Considered opinion: France’s jihadistsOrdinary Jihad
In 2012, Mohamed Merah, a French self-proclaimed jihadist, and friends killed seven people, including three Jewish children outside their school, in several shootings in southwestern France. Since then, more than 260 people have died in France at the hands of Islamist terrorists. Many of the killers came from what what Bernard Rougier, in his book The Conquered Territories of Islamism, called “Islamist ecosystems.”
The dead are added to the dead. Killed in a station like these young girls in Marseille, two years ago, stabbed in Villeurbanne while waiting for the bus at the end of August, stabbed to death in the Paris police headquarters in the month of October…
On Friday, a man was killed in a Villejuif park in the early afternoon. Since Mohamed Merah’s barbaric gang eight years ago [Merah, a French self-proclaimed jihadist, and friends killed seven people, including three Jewish children outside their school, in several shootings in southwestern France in March 2012], more than 260 people have died in France at the hands of Islamist terrorists. The collective emotion was succeeded by a feeling of helplessness, a sort of fatalism to which one should get used. Ordinary jihad has become horribly commonplace: an assassin, a knife, and bystanders beaten to the cry of “Allah Akbar.”
Then follow the eternal media-judicial procrastination: “We are dealing with an unbalanced person, who has converted to Islam but for whom nothing indicates for the moment that he has become radicalized …” It typically takes 48 hours for the lonely madman officially to be designated a terrorist. Both Villejuif and the murderer of the Paris police headquarters were converts. They frequented what Bernard Rougier in his book Les Territoires conquis de l’islamisme (The Conquered Territories of Islamism) called “Islamist ecosystems.”
A network, established in the French suburbs, which links schools, mosques, sports halls, shops, and even prisons. Preachers and recruiters are deployed there to detect weak spirits capable of forming the first line of the Holy War. There is, continues Rougier, an “ideological continuum “between “Salafism” and “jihadism.” Gérard Collomb, who left the Interior Ministry [in 2018, to become the mayor of Lyon], feared that two populations “side by side” would soon find themselves “face to face,” Police in Metz yesterday were forced to shoot a new unbalance man, who, armed with a knife, shouted “Allah Akbar!” Threatening passers-by. “You are the murderers!” said residents to the police. The latter, regardless of the day or hour, courageously fight against the crazies of Allah.
This editorial, translated by Ben Frankel, appeared in Le Figaro, 6 January 2020. Emphases in the original.
