On May 4, Chantal Guy from The Press wrote a text on the terrorist attacks which set Paris ablaze on November 13, 2015.
“Paris was the target of the worst terrorist attacks in its history,” she wrote.
It was an “irruption of violence into the daily life of such a lively city”.
“Chance wanted me to be in Paris that evening, in the heart of the 11e borough, where most of the shootings took place.”
“We could hear Kalashnikov shots.”
“What struck me was the youth of the victims and killers, in a deliberate attack on the pleasure of living.”
But who committed these attacks?
Who fired a Kalashnikov at innocent people?
Chantal Guy never says it.
The words “Islam” and “Islamist” never appear in his text.
She talks about disaster.
Of events.
But the cause? Ugh.
A detail.
Which she chose to ignore.
History, I imagine, of not “feeding Islamophobia”.
To paraphrase The Stranger from Camus: “Yesterday, Paris died.
Perhaps it was Christians who fired.
The text doesn’t say it. “Bloody city. Funeral soon.”
It does not mean anything. Maybe they were Buddhists.”
HIDE THIS CAUSE!
I’m asking you a very simple question.
What if it was far-right activists who killed 129 people in cold blood that fateful evening?
Do you think that the journalist from The Press would have concealed this fact?
Of course not.
She would have written it in her first paragraph. And she would have repeated it ten times, at least.
With reason.
Because that wouldn’t be a detail.
It would even be at the heart of the massacre.
Deliberately hiding why 129 innocent people were killed, on what ideological pyre these victims were immolated, at what altar their assassins prayed, for what cause they were slaughtered like animals, is to kill them a second time.
“To name things badly is to add to the misfortune of the world,” as Camus said.
SELECTIVE INDIGNATION
I’m talking to you about this text because the author’s deafening silence says a lot about the moral hypocrisy of our time.
Not a day goes by without denouncing the excesses and dangers of the extreme right.
It’s very simple, we see fascists everywhere.
But the far left? Isn’t she also dangerous?
And what about the Islamist threat?
Why aren’t the “social justice soldiers” who are loudly protesting against Israel also protesting against Iran? Afghanistan? China? What about all the other countries that imprison and execute women, homosexuals, regime opponents or members of religious minorities?
No. We ALWAYS aim for the same targets.
The West, the far right and the Christian right. In short, the white devil.
The other extremism, that which leans to the left and which embraces Islam (the dominant religion in so-called “racialized” communities) is “protected”.
Either we minimize its dangerousness.
Or – when it draws blood – we “forget” to name it.
As if there were two kinds of extremists.
The evil white fascists.
And those who became evil because of evil white fascists.
