“Oh please, mind your language, show some restraint: it was not a French September 11!” wrote Olivier Roy last week, in an otherwise nuanced article on the French Muslims and the emergence of extremists.
This brilliant intellectual, a researcher on Islam, meant there was no comparison between the 17 victims of Paris and the nearly 3,000 dead in the United States 14 years ago. The size and intensity of the crime and trauma, the level of destruction, defies the comparison. But so do the consequences.
French President François Hollande may have enjoyed a miraculous boost in the polls, he may pace on the deck of an aircraft carrier with a strange Bush-like swagger amid the chorus of sacred national union, but he won’t bend the course of world history because of an attack on his territory.
Still, he looks at France now and finds matters of tremendous reflections, along with some similarities. Coping with anger is one of them.
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Sexism, denied in the name of the rejection of American-style political correctness, is an example. Race and culture barriers are another manifestation of this orchestrated blindness. At a moment when ghettos promote the surge of religious devotion as a remedy to the denial of “Frenchness,” the gap is getting even wider, and the rage more dangerous in the eyes of the most violent of the downtrodden and hopeless.
The so-called “Laicité,” the official secularism of the French Republic, bears a deep responsibility. The concept has always been a political expedient, an offshoot of anti-clericalism that justified even in part the denial of the right to vote for women until 1945, out of fear their obedience to the Catholic Church would endanger the Republic.
It has later, for too long, been directed at the most different and disadvantaged immigrant population from the Maghreb region. A glorious façade of the denial of differences, one which let discriminations and injustice fester for decades, prevented any affirmative action or simple recognition of diversity.
Long before September 11, Bill Clinton, speaking of race and class relations, said that “there is nothing bad in America that cannot be solved with what is good in America.” The same must be true in France as the horror of January makes us look at the truth about our country.
