Thread by @ShMMor

Still trying to make sense of this article by @jameskmcauley in @washingtonpost on Sunday. The thesis seems to be that Islamist violence in France is caused by a peculiarly French systemic racism rather than any kind of Islamist ideology.

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washingtonpost.com/outlook/macron…

In order to be even minimally plausible, we would need to also see: (1) No Islamist violence in other European countries, as they don’t have burqa bans or laïcitié &c. (2) Radical violence from other minorities in France who, after all, are subject to the same systemic racism.

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Neither of these is remotely true. But without them, the thesis of this article is ridiculous.

When people believe something slightly wrong or ambiguously wrong, there is not much to learn from it.

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When people believe something so absurdly, embarrassingly, eye-poppingly implausible as the fervent retweeters of this article do (I found no notable critics except for @CarolineFourest), it tells us something about the importance of that belief to a comprehensive worldview.

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This sentence captures all the attractiveness and wrongness of the whole piece. It pretends that a well-formed ideology whose origins are outside the west is caused by western actions...

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It conflates a political ideology with a religious affiliation, and even throws in the PC shibboleth about 2 billion peaceful followers, as though the violent encounter between Islam and non-Islam is uniquely French and uniquely current.

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Inevitably, as with all articles of this genre, the Jews make an appearance, but only as a helpful metaphor, and then are dropped as soon as the metaphor is exhausted.

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Here is the first. Reminder: Napoleon didn’t create the consistoire because radicalized French Jews beheaded teachers, massacred music aficionados, killed journalists, or blew up public transport.

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Here is the second. While it is technically true that accurate population records made it easier to locate Jews and deport them, the thing that made it easier still was a violent and bigoted set of beliefs that justified their mass murder. Pretty sure that was more important.

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The violent and bigoted belief system that undergirds 21st century jihadism is what we need to be studying, analysing, and fighting. It is by now a depressingly familiar ideological cluster, with normal variation but a solid core of common beliefs. It is not unique to France.

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Indeed, just in the past week new boycotts of French cheeses were announced in Kuwait because of the Muhamad cartoons, yet last time I checked Kuwaitis were not living in crowded housing projects in peripheral suburbs, so I’m not sure that’s really the cause.

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It’s odd (but entirely unsurprising) how quickly Jews as a subject are dropped from this analysis, because if there was one gigantic failure of the French establishment it was not seeing in time the jihadist threat in its early days when the targets were “only” Jews, and...

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...the reflexive response was to attribute it to justified anger over distant events or, in the clichéd formulation popular in the early 2000’s, the “importation” of the conflict into France.

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But that’s not even the worst part. This is. The idea that any of this man’s intellectual curiosity or cultural sensitivity stands somehow in contradiction with French republican values only makes sense if you hold a blinkered and cartoonish view of French history and culture.

The irony here is that in falsely accusing others of co-opting the murdered teacher’s memory for politics, this article seeks to make him a woke martyr and commits the very transgression it wants to criticize.

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