners", or "see the defense of republican secularism as a means of "stigmatizing Muslims", as Raphaël Enthoven recalled after the recent assassination attempt on Rushdie[1]. Blackmail with “Islamophobia” (a term, let us recall, invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to disqualify any criticism of Islamism) constitutes the recurring weapon of these deniers: they are driven not by indignation against the barbaric excesses of a religion but, above all, by the “fear of offending minorities,” as Laurent Joffrin noted after the Chautauqua attack.[2]. We found them, even more recently, in the contestation of the decision to expel in the name of the laws of the Republic the imam Hassan Iquioussen, preacher of fanaticism, anti-Semitism and sexism: a contestation coming from La France Insoumise, against the very values of the left but in the name of "the left", in a perfect perverse reversal.
Refusal to appoint
Only one LFI MP used the word "Islamism" in reaction to the attack on Rushdie: Christophe Bex, MP for the 7th constituency of Haute-Garonne. But the ellipsis of the expression "Islamist fascism" is not limited to the radical left. In the edition of Marianne On August 18, 2022, Jack Dion asked: "What do Emmanuel Macron, his lieutenants, his ministers, and the main leaders of La France Insoumise have in common? The stubborn refusal to use the word "Islamism" in connection with the attack on Salman Rushdie. All condemn the criminal act, all cry obscurantist madness, all defend freedom of expression, but none of them dare to dot the i's, call a spade a spade, and condemn the ideology underlying the act of Hadi Matar, the fan of Ayatollah Khomeini, former guide of the Iranian revolution."
Likewise, in AOC On August 29, the article by Marc Porée, professor of literature at the Sorbonne, entitled "Salman Rushdie, the fabulist", mentions an "attempted assassination" of "the one they had tried to silence forever", the "assassination" of his Japanese translator, an "attack", an "arson of criminal origin", "actions from another age", "resentment and the spirit of vengeance"... But the ideological-religious causes of the attack are never mentioned: the article does not include the words "Islam", "Islamism", "Islamist" anywhere. This reminds us of distressing precedents, with the systematic avoidance of the word "Islamist" in many political and union statements after the assassination of Samuel Paty. If "misnaming things adds to the misfortune of the world", according to Camus's oft-quoted words, does not not naming evil make those who commit it happy?
Euphemizations
A milder form of this negationism consists of designating, but with such imprecise words, and with such precautions that one must already be well aware of what is involved in order to be able to understand: "knife attack" for throat cutting, “fanatic” or “unbalanced” for Islamist, “religious obscurantism” for Islamic fundamentalism.
Thus, in 2021, the memorial installed in front of the Bataclan included, hung on the gates of the central reservation, a plaque bearing the names of the victims as well as an exhibition of photographs commented on by their authors. However, nowhere – neither in the artists' texts nor in those presenting the device – was the word "Islamists" used: it was only a question of "attacks", of "murderous madness"... As if it had only been an unfortunate, unplanned slip-up, a fit of madness without ideological motivation. A strange way of transmitting the memory of a mass crime, whose motivations are modestly covered up by the very act where one pretends to deplore it.
Voluntary confusionism
One of the causes of this negationism is to be found in the Manichaeism of a part of the left, which systematically takes the side of the dominated (the "exploited") against the dominant (the "exploiters"), whatever the actions and circumstances. And if the former happen to behave badly, it would either be the fault of the latter ("society", "the State", the "consequences of colonization" ...), or because of a conspiracy - for example "Islamophobes", or "Zionists", fabricating attacks to better stigmatize Muslims. Thus Jean-Luc Mélenchon declared on June 6, 2021 on France Inter: "You will see that in the last week of the presidential campaign, we will have a serious incident or a murder. It was Merah in 2012. It was the attack last week on the Champs-Elysées. (...) All of this is written in advance." [3]Far-left conspiracy theories and far-right conspiracy theories then come together in populist refrains: "The government is lying to us", "The elites have betrayed us"... Without seeing or wanting to admit that, in France, what Muslims are victims of above all is the murderous madness of their fanaticized coreligionists.
Another example, again recent, among many others: on April 27, 2022 the site AOC published a text by Philippe Corcuff entitled "In full confusionism, on the edge of the political precipice", which makes one wonder if the author has measured to what extent this title applies to his own text. Because he associates my name, via my participation in the "Observatory of decolonialism and identity ideologies", with a "focus on "Muslims". I immediately wrote to the editorial staff of the site to request a right of reply to this defamatory statement, because it is exclusively on Islamism that I and my colleagues at the Observatory have directed - among other subjects - our analyses. This confusion between Muslims and Islamists, astonishing for a sociologist and political scientist, tends to prohibit any criticism of Islamism by assimilating it to a global rejection of Muslims - a rejection commonly described as "Islamophobia". In this respect, the confusion he commits on the grounds of denouncing "confusionism" is typically part of this "Islamo-leftism" which, in the same paragraph, he considers to be "phantom", even though his assertion constitutes a flagrant example of it.[4].
Voluntary confusionism, bad faith and lies: who can identify with this left?
It's not from yesterday
The phenomenon unfortunately dates back well before this month of August 2022. Let us remember: in 2014, after a first attack against Charlie, Edwy Plenel published a pamphlet in La Découverte entitled For Muslims, where he stated that there is no more "problem of Islam in France" than there was a "Jewish problem" in the interwar period. Here, two realities are hidden in a clever sleight of hand: first, there is indeed a problem ofIslamism in France; and secondly, the anti-Semites who were once concerned about a "Jewish problem" were targeting a category essentialized as such (this is the very foundation of racism) and not, like those who are today concerned about Islamism, individuals guilty of acts contrary to the law and to human dignity.
Let us remember again: January 8, 2015, just after the attack on Charlie, Edgar Morin wrote in a column in Monde that « Islamophobes reduce the Arab to his supposed belief, Islam, reduce the Islamic to Islamist, the Islamist to fundamentalist, the fundamentalist to terrorist"[5]. In other words, we should ban the words "terrorist", "fundamentalist" and "Islamist" from our vocabulary, otherwise we risk stigmatizing "Arabs" and their "supposed beliefs" (let us note in passing the deliberately maintained confusion between ethnicity and religion): should we therefore remain silent rather than name names? And he continued: "This anti-Islamism is becoming more and more radical and obsessive and tends to stigmatize an entire population even larger in number than the Jewish population that was stigmatized by pre-war and Vichy anti-Semitism." To call Islamism this way would amount to committing the same atrocities against Muslims as were committed against Jews under the Occupation... A strange distortion of memory for someone who was a Jewish resistance fighter from 1942, but who today does not seem to make the difference between the more or less explicit racism of a part of the population and a State policy which knowingly made itself complicit in the extermination of millions of innocent people.
Closer to us, in 2021, François Héran, professor of demography at the Collège de France, reacted to the assassination of Samuel Paty with a Letter to Teachers on Freedom of Expression (La Découverte), on the occasion of which he gave an interview on April 9 at Monde. He declared in particular: "Freedom of expression today tends to stifle or absorb freedom of belief". Thus Salman Rushdie, by exercising his freedom of expression as a novelist, would "stifle" the freedom of belief of Muslims? But how do his writings prevent anyone from believing in anything? On the other hand, those who equate freedom of belief with the prohibition of criticizing this belief do indeed stifle freedom of expression, by the threat that gags or by weapons that kill. By an unscrupulous reversal, the defender of beliefs presents them as victims of freedom of expression at the very place where it is in their name that people are being slaughtered and decapitated. And it is he again who denounces, regarding the criticism of the word "Islamophobia", "a word police in the service of denial": we find here this same perverse reversal which makes the denouncers of Islamism the instigators of a "word police" and a "denial", even while the new negationists multiply euphemisms and unsaid things.
Faced with the very real murder of hundreds of innocent people, the first reflex of the protectors of the new "damned of the earth" that the Muslims would be is to deplore the risk of intensification of Islamophobic discrimination; faced with the reality of blood, they see only the virtuality of injustice; faced with the actual attacks on freedom of expression, they see only imaginary attacks on freedom of belief (which they also rename, as Héran does, "freedom of conscience", as if this did not include the freedom not to have a religion and the freedom to criticize religions). Faced with what does not fit with their ideas, not only do they choose to look elsewhere but they also work to prevent others from thinking and speaking.
The power of words
But when faced with weapons, there is no other defense than the law and words. The law and its application are the responsibility of politicians and judges; words are what make intellectuals competent. They are our responsibility.
Let us therefore stop being fascinated and paralyzed by the word “Islamophobia,” this red rag brandished to silence any warning against Islamofascism. It was this ideological lever that the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) used to draw the left-wing parties into the “demonstration against Islamophobia” of November 2019, where the most naive—or the most cunning, because there were some electoral profits to be gleaned there—were taken in. The CCIF was fortunately dissolved after the assassination of Samuel Paty, by a government that finally became aware of the nature of this organization serving the Muslim Brotherhood’s infiltration.
It must be repeated: we have the fundamental right not to like religions, or a religion in particular, and to say all the bad things we think about it. A religion is neither a race nor a sexual orientation, so that its criticism is in no way a call for discrimination against its practitioners. Furthermore, we can legitimately be phobic not so much of Islam as of Islamism and its totalitarian political project. And let no one talk to us about "respect for religions": religions can be respected when they show themselves to be respectable, capable of eradicating the poison of fanaticism in the bud. Failing that, we must treat them for what they are: calamities.
So let us also arm ourselves with words and talk aboutislamofascism and not just "jihad" or "sharia". Let's talk about barbarity and not of "fight", ofassassinations and not just "terrorist acts". Let us have the courage to say the word Islamism, as much against the confusionism of the right – which does not see its difference with “Islam” – as against the confusionism of the left – which knowingly practices the amalgamation under the cover of rejecting it. Let us break the complicit silence that results from the fear of stigmatizing Muslims by denouncing Islamofascists. And let us insist: they are Democrats who stand up against Islamofascism, and not "racists" or "Islamophobes", or even "fascists", as the ideologues who deny reality would have us believe.
Breaking the silence: we would like all the Islamo-leftists who have been the useful idiots of Islamofascism in recent years to recognize that they were wrong, and to make amends, instead of looking the other way or feigning indignation in the face of acts that they never had the courage to clearly denounce. One may have been a denier of Islamofascism due to a lack of lucidity, vigilance, or political courage. But there comes a time when one must come out of denial, by agreeing to recant.
