Religious Bric-à-Brac and Tolerance of Violent Jihad

In the two days following and during the events I heard much nonsense about the context of the mass murders of 12 newspapermen and police officers, of a policewoman the next day, and of four Jewish hostages in Paris. The nonsense included the assertion by Rush Limbaugh that French cops are unarmed (90% false) and another, by a local conservative radio host, a good friend, that the French had imported North Africans to compensate for their demographic decline (false and absurd). Of course, NPR joined CNN in consistently misreporting the ongoing action without bothering to glance at Google Maps. Christiane Amanpour breathlessly contributed mistranslations of simple French words. Several media affirmed that there are “hundreds” of areas, including in Paris itself, where the French police won’t venture, areas that are already under Sharia law. It’s pure alarmist invention. (Fox News apologized about a week later; the Socialist Mayor of Paris is suing nonetheless.)

An American scholar reared in France, I have to add my voice, because I may in fact be better informed than most of those who commented in English. I will give you a short description of French society today (with few accordions), and I will try to address features relevant to its tolerance of the foundations of violent jihad. I will speculate on the nature of French Islam and then I will draw from my narrative a few implications for action.

The massacre of 12 people, including two police officers, at the satirical Charlie Hebdo was followed within hours by the cold blooded murder of a black female traffic officer somewhere else and then by a murderous attack on a kosher store right near Paris. The attackers were two brothers of North African origin, in one case, and a West African and perhaps his girlfriend, in the other. (There are reports that the girlfriend fled to Syria. It’s not obvious as I write whether she was present at the murders or not.) All the terrorists had Muslim names, as does the girlfriend. The brothers who murdered at Charlie Hebdo were caught on film. According to survivors of the first massacre, they shouted “Allahu Akbar” and “We revenged the Prophet Muhammad.” The terrorist of West African origin attacked and took control of an obviously Jewish establishment where housewives were likely to be shopping in large numbers before the Sabbath. Four shoppers were gunned down there. The three male terrorists were killed by the police. They will never be interrogated.

It’s useful to keep in mind that these events did not take place in a failed state or a place where the population lives in dire poverty. France is not Pakistan, or even Greece; it’s not even close to the latter. A friend who travels a lot by road on business declares the French freeways the best in the world. Fifty years of observation suggest to me that all streets in France are cleaner than all streets in America. The French security forces are well trained. They put an end to the hot phase of the crisis with exemplary precision. No police officers were killed and no members of the general public, aside from the hostages in the grocery store. In general, French intelligence services are held in high regard by their counterparts elsewhere.[i] The French political class — for all its vices — is not especially supine, not much infected by the virus of political correctness. It held firm, Left to Right, on the issue of head veils for minor girls. (The hijab is prohibited in all public schools, along with visible crosses and stars of David.) It banned even more forcefully in public places the full facial covering that was becoming the fashion among French Muslim women, including converts. (The French government probably bought back hostages held by Islamists on several occasions though.)

There may be more Muslims in France than in most or in all other Western countries, but, as I will discuss below, they are on the whole better integrated there than elsewhere. What happened in France could happen in several other countries. The attacks were not due to some French idiosyncrasy. Rather, I will argue that they took place there in part because of the kind of society that is France. But there are many others like it. Below are some insider’s images of relevant features of French society.

A Liberal Society

On Jan. 1, 2015 — a week before the mass murders — the French police authorities were in a celebratory mood. The reason for their glee was that the night before, New Year’s Eve, only 930 cars had been burnt in all of France. That was a decline from previous years. I am referring here to the casual torching of strangers’ cars parked in the street as an act of New Years celebration, but also when a favorite soccer team is victorious. These acts of mass vandalism are largely limited to what the American press improperly calls “suburbs.” (See below.) Of course, many of the arsonists are probably young men with Muslim names. Why wouldn’t they be? The burnings take place where they live. The celebrated center of Paris is too far away; so are the centers of many other French cities. The arsonists are said to be “marginalized” young people. They are seldom arrested; they are seldom convicted; they rarely spend time in jail. These facts alone don’t make the habit of mass arson an Islamist act.

The areas right outside French cities are made up mostly of rings of low-density, fairly comfortable, largely unintended, and non-racial ghettos. They are geographically located where suburbs would be found around American cities. Yet, they are not “suburbs” with all the implied connotations of petty-bourgeois bliss. In a concerted effort — in which I participated (see my book of memoirs[ii]) in the ’60s and ’70s — most of the poor and even of the lower-middle class were moved out of the substandard, often slummy housing in the cities proper. They were offered brand new, decent high rises right outside the cities. Yet inside the cities there remain government-subsidized projects that were the forerunners of those of the massive urban reform of the sixties and seventies. I grew up in one such, the same area (the 19th Arrondissement) from which, by the way, the dead assassins of the Charlie Hebdo massacre came. Their extremist cell used to meet in the same park where I played as a child. It’s not prosperous but it’s not a slum.

The new housing or projects around the main French cities, including Paris, were and still are significantly subsidized by the government. People became used to paying low rents there for shelter that was not even close to their dream house, although it was salubrious. The relevant urban reform was all done hastily. The new projects made insufficient allowances for ordinary services. Going to the dry cleaner, for example, is a chore in some of the airy, low-density, originally park-like developments. In most projects, the number of cafés was kept deliberately down in an effort to improve public health. But the café is, has always been, where French people of different origins meet peacefully in all weathers. (Cafés serve many kinds of nonalcoholic beverages including coffee, hot chocolate, Coke, etc.) The transportation needs related to the new exurban projects were underestimated by government macroplanners. They were proud, nevertheless, because what was done — the Réseau Express Régional, around and into Paris, for example — seemed to have been done well: attractive, fast trains with a reasonably high frequency (but only during work hours, more or less). No one was trying to short-change the lower classes. On the contrary, a progressive social vision of both socialist and Catholic inspiration presided over this effort. “Urban planners” were all working with a pure zeal for the improvement of the condition of the masses. And yes, parking in Paris proper improved as well as parking inside other major cities. That was probably inadvertent. From a planner’s standpoint, everyone should have been more contented than before.

As I write (in January 2015), tens of thousands of French schoolchildren are happily preparing for their annual stay in the mountains. Those “snow classes” (classes de neige) are largely financed by local governments. In practice, no kid is held back because his family is not rich enough to send him (egalité). This institutionalized practice makes me envious, of course. When I was rearing my children in California, they never went skiing, although my family was solidly middle-class. For 20 years of her life, my sister-in-law received two monthly checks directly from the government, one for having four children, one for staying home to take care of them. And, no, my brother had not deserted her or the children. The payments were part of being French (fraternité). Her children’s school lunch was free throughout. It was because the family had no visible income although it was near-rich. Any day, the school lunch would have honored the average restaurant in Santa Cruz, California. It’s France we are talking about, after all. And yes, kosher food and halal food were always available (liberté).

In the past few months, there was a debate in the French parliament about whether emigrants should be allowed to arrive in France on a Monday and begin eating at the common trough and receiving social services on Tuesday, or whether a short waiting period should be imposed. I don’t know whether any legislation was passed; the fact that the debate took place at all is instructive. And, yes, of course, many of the immigrants who partake of the French state’s munificence are Muslims. Most immigrants to France today are Muslims, the product of colonial, and especially of postcolonial vicissitudes, much aided by the success of French efforts to spread the French language. (Few Moroccans schooled in French from first grade will learn Dutch or German in order to emigrate to any place in Europe other than France. Some do, obviously.) A rural Algerian mother of eight who manages to move to France sees her family’s standard of living multiplied by ten shortly after they arrive, with or without a husband. She is not a conventional deliberate welfare parasite. She may want nothing better than to work, or for her husband to work. There is not enough work. (See below.)

Why would this situation not be irresistible, for poor Muslims as well as for poor anyone? Yet if there is something you abhor in French society, for whatever reason, including religious, it will be difficult to leave, because you will soon be addicted. (Technical note: immigration into France from outside the European Union is restricted, but there are ways, legal and other.)

This stereotypical imagery describes the truth, but only a small part of it. The complete truth is that people with Muslim names are present at all levels of French society, from street sweeping to cabinet posts, through university faculties. I am sure that most have jobs. Most give the impression of being thoroughly French. A young female lawyer with a Muslim name appears on French TV before the massacre. She defends two Islamists of Algerian nationality accused of terrorist acts. She wears long earrings pointing to a plunging neckline. She is not concerned that her attire would earn her 20 lashes under ISIS or even in Saudi Arabia; she is French, after all. The most beautiful recent tall building in Paris is the Institute of the Arab World. It’s headed by an old theater man, a Jew. The police officer executed in the street by a Charlie Hebdo assassin had a Muslim name. He was buried in a Muslim cemetery. Many French nominal Muslims are highly visible and beloved in show business and in sports. The French national soccer hero is named “Zinedine Zidane,” not “Pierre Dubois.” In my necessarily subjective judgment, the only good popular music in France in the past 30 years is Rai, composed and sung by children of North African immigrants. (It’s sung mostly in French.) The first French soldier killed during the NATO action in Bosnia in the nineties was named “El Hadji.” Large numbers of people from predominantly or totally Muslim countries have lived in France (France narrowly defined) for more than 100 years. They are deeply rooted there. Tens of thousands of them lie in French military cemeteries. Muslims have not yet derailed French democracy. French non-Muslims with names like mine did, several times.

Religion as Culture

You will notice that I said above, “people with Muslim names,” and “nominal Muslims.” I am not eager to guess who among such people is a real Muslim and who is not, or not really, or only sometimes. If I had to bet I would bet that most French nominal Muslims are similar to their non-Muslim French contemporaries: religious in name, not devout, not practicing, not even minimally. Nothing is easier than spotting a North African-looking man in Paris lifting a theoretically forbidden beer in a café with his blue-eyed workmates. Like other French people, they probably receive little formal religious instruction except from Grandma and Grandpa. The fact is that there are few mosques in France outside the two monumental ones in Paris and Marseille, out of reach for most. Halal meat is widely available in France, which means that it’s being consumed. It’s likely that many French Muslims observe the annual Ramadan, which consists in going without water and fasting during the day and gorging and visiting at night.

I would guess that many French Muslims are Muslims in culture only, in the way I, an atheist, am a cultural Catholic. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing either. It’s a vague tendency to see the world a certain way. I, for example, put off the tedious task of straightening out my desk because, I am fairly sure, the Virgin Mary, or one of her delegate saints, will give me a hand soon, at some point, in the undefined future. Naturally, that’s a residue from the Catholic doctrine of grace with which I grew up: God wants you to help yourself but there is a good chance He will help you even if you don’t deserve it.

A religious culture is often a fallback position in hard times. For many people, it’s the built-in default option. That’s the option that is activated when one faces difficult circumstances for which one is ill prepared. Thus, when my equally atheistic, free-thinking but Hindu-reared wife becomes frustrated, she often devolves, and strikingly, to transparently caste-contaminated vituperation. This, although she detests caste.

Hard Times in the Welfare State

There are many hard times in the French welfare paradise, and many causes for frustration. They are mostly smallish hard times, hard times that might pass below the radar, and mostly evanescent occasions for frustration. With a couple of important exceptions about which I don’t know enough, welfare states rarely generate even moderate sustained economic growth and, therefore, employment. (The exceptions of which I am thinking are Denmark and Sweden.) It’s a little difficult — perhaps also confusing — even for the neutral observer to spot the hardships in French society. Everyone there is decently fed (or well fed — see above.) Nearly everyone is reasonably well dressed, or adequately dressed. Healthcare is practically free. French men’s life expectancy is actually two years longer than American men’s. (I am not asserting that there is a connection — I don’t know yet — but the socialized French health system works pretty well, I hate to admit.) All French public schooling is free, including at the university level. The meals of properly enrolled students, even in their thirties, are subsidized by the government. Many students even receive a stipend. In my judgment, French education at all levels is quite bad, with the exception of maybe 20 schools, but so? Why not keep going to school? The official workweek is still 35 hours; after that, overtime pay kicks in. Retirement age is 62. There are many more vacation days and holidays each year than in the US. Either you have a job and you don’t work all that much (unless you are in business for yourself), or you don’t have a job and you work even less, or not at all, and then still, life is tolerable. What’s not to like about the ease of the current French lifestyle?

It’s hard to put your finger on the answer. My shortcut is that it’s a good way of life for mediocre people but it’s the worst way of life for the best people. As I write, the bumbling and militantly secular Socialist government of François Hollande is secretly on its knees, praying that GDP growth will reach 0.8% in 2015. They are not confident it will happen; 0.5% is more realistic. It’s an order of magnitude below the growth achieved by our own ailing economy. For about 20 years the French GDP growth rate has more or less matched the country’s population growth rate: around 0.5%. It’s a stagnant economy. Formal unemployment is 10%. It has rarely dipped below 9% since 1985. That’s against a background of extensive long-term unemployment, a background decades older than the current American counterpart.

Although it’s not formally illegal, it’s difficult in practice, and costly, to lay off anyone in France. (Doing it is like asking for legal action.) Employers mostly don’t try, and consequently they also avoid hiring. As a result of both facts, the middle-aged keep their jobs and fail to make room for the young in an economy where stagnation makes making room essential. This succinct description of the French economy has been valid since about 1985. Today, much of the work force carries around obsolete skills while the young don’t have reason or occasion to acquire new skills or any skills at all.

This stark description has concrete if diffuse social consequences. Of my four nephews in their thirties, two have never had what I would consider a real job. They don’t know what a real job looks like from the inside. They have not learned the basic disciplines that young people ought to learn in entry positions with a future. It’s doubtful they will learn now. There is not much reason for them to try, given the unemployment numbers, numbers that are validated by what they see informally all around them. I suspect they are permanently semi-employable. It’s not a tragedy for those two because one is a happy ski bum and the other pretty much enjoys the status of the everlastingly-in-training. One wonders, though, about the state of mind of those who possess ambition, a sense of initiative, a desire to be independent, or simple energy.

My nephews are middle class by upbringing; they have a pretty good education; they live in economically sound areas. Both have a French first name and a French last name, and they look the part. In their age group, the unemployment rate is around 20%. If your first name is “Ahmed,” however, the relevant unemployment rate is probably 30%, unless you have a respected degree. There is discrimination against people with Muslim names, although it’s not bad enough to stem the inflow of thousands of foreign Muslims into France, often putting themselves at major physical risk. To my knowledge, no European jihadist has ever mentioned bitterness against this discrimination as a source of his actions. France is full of possessors of worthless Masters degrees. These things become known. (Personally, I think that even some respected French degrees are not respectable — another story.) If, in addition, you live in one of the exurban projects with poor transport connections to employment centers, the unemployment rate relevant to you is probably close to 50%.

Now, look at it from Ahmed’s viewpoint: If he works hard, if he perseveres, if he manages to find the $15 round-trip fare, if he has had no brush with the law, he stands an even chance of landing a temporary job with mediocre pay, and a long wait for any promotion. I am tempted to think that those in Ahmed’s situation who even try are simply underinformed.

Thus France offers a fairly comfortable but a hopeless and enervated future to millions of its young, with no relief in sight. (Most of those do not have Muslim names, of course.) Many younger people don’t even know what relief would look like. They have no vision of a prosperous society where those who want to work, do — except in a mythical sense, through American movies (half of all tickets sold in France in an average year). It does not look like there can be a Steve Jobs in France. If one arises nevertheless, he will probably try to move to California, where entrepreneurship is still tolerated.

The Dull and the Spunky

If you are a young French person lucky enough to be dull, you may just enjoy the existence the country offers. You know that you will never go hungry or sick, that you will be clothed, that hot showers will be available. You won’t have much to fear because you don’t have a car, and your clothes don’t excite envy. You will be OK so long as you remember to carry your cellphone in your underwear. You will never have to get up early in the morning. If you are bored, even the astonishingly mediocre French television will give you a steady fare of soccer games, of so-so movies, and even of increasingly decent series. Used computers are cheap, and they provide 24/7 access to the internet. If you are dull but endowed with physical energy, you will easily locate pickup soccer games during about half the year.

If you are bright, if you have some spunk, a wish to exercise your initiative, some energy, your options are few and as if well concealed. You can always try to qualify for one of the few good schools of higher education. Your chances of admission to those will be small because they are (fairly) ultra-competitive. No matter, there is an abundance of bad schools. After your second worthless Master’s degree you may decide to give up this path. (Many young Muslims actually follow this very path.) The smarter you are, the faster you will abandon formal education, I think. Many young Frenchmen with a curious turn of mind, including some with Muslim names, devote their attention to the scientific study of drugs, mostly cannabis, with themselves as principal experimental subjects. Their research often leads to participation in the petty drug trade (both Charlie Hebdo assassins had such a past).[iii] The petty drug trade brings both spending money and, perhaps more importantly, adventure. Sometimes, participation in the trade leads to various degrees of delinquency or serious crime. (That was the case for two of the three terrorists. The kosher restaurant killer had moved on and garnered seven felony convictions.)

If you happen to come from a Catholic family, you might chose instead to dedicate your stamina to the surprisingly dense and lively Catholic action network. If you descend from two or three generations of unionized people, there is a fair chance you may become a minor labor activist or a political activist. These options are obviously not readily available to the offspring of Muslim recent immigrants. But a Muslim background, being an ethnic Muslim, and having spunk, so to speak, opens its own avenues to self-expression and even to success. Specifically a Muslim background makes a certain kind of imagery available that feeds the imagination, that provides scenarios. Such a background also has consequences for one’s affiliations, of course.

French Islam as a Culture

Remember my mention of religion as a cultural fallback position. It works well for Christians and also for ex-Christians, and for others as well. Jesus walked around and talked to those who would listen, and he occasionally cured the sick. Buddha seems to have spent a lot of time meditating under a tree. Muhammad was not only a prophet but a successful war leader. He spent most of his later years, after the revelations, fighting those who would suppress him — in jihad, in other words. This is strong, brave, attractive imagery for any young male.

Moreover, if you come from a Muslim background, as an immigrant, you will often live mostly with others from a Muslim background. That’s true irrespective of discrimination. For several generations, immigrants tend to follow each other geographically. Immigrants from the same country, from the small town, even from the same tiny village end up together. (It’s as true in France today with people who happen to be nominal Muslims as it was formerly for Italian immigrants to the US, for example.) In a stagnant society with little economic mobility, there will also be little geographic mobility. Your children will likely also stay put, and theirs. Then, some of your neighbors, unavoidably, will be Muslims; some of those will be pious; some Muslims — your own grandfather, for example — will take you, or drag you, to the mosque. With this ongoing process, the probability that you will never meet a jihadist is quite low. Your name will act like a greeting card to moderate Muslims, to Muslim agnostics, and to jihadists alike. Others will talk in front of you the way they would not talk before someone named “Marius.”

Given the basic warlike Muslim imagery and given these probabilistic affiliations, it would also be surprising if no young male nominal Muslims living a comfortable but boring life without a future were tempted by jihad. Going on jihad is like joining the Foreign Legion, but with a higher moral purpose. It’s so attractive that even some young Frenchmen with no Muslim background at all are drawn to it. The question is not why some Muslims do it but why they are not stopped more often by those most in a position to stop them. I believe there is a cultural predisposition in the large nominally Muslim segment of French society that commits it to passivity toward violent jihadism. It’s true among other Muslims, living elsewhere in the democratic West. It’s before us for all to see, but we feel a delicateness about acknowledging what we see.

Outsiders’ Tolerance of Criminal Behavior

Every time someone commits atrocities while shouting slogans with obvious Muslim content, the liberal or mostly liberal American media, but also the French media, and most media in the Western world, I expect, trot up credentialed Muslim spokesmen. (The masculine gender is intentional here; it’s a low blow.) Every time, the spokesmen affirm solemnly that the terrorist perpetrators are not “real Muslims.” They seldom fail to add that the “majority” of Muslims are moderate and peaceful. Prominent elected politicians such as President Hollande of France and President Obama hasten to repeat these empty formulas. This is now a nearly automatic, institutionalized manner of avoiding a big problem we are collectively not brave enough to face.

Of course, the majority of Muslims are peaceful. In fact, I think the real number is upwards of 95%, or 99%, or more. Ordinary nominal Muslims in France, elsewhere in Europe, and in the US, are first of all ordinary people. They want to work. They do their job when they have work. They quarrel with their spouses. They cherish their children. Most are too busy to care. Many would not be brave enough to become terrorists if they wanted to be (like most of us, like myself). The issue is also not daily behavior. People with Muslim names are often likable. I have myself always known both nominal and practicing Muslims. I have always preferred them to others, in France and in the US. They tend to be sweeter, more courteous than the average. There are Muslims in my extended family now. Long ago, I almost married an Arab girl. (She rejected me because of my frivolousness.) Today, my favorite young woman is a practicing Muslim (I wrote about her in Liberty, December 2010.)

My favorite foreign countries are Turkey and Morocco. All this colors my judgment, of course: I am prejudiced, prejudiced in favor of Muslims. If you call me an “Islamophobe,” please take note that I am a loving Islamophobe.

Passive Complicity

But culturally induced kindness is only a part of the reality of cultural Islam, of Islam as a culture, in France, elsewhere in the West, and elsewhere in the world. Take the two murderous Charlie Hebdo brothers. Each of them had traveled abroad, one to Yemen, one apparently to Tunisia. They possessed fairly expensive weapons and even more expensive bulletproof vests, all the more expensive because they are outlawed in France. Yet neither of them had held even a modest job for a while. The Jewish store killer had a girlfriend who escaped. The French media say she fled to Syria. The plane fare from Paris to Istanbul, the jumping-off point for Syria, is at least $600. Before the murders, she and her late boyfriend had traveled extensively, including to the Dominican Republic and even to Malaysia.[iv] Neither had a steady job. Someone in the Muslim community, broadly defined, must have helped them financially. Surely, it was not Lutherans or Jews who lent them a hand. I think it was not Al Qaeda either in spite of media reports to the contrary, although one killer may have trained in Yemen instead of going to language school there. Al Qaeda in Yemen claimed the Charlie Hebdo massacre while the perpetrator of the grocery store massacre claimed he belonged to ISIS. The two terrorists knew each other. The two groups wage war on each other on the ground.[v]

We know that the killers were part of a network because one of the brothers was convicted earlier of helping others to go fight jihad in Iraq. Members of their networks may all have been fanatics like them, and thus capable of secrecy. But some of the fanatics at least had brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, uninvolved friends, jilted girlfriends, some of whom must have got a whiff of the forthcoming actions. Some of those probably chatted idly or shared their concerns. There were 500 calls between the cellphones belonging to the wife of one of the Charlie Hebdo killers and the cellphone of the girlfriend of the grocery store killer. Either the men used their phones and the women did not notice, or they knew, or they were themselves talking. In all cases there must have been leaks. The brothers’ drift must have been visible to their neighbors. French security forces have thousands of members whose first or second language is Moghrebi Arabic, the principal language of French Muslims after French. They should have picked up anything untoward. Apparently, no one from the “Muslim community” stepped forward to say, or even to whisper, “Those are bad men; they want to destroy the Republic.” Someone must have known and decided not to act, probably several.

The information gathering of French police failed miserably on this occasion. The police declared itself overwhelmed by the numbers requiring surveillance. Of course; good police work does not result from having five cops following each suspect over 24 hours. It comes from people close to the criminals approaching the police voluntarily to provide useful information.

The propensity to ignore forthcoming evil is a sickness that may well be distributed across all religiously defined groups. However, the consequences of in-group solidarity are graver where Muslims are concerned, because theirs is currently the only group whose religion glorifies religious violence, or appears to glorify religious violence, or lends itself to the misunderstanding that it glorifies religious violence. (See below for an assertion that it’s not all in the mind of the viewer.)

A heavy complicity of silence reigns over French Muslims, nominal and devout alike. It’s abetted by embarrassed, secular silence maintained by elite intellectual voices and by most politicians in the country. The same seems to be true everywhere else in Europe. The politicians who break ranks with this conspiracy are mostly disreputable for other reasons. (I mean the Front National in France and similar nationalist groups in other countries.)

Jews as the Canary in the Mine (As Usual)

Complicity is not always discrete. Take the stereotypical Muslim responses to the habitual targeting of Jewish businesses — such as the kosher grocery store in this event — of Jewish institutions, of Jewish cemeteries, for a while, even, and of Jewish neighbors, including, horribly, schoolchildren. (The latter crime condemned by large French Muslim organizations.) Or focus simply on the myriads of anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls of all French cities. Everyone in France knows that the old style French anti-Semitism is dead or moribund. The Dreyfus affair was more than a century ago; many actually know that Dreyfus was innocent and framed. The Catholic Church has desisted. Most Gentiles of Christian background are somewhat aware of the ignominious French role in the genocide of Jews in WWII. Many don’ t care about Jews, one way or the other, and are thus not hostile.

Everyone suspects strongly that young people with Muslim names committed nearly all the anti-Semitic acts and probably all the anti-Semitic graffiti in France in the past twenty years. Yet Muslims who speak about this at all — and rarely, because there is seldom formal proof — blame a fairly natural confusion among the young between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, as if the persecutors did not know that their targets speak French like themselves, not Hebrew.

There is also a strong official reluctance to admit the obvious. The secular French Republic does not collect ethnic or religious data. No way exists to express related facts in official reports. Perhaps if the graffiti vandals (and also the terrorists) conveniently wore a fez or a hijab. . . . Whenever an ugly anti-Semitic event takes place in France, imams in full regalia go on the media to denounce all forms of racism and anti-Semitism, not to mention Islamophobia. The message implies: “We are all equal before prejudice.” It’s as if Jews did their own share of anti-Muslim graffiti!

Sometimes, occasionally, the Muslims of France inadvertently display another side of their collective thinking. Several years ago, someone sued the same Charlie Hebdo, already about insulting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The plaintiffs failed, of course, in their attempt to have a French court declare that freedom of speech somehow doesn’t apply to insults to religious figures. The memorable fact is that the full array of representative French Muslim associations and institutions joined or commented favorably on the suit. It looked on television as if they did not realize what they were doing. One indignant hijab-wearing woman asked a journalist in the lobby of the courthouse, “What would you say if a Muslim periodical insulted Jesus?’ The man had the presence of mind to declare calmly: “F… Jesus!” (“J’emmerde Jésus“). The woman walked away angrier than before. It’s doubtful she learned anything about French democratic political culture. She spoke without an accent, so she was probably French-born.

Several times, I have myself asserted to Muslim friends or friendly acquaintances with Muslim names that I have the legal right to insult any being I want, including Jesus Christ, including God Himself. I have done so in both English and French. Each time my interlocutor turned away in embarrassment, as if I were obviously spouting nonsense, as if I had taken leave of my senses. Public declarations by moderate Muslims trying to calm things down often suggest that rights must entail responsibility. A Muslim professor I know in an American university, a very intelligent man, also a nice guy, expressed this very thought on his Facebook three days after the events in Paris. (He recanted the next day.) This view is not completely surprising, because it’s common even among American-born, American-reared, second-grade teachers of Christian background. Nonetheless, it betrays a reluctance to admit this essential foundation of democracy, as if there were a brick wall before them.

In the mass protests in Paris in the aftermath of the massacres, Muslims were present in large numbers, the reporters say. Nominal Muslims interviewed on French TV cried out: “No amalgam!” It means: “Don’t confuse ‘Muslim’ and ‘terrorist’; we are not all terrorists.” It’s a strange claim. Nobody thinks that all Muslims are terrorists. Nearly everyone knows that violent jihadists are a tiny fraction of the population with Muslim names. The talk stops there. There is no collective self-examination, at least, not in public.

Incidentally, the Charlie Hebdo jihadists did not strike against a military target, although the small French Army is extensively engaged in the killing of their brother jihadists in Africa. Instead, with good intuition, with acumen, they struck where they somehow knew it matters, at the linchpin of democracy, the legally guaranteed freedom to offend. Some ignorance is often not just ignorance.

Intolerable Intolerance in Islam, Self-Delusion

It’s not absurd to argue that the current acts of violent jihad do not really have an Islamic inspiration, even that they are heretical because the essence of Islam is tolerance. Nevertheless, the law of explicitly Muslim countries gives abundant examples of intolerable intolerance. I mean examples that seem to me related to terrorism, of practices that enlightened opinion has no reason to tolerate where it can avoid doing so. In several such countries, the death penalty is prescribed both for apostasy and for blasphemy. This kind of law is rarely just imposed from above, although many of those countries lack democratic representation. I remember riots in Bangladesh because the legislature would not toughen anti-blasphemy laws with capital punishment. I don’t think there has ever been a demonstration in any Muslim country — except perhaps Turkey — against the existence of blasphemy laws.

The public performance of Muslim spokespeople in Western countries is often revealing of ambiguity toward freedom of speech. A tiny number of the Muslim official intellectuals summoned to appear on the US media cynically but politely describe their program of universal domination. (There was one on Fox News in early January 2014; he had been set up.) Many more go publicly into hiding in front of the camera. They ignore direct questions; they change the subject. They dissemble openly as if there were no chance that a single one of millions of viewers would unmask them — a sure sign of self-delusion. A Muslim intellectual interviewed on one of the American cable channels the night following the Paris mass murder wants to show that freedom of expression has natural limits. He declares that no periodical in the “whole” Western world would dare publish an anti-Semitic cartoon. Seconds before, the very same news channel had displayed a cover from Charlie Hebdo of a clear, grossly anti-Semitic nature. Facts are scarce in their discourse. Muslim spokesmen who are intellectually dignified carry other problems. There is an openly Islamist philosopher who appears frequently on French TV. His name is Tarik Ramadan; he is a sophisticated, cultured man. He addresses directly the most difficult questions. It would be difficult for the French intellectual class to reject or ignore this man. The very elegance of his French (by any standards), however, guarantees that young Muslims in the banlieues would barely understand him. At any rate, I think he never tries to talk to them.

The actions and the words of moderate Muslims themselves, and the aloofness of others, cry out to us a truth we are loath to admit: the problem is not a few more or less heretical, often sociopathic, “extremist” Muslims who have gone rogue from true Islam, but Islam itself. I don’t mean Islam the true religion; I don’t really know what it is, any more than I can hold a discussion about dogma with a Jesuit theologian. I mean Islam, the religiously delineated culture. I don’t mean the jihadists themselves; I have already argued that, of course, in enervated welfare societies such as France, there will be some who want to become terrorists (the Foreign Legion argument). I mean the Islam-inspired culture that is the pond in which the jihadist tadpoles actually morph into toads.

Ordinary Muslims and enlightened carriers of public opinion in the West are in constant denial. The latter — including people like me — shudder at the thought of admitting the unsophisticated obvious: no Lutheran has deliberately gunned down a Catholic since 1648 (the Peace of Westphalia). The well-illustrated Catholic proclivities toward fanaticism were tamed by the anti-clerical Renaissance, by the Protestant Reformation, and by the sometimes frankly atheistic Enlightenment. It’s true that the United Kingdom restricted the civil liberties of its religious minorities well into the 19th century, but it did not execute any. Buddhists have their own reasons for conducting little persecution on religious grounds. Both the Japanese and the Chinese — who may or may not be Buddhists, on the whole — found their own rather mysterious paths toward religious indifference. Hindus don’t become offended at what others say about them, because they often don’t know what they believe themselves.

The only noticeable group, large enough to be observed, that generates (or wrongly seems to generate) deadly religious intolerance is Islam. The explicitly Islamist, anti-learning Boko Haram alone slaughtered 2,000 civilians in Nigeria in the single week following the small Charlie Hebdo massacre. Not only do the facts seem obvious; there is a comprehensible reason for the passive complicity of ordinary Muslims toward violent jihad.

Real Religious Participation

I refer to the passive complicity of both those real and those nominal Muslims who only want to live in peace. I mean people with whom I would enjoy having coffee any day. They are paralyzed, not only by a justified, understandable fear of violent repercussions but by the unexamined contradictions in their own hearts. Muslims, including merely nominal Muslims, are permanently caught in a cultural trap. They, like almost everyone else in the world, are mostly not theologians. As is true for members of several other religions, their religious identification rests on a handful of practices — precisely, on a naive understanding of religious doctrine, and on a small number of simple myths. For many or most Christians, for example, this reduces to occasional or even regular attendance at church services, to the habit of praying, to an unexamined belief in the virgin birth and in the divinity of Christ.

Several religions mandate, even if by default, the imitation of historical founding figures as a respectable and attainable form of religious participation. Often, it’s actually the preferred shortcut for the intellectually unsophisticated. It’s highly visible in Catholicism, with a notable slide from a too-distant God to the more accessible Virgin Mary and other saints. The Imitation of Christ was a Catholic bestseller for about four hundred years. It seems to me that Buddhists do little but dream of imitating the Buddha. Islam abroad belongs squarely among these religions. Imitation of the Prophet Muhammad is also a simplified but nevertheless sturdy prescription for proper religious behavior. Although the Prophet Muhammad himself was always careful to insist that he was not divine, that he was merely a passive messenger of God, nevertheless the imitation began in his own lifetime. His birthday is even a major feast day in Muslim nations, although this would seem to go straightforwardly against his wish to eschew idolatry. It’s a result of a process of simplification shared by other religions.

Understanding the Koran is hard work. It’s especially difficult if your main exposure is its memorization in a language you don’t understand (most Muslims worldwide). The Prophet’s hagiography, by contrast, is accessible. It even exists in illustrated form, although that is supposedly forbidden. (It’s forbidden in order to discourage idolatry, again. There are wonderful Persian miniatures depicting Muhammad.) The Prophet’s feats are well known among those reared in or near Islam; they are widely disseminated. They are imprinted from childhood through storytelling among the faithful — and among the formerly faithful as well, naturally. For many, not much else remains.

We know well how this works in other religions. I, for example, a good atheist, as I said earlier, do not think the Virgin Mary was one. But I have a special fondness for Saint Christopher. He carried the baby Jesus across a river on his shoulder. I would have done the same. He hiked his robe up to do it. You can tell he had good legs, like me. He had a beard, also like me. Of course, I cannot possibly think that Jesus was divine but frankly, I don’t mind him. He walked around with his best buddies telling people to shape up and to stop talking s… He changed water into wine. He cured the sick occasionally. Once, he fed many people with just a little bit of food. That one stuck to my mind.

Every week, someone feeds the homeless in Santa Cruz, where I live. It’s a messy nuisance. Many of the homeless are not well bred at all; they leave greasy used paper plates everywhere. Some are just not in control of their behavior; they are loudly obscene; they disturb the peace, my peace. (The event happens across the street from my favorite coffee shop; see “The View from Lulu’s,” Liberty, May 2010.) I don’t like it at all. Yet if the city decided to outlaw this event, I would become hostile. I would surely keep my mouth shut if I heard of a group doing something positive to counter the city. I would keep my mouth shut if I heard of active resistance against the ordinance. I don’t know how far I would go. One thing leads to another; resistance to what’s wrong is its own reward; resistance makes you stubborn. I might end up going quite far. It would not be because of my religious faith, since I don’t have any. It would be because of the residual imagery of my Catholic childhood.

The Moroccan novelist Fouad Laroui , a winner of the Goncourt literary prize, said recently on a French blog: “People call themselves Catholic or Muslim but they hardly know what they are talking about.” (My translation from the French.) Laroui added that he often playfully tests Catholics on a salient point of dogma (the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception) and receives wrong answers nine times out of ten. Curiously, I have done exactly the same for 20 years with approximately the same results. I even had a Jesuit priest flunk!

The point here is that even when you have removed all the religious furniture from your house, there remains in your attic religious bric-à-brac that affects what you do and, even more, what you won’t do. Muslims have mental attics too, including Muslim atheists. The fact that the Muslim attic includes a lot of war imagery is not indifferent. Other things being equal, it would promote passivity toward those who engage in jihad, even among nominal Muslims who would never consider violent behavior for themselves. As I pointed out, the Prophet Muhammad was a successful war leader. He spent years of his life engaged in jihad. (I think it was imposed on him by his enemies.) There are consequences for democratic societies in the West. The jihadists of the Middle East cannot be engaged verbally, obviously. The whole Muslim world has its own dynamics that may or may not be of a religious nature and is not available for our questioning. Muslims, and people with Muslim names who live in Western democracies and who enjoy the associated freedoms, are within reach if one only tries. The time to try came some time ago. They must be confronted openly, individually and collectively, by enlightened citizens and by the media — about their beliefs especially, the beliefs inside their mental attics. This will make many nominal Muslims and real Muslims angrier. It will help others move toward a deep reform movement that has already begun from within the Islamic world (see below).

Constructive Confrontation

A confrontation would look like this:

The Prophet Mohamed was a great and successful military leader.

Is this true?

Sometimes he was merciful to his vanquished enemies and he let them go. Sometimes, he did not. He had several hundred Jews beheaded after they had surrendered. (“Beheaded,” “Jews”?)

Do you think it’s fine to kill prisoners of war?

Or is it only acceptable if they are Jews?

The Prophet’s own code of war forbade the killing of children and women. Often, he showed mercy by marrying the widows, the sisters, the daughters of his dead enemies. (“Marrying”?)

This sounds to me like rape. Or did he make sure they were willing, after he had killed their husbands, their fathers, their brothers?

Are you in favor of rape?

This also sounds to me like slavery.

Are you in favor of slavery?

I have also heard that the Prophet kindly waited until his favorite wife was nine before he consummated his marriage with her. (Nine.)

Is the story true?Feel free to tell me that it’s a mistake of transliteration, that she was actually 19 and willing. If it’s true, it sounds to me like pedophilia.

Are you in favor of pedophilia?

Do you have children?

Please, answer aloud so that others nearby may hear you.

Feel free also to tell me that I am mistaken that those are just internet rumors. I am surely no expert.

You may, in addition, state that those were other times and that the Prophet’s pagan enemies did much worse. It’s plausible. However, this latter argument suggests that uncritical imitation of the Prophet is not a morally valid posture. And if imitation is not valid in the treatment of prisoner of wars, or as concerns the freedom of individuals, or in sexual matters, is it valid in matters of jihad? I only ask you to think about and to answer, at least in your own mind.

If you answered “Yes” to any one of the italicized questions above and if you have not stated that the Prophet’s example is not wholly relevant today, what right do you have to enjoy the protection of a society in which all these practices are illegal because they are morally repugnant? And then, why don’t you look into emigrating to a country where they are not, or not obviously, illegal? Yes, I ask you the same question whether you arrived on the last plane or whether your antecedents have been here since 1910. And, yes, thank you for asking, I would make the same request of any Lutheran, agnostic, Catholic, or Buddhist who shares your views on the execution of prisoners, on Jews, on rape, on slavery, on pedophilia. It’s not about your spiritual beliefs; it’s about barbarism.

The idea is not to vilify Muslims but to push those who live in Western countries such as France to come to their senses. If it causes some to choose the other side, so be it. As Ben Franklin wrote, “if you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you” (letter to Jane Mecom, Nov. 1, 1773). It’s also not a denial of the presumption of innocence as I often hear said. That is a strictly judicial principle. It’s intended to shield private parties from abuse by agents of the state wielding overwhelming power. It does not exist to protect private parties from rude questions by other private parties, questions that can be ignored anyway. When my wife asks, Did you really spend seven hours in the library or do you have a mistress in town?, she is not violating the principle of presumption of innocence, just being unreasonably nosy. Asking difficult questions is a constructive exercise in virtuous influence.

A Deplorable Lack of Sophistication?

The sophisticated will attack the simplistic and stereotypical nature of this plan. I have no need for an excuse. The relation of most people to their religion is simplistic and stereotypical. This is especially true of vestigial relationships to religion, of the kind I think French secular Muslims harbor, as do I. I don’t see how Muslims in other Western democracies — except for recent immigrants — would depart much from my description. If I wanted to appear sophisticated myself, I would reply that the now old death fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie was simplistic and stereotypical. It had great power nevertheless. It has continued power 25 years later, power much beyond the affliction of Rushdie himself.

Tough love toward Muslims, both citizens and immigrants, should have become long ago the prescription for all rationalists and all lovers of freedom in democratic countries.

The first point is to interfere with the self-destructive reflex of politeness that has already set in. Quickly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, The Economist urged us to not “vilify” Islam. In an upsurge of courtesy conveniently interlaced with cowardice, the New York Times and CNN announced right away that they would not publish the offensive cartoons despite their incontestable newsworthiness. There are many other examples of such politeness.

The second step is to nudge Muslims to reform their religion, or their former religion. Why assume it’s not possible? My own ancestors used to burn people alive over small differences of opinion. They eventually got over the habit. Politeness played no role. Criticism did; think of Voltaire. Granted, it took a long time; but people of the past did not have the internet or television, and many barely knew how to read. They did not have any precedent to go by. Muslim reformists, by contrast, have a good road map in front of them.

In any case, Westerners don’t have to carry the burden alone, because brave people from the Muslim world have recently been doing more or less the same thing. The most credible calls for a re-examination of Islam itself — rather than of “radical Islam” — come from people with Muslim names, including the President of Egypt. On December 31, 2014, he went to the most prestigious school of theology in Islam and advised the professors there to do something constructive about their religion’s bad reputation. (Yes, President Sisi is not a freedom of the press-loving democrat. The sign to Boston does not have to go to Boston, as they say.) There is also the great Algerian novelist Boualam Sansal who wrote straightforwardly, “Islam’s vocation is to convert and to govern.” The Tunisian philosopher Mezri Haddad has published several essays in French on reforming Islam. There are many others whose names seldom appear in the English language media for reasons that are difficult to fathom, beyond provincialism. (In a rather timid review, Eric Ormsby recently gave us a glimpse at how difficult it is to criticize the Prophet of Islam.) Giving a hand to the courageous people who call for reform from within Islam is the honorable thing to do. It’s more honorable than politeness.

And here is an aside not directly connected to the analysis and proposals above. It has to do with acceptance of that which is ordinarily repugnant. Besides pressing all Muslims to own up, including the moderates and the lukewarm and also the indifferent, there are active steps Western democratic countries can take to limit the effects of violent jihad on their tranquility. The main measure is to place in indefinite detention all those convicted by proper courts of committing or aiding terrorism. It’s not obvious that long-term detention would act as a deterrent. Being kept in jail (or in an abandoned Club Med site), however, would certainly have reduced the destructive capacities of one of the two Charlie Hebdo terrorists who already had a serious conviction of aiding terrorism. My own love of civil liberties would not be affronted by such a normal wartime measure. The democracies could promise to free all such detainees shortly after their side unconditionally surrenders. I can already hear the clamors of protests, but is there a single libertarian who would have promoted the liberation of Waffen-SS prisoners of war in 1943?

Conclusions

Of course, the attitudes and the policies described above might well strengthen the hold of statism where they were adopted. They would not strengthen it as fast as would the destruction, or even the mere rapid erosion, of those conventional democratic arrangements that are most likely to lead to the shrinking of statism. Many libertarians need to have a heart-to-heart with their inner liberal pacifist.

quot;We are all equal before prejudice./a