I left the Labour Party when I realised that most of its membership, which is overwhelmingly drawn from the state-employed middle class, are not really interested in improving the condition of the country – and certainly not that of the working class. They just want to put a camera in your bedroom. It’s the oppressive authoritarianism of Islam that they love.
Don’t know who could offer themselves as better embodying the general interest than public sector employees, it’s certainly not those whose only vision is self aggrandisement.
It’s one of the great myths of the left that the interests of those providing a service are automatically aligned with those receiving it. It simply isn’t true, and to some extent those interests are opposed. In its most extreme form this is called “provider capture”.
This is obvious in terms of salary, but it can also apply to policy and practice. And it certainly applies to accountability and transparency.
True that – what killed it for me was reading Popper and Kuhn and other philosphers of science. Nails in the coffin enroute were the inane privelaged kids playing at leftism before joining Daddy’s bank, and the Spartists saying “the blacks think this” “the jews say that” “the women do the other” as if race, religion or gender are causative of character laid down by the immutable rules of Allah/Marx/RH Tawney. Myron Magnet’s work is prob the gold standard for explaining the futility of leftism as well as its terrible side effects.
Right-Wing Hippie
10 days ago
the larger political problem is that the Left refuses to believe there is a small but dangerous part of the French population which hates the Republic and wants to destroy it.
Oh, they don’t refuse to believe that; rather, they identify the “small but dangerous part” differently.
Lancashire Lad
10 days ago
Although the author seeks to make a special case for France as the ‘leader’ in secularist resistance to totalitarian Islamism, this article could just as easily apply to the British left.
Even now, the nature of the threat to our hard-won freedoms isn’t so much denied by the left, as facilitated.
Still, as a way of marking the tenth anniversary of the Chatlie Hebdo massacre, a salient reminder of how far the West has been undermined; not from without, but essentially from within.
It feels as though this is being brought to a head, which is rather an unfortunately pertinent way of describing it.
Always have to remember that the modern Left is animated at bottom by a fundamental disdain for the free Western capitalist culture that supports them, so there is always a default to support or at least become apologists for other cultures (Islam, communism, socialism) that share the same antagonistic attitude, even to the point of violence. There also seems to be a masochistic urge to surrender.
Don’t ever forget that jihadist Islamism was a deliberate creation of the British Empire dating from the encouragement of the Wahhabis at Deoband as a ploy against incipient Indian nationalism and the subsequent fostering of Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan to keep Congress led India away from their Soviet friends.
I was at SOAS when Bernard Lewis had the bright idea of making such Islamist identity politics a general tool of US policy, leading to his move across the Atlantic and Brezhinsky’s sponsoring of Al Qaida, the first of many such movements deployed by the Americans. Let’s not ignore either the exploitation of anti-Islamist identity politics eventually expanded into the War on Terror following 9-11.
It’s not only the Islamists being manipulated but all of us.
A story as old as the Franco-Ottoman alliance against Spain (and UK) 1500s – 1715 ish. Wahabi Islam by Natana DeLong Bas is a good read on how that particular school of thought easily ends up getting violent. But its not just students of Islamic laws and philosophy that get glove puppeted: The “smoke the Russians out of Afghanistan” elevated illiterate drug traffickers to hero status and sowed the seeds of the Taliban #1 and #2 (#2 are the same lot but better PR and online presence = prob trained by the BBC ort Guardian lol)
Yes. In fact since 1858 when the Crown took charge of India from the EIC, British policy favoured Muslim hardliners and fostered separatism.
You reap what you sow….
Don’t ever forget that jihadist Islamism was a deliberate creation of the British Empire dating from the encouragement of the Wahhabis at Deoband as a ploy against incipient Indian nationalism
… and their later import into Britain to assist in the Labour Party’s class war against working people here.
Jihadist Islamism conquered and ruled a massive empire when the British Empire you claim invented it was still centuries in the future.
P Carson
9 days ago
Let’s face reality. The Arab world has not contributed anything positive to the modern world, and the last contribution of Islam was 600 years ago. Why do we have to accept cultural equivalency as an irrefutable truth?
Andrew Vanbarner
9 days ago
Is there any chance that someone could mention the unmentionable, which is to say that the very notion of blasphemy is incompatible with the values of a free democracy?
And, to furthermore mention the unmentionable, that persons from societies radically different from our own western societies, will tend to bring their beliefs and behaviors with them?
We have the right, in western societies, to criticize religions, just as we have the right to criticize political figures. We obviously don’t have the right to physically harm people who upset us. Both of these ideas are fundamental to western society itself.
We also have the right, albeit collectively, to determine who lives amongst us. Otherwise, immigrants who settle here for economic reasons only, and who refuse to integrate, more closely resemble invaders, imposing their societies on ours.
Sure there’s no hypocrisy lurking there? ‘Criticise’ means what chez vous? What Charlie Hebdo did was plain and simple mockery, which needs a different kind of defence than what you’ve offered. If you want to define it at all…..
Mockery, sarcasm, parody, cartoons, Spitting Image, and the rest are all valid forms of criticism. Public figures – politicians, sports people, actors, even journalists, – dish it out, and take it, every day. They often get offended, but don’t react with violence. That’s the preserve of the feeble-minded and inadequate, who need the crutch of a supposed supernatural minder.
Charlie was, and presumably still is, an equal opportunities critic. They are happy to have a go at religion across the board, and much else. Their reaction to being told not to was to go ahead and do it. If you like, to demonstrate and exemplify free speech.
To Anglo eyes it all looks sort of old fashioned and quaintly left wing – not because we have become better, but because we have lost our nerve. They may sometimes seem a little adolescent, but then how do our current crop of adolescents occupy their time.
The idea that Charlie only took aim at Islam is completely false. Their very name is a slight on Charles de Gaulle delivered, I believe, just after his funeral.
Benjamin Dyke
9 days ago
I am a devout Christian but am not offended if someone makes fun of my Christianity or of Jesus himself. I am confident in my faith both intellectually and experientially (objectively and subjectively) and if Jesus is God he certainly doesn’t need defending with any worldly means – he makes that clear himself to all who say they follow him. Islam sees this as weakness and lack of confidence in my beliefs, and as an accommodation of secular forces, in rebellion against God and his words….these opposing viewpoints, one that helped shape the West and one that still holds in much of the Middle East and Africa plus elsewhere, can never be reconciled. Willing surrender to love or surrender through fear. I accept that there are many examples in history where so called Christianity, in direct rebellion against Christ’s words, abused worldly power to also force submission through control but most Christians today are fully aware of that and are equally horrified as non-believers when it occurs. A reform of Islam meanwhile seems to go against it’s whole raison d’etre or foundation and it’s not helpful (understatement) that all schools of Islam believe that an adult male leaving the faith deserves to die, alongside anyone that blasphemes…
Chris Whybrow
9 days ago
During the Revolution if the Paris mob laid hands on a priest they would beat him to death and parade his head around on a stick. The French secularists have a long and shameful history of being exactly as bloodthirsty and unhinged as the militant Islamists they despise so much.
You could try looking this up.
The numbers killed are reported on a wide range of 30 to 300, but here is a quotation appearing in the Wikipedia entry:
During the night, a massacre took place in the courtyard of the police headquarters, killing tens of victims. In the Palais des Sports, then in the “Parc des Expositions of Porte de Versailles”, detained Algerians, many by now already injured, [became] systematic victims of a ‘welcoming committee’. In these places, considerable violence took place and prisoners were tortured. Men would be dying there until the end of the week. Similar scenes took place in the Coubertin stadium… The raids, violence and drownings would continue over the following days. For several weeks, unidentified corpses were discovered along the river banks. The victims of the massacre can be estimated to at least 200 fatalities.
Paris. 1961.
Victor James
9 days ago
The ‘left’ is now synonymous with non-white interests. It’s not betraying anyone as it’s doing what you expect. It’s not ‘college’ educated white females with silly ideas who are the face of the left – it’s non-Europeans with colonial settler attitudes. The delusions of the ever shrinking ‘white liberal’ matter less and less – they either have to shut up or say what is expected of them.
Europe is balkanising in every conceivable way – the divide on the Charlie Hebdo atrocity and the right to satire, is race and religion.
The dog whistling over ‘child grooming’ promoted today is certainly about race and religion. The appeal is to those for whom misogyny and even child abuse is normal enough unless practised by certain ‘others.’ Such hypocrisy is off the scale.
There is a sliver of truth in this – the old industrial cities of Fr and UK were not known for treating their wives and daughters well in their heydays compared to stock-broker suburbs and urban wealth-spots. It is noticeable the rape gangs got most of their tractoin in these areas in UK. Not sure about France but i used to go there as a kid and places like Lyon, Marseille and even Boulogne were as rough as anywhere in London, Cardiff or Glasgow
What’s ‘child grooming’, sounds like a pathetic euphemism. I think you mean the Islamic supremacist race hate communities who targeted white children for rape and torture for decades as the ‘institutions’ looked on and did nothing?
Nobody thinks child abuse is normal, nor for that matter genuine misogyny. The only thing that would make your statement true is if you have completely redefined both of those terms. Nobody would look at what happened to these girls and consider it “normal” if carried out by gangs of white men.
I suspect you are a troll. If not, either get a grip or make it clear what you are actually saying.
Josef Švejk
9 days ago
The French Left have lost that mongrel attitude that led to revolution and equality. They bend the knee to a chimera expecting applause, and praise a fascist god, a shabby poor substitute for liberty. The South and the descendants of the pieds-noirs will hopefully rise and take their brothers and sisters to freedom.
The French left have simply been colonised and split like social democratic movements most everywhere, between those who have compromised with capital and those who resist. The latter, together with those resisting on the right, comprise a majority committed to the well being of working people, currently holding the ‘responsible’ propertied ‘centre’ interests to ransom. No ‘freedom’ without economic security.
This is romantic wishful thinking. The modern ‘left’, with a few notable, even noble, exceptions, is almost entirely drawn from a suburban graduate class that is largely parasitic, deriving its livelihood from unearned property wealth and state sinecure. These people are not hard to identify. Anyone who has ever visited North London can find them in every borough.
Alex Lekas
9 days ago
More of the same – the left refuses to call out the obvious for fear of offending someone. Who exactly? People like these killers, the English grooming gangs, American criminals, and jihadis everywhere take advantage of the left’s syrupy sensibilities.
Sophy T
9 days ago
That, of course, begs the question: why
Pedantry alert: That isn’t what ‘to beg the question’ originally meant but I think the pedantry battle on that one has been lost.
Sophy T
9 days ago
That, of course, begs the question: why
Pedantry alert: That isn’t what ‘to beg the question’ originally meant but I think the pedantry battle on that one has been lost.
Sophy T
9 days ago
That, of course, begs the question: why
Pedantry alert: That isn’t what ‘to beg the question’ originally meant but I think the pedantry battle on that one has been lost.
Sophy T
9 days ago
That, of course, begs the question: why
Pedantry alert: That isn’t what ‘to beg the question’ originally meant but I think the pedantry battle on that one has been lost.
mike otter
9 days ago
The problem i see coming head on is this: The left made allies of Hamas, rape gangs and pretty much any Moslem who isn’t peaceful and contemplative (IME about 99% of Moslems ARE peaceful and contemplative). This alliance seems based on “my enemies’ enemy is my friend” and “the ends justify the means” even if the means are massacres of the defenceless, mass rapes and throwing homosexuals off tall buildings. Now the public are waking up to this they understandably want justice. Put yourself in Labor’s or Melanchon’s position, you are associated with crimes so abhorrent that if you were lynched on the street or in prison no normal person would give two Fs. This will make the left desperate – and much more dangerous as a result. Their usual mendacity will increase 1000 fold and their vandalism of UK (and Fr) society and economy will ratchet up with it. This will be a big problem in the coming years unless we can find a better way of stopping bad guys with guns/knives/IEDs
IME about 99% of Moslems ARE peaceful and contemplative.
You’re not obliged to say that anymore, you know. Most surveys put the figure at somewhere in the 60s, not 99.
Martin Layfield
9 days ago
Charlie Hebdo are a set of pseudo-Jacobin nihilists. I agreed with Le Pen when he said he wasn’t Charlie, but was Charlie Martel. What makes France a great country is primarily based on its Catholic and Latin past, not the legacy of the enlightenment and the revolution.
”We are the sons of the Crusaders and we shall not recoil before the sons of Voltaire” – Charles Forbes René de Montalembert
Tyler Durden
8 days ago
If you ask my opinion, Brits who flirt with the FN or RN’s ideas are flirting with French neo-F-scism.
There was a reason why the British press wouldn’t reprint the Danish cartoons- to prevent a race war. So liberal Brits can ignore 20 years of cover-up over grooming gangs while feeling heroic about the fateful CH provocateurs over rhe channel.
It’s a depressing mess upon which traditional French anti-Semitism then intrudes via this new popular Left.
Milton Gibbon
9 days ago
Hmmm, funny that (before Islam) the French “balance” between freedom and faith wasn’t at all tricky. Good riddance to laïcité which was always a study in anti-Catholicism. Also, the first laws targetting the church were not in 1905. They had been incipient from the start of the revolution in 1789 and were very restrictive then, actually having been mollified over time.
0 0
9 days ago
Bizarrely wrongheaded ‘analysis’. . I was there ten years ago and it was a shock. What we have learned since is that over time Charlie Hebdo itself displayed alarming signs not only of moral decline but of self satisfied ignorance.
What goes round comes round, as ever. It’s foolishness at Charlie that fed ‘Islamist menace’ and it’s essential when confronting that not to associate ourselves with them.
UK
US
I left the Labour Party when I realised that most of its membership, which is overwhelmingly drawn from the state-employed middle class, are not really interested in improving the condition of the country – and certainly not that of the working class. They just want to put a camera in your bedroom. It’s the oppressive authoritarianism of Islam that they love.
Don’t know who could offer themselves as better embodying the general interest than public sector employees, it’s certainly not those whose only vision is self aggrandisement.
True and unlike Groucho Marx they are too arrogant to realise they ought to be suspicious of any club that would accept people like them as a member
those whose only vision is self aggrandisement
The automatic assumption of moral superiority is another defining characteristic.
It’s one of the great myths of the left that the interests of those providing a service are automatically aligned with those receiving it. It simply isn’t true, and to some extent those interests are opposed. In its most extreme form this is called “provider capture”.
This is obvious in terms of salary, but it can also apply to policy and practice. And it certainly applies to accountability and transparency.
True that – what killed it for me was reading Popper and Kuhn and other philosphers of science. Nails in the coffin enroute were the inane privelaged kids playing at leftism before joining Daddy’s bank, and the Spartists saying “the blacks think this” “the jews say that” “the women do the other” as if race, religion or gender are causative of character laid down by the immutable rules of Allah/Marx/RH Tawney. Myron Magnet’s work is prob the gold standard for explaining the futility of leftism as well as its terrible side effects.
the larger political problem is that the Left refuses to believe there is a small but dangerous part of the French population which hates the Republic and wants to destroy it.
Oh, they don’t refuse to believe that; rather, they identify the “small but dangerous part” differently.
Although the author seeks to make a special case for France as the ‘leader’ in secularist resistance to totalitarian Islamism, this article could just as easily apply to the British left.
Even now, the nature of the threat to our hard-won freedoms isn’t so much denied by the left, as facilitated.
Still, as a way of marking the tenth anniversary of the Chatlie Hebdo massacre, a salient reminder of how far the West has been undermined; not from without, but essentially from within.
It feels as though this is being brought to a head, which is rather an unfortunately pertinent way of describing it.
Always have to remember that the modern Left is animated at bottom by a fundamental disdain for the free Western capitalist culture that supports them, so there is always a default to support or at least become apologists for other cultures (Islam, communism, socialism) that share the same antagonistic attitude, even to the point of violence. There also seems to be a masochistic urge to surrender.
Don’t ever forget that jihadist Islamism was a deliberate creation of the British Empire dating from the encouragement of the Wahhabis at Deoband as a ploy against incipient Indian nationalism and the subsequent fostering of Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan to keep Congress led India away from their Soviet friends.
I was at SOAS when Bernard Lewis had the bright idea of making such Islamist identity politics a general tool of US policy, leading to his move across the Atlantic and Brezhinsky’s sponsoring of Al Qaida, the first of many such movements deployed by the Americans. Let’s not ignore either the exploitation of anti-Islamist identity politics eventually expanded into the War on Terror following 9-11.
It’s not only the Islamists being manipulated but all of us.
I think that the Kharijites might lay claim to be the original ‘jihadi Islamists’, and there have been plenty of others since then.
A story as old as the Franco-Ottoman alliance against Spain (and UK) 1500s – 1715 ish. Wahabi Islam by Natana DeLong Bas is a good read on how that particular school of thought easily ends up getting violent. But its not just students of Islamic laws and philosophy that get glove puppeted: The “smoke the Russians out of Afghanistan” elevated illiterate drug traffickers to hero status and sowed the seeds of the Taliban #1 and #2 (#2 are the same lot but better PR and online presence = prob trained by the BBC ort Guardian lol)
Yes. In fact since 1858 when the Crown took charge of India from the EIC, British policy favoured Muslim hardliners and fostered separatism.
You reap what you sow….
Don’t ever forget that jihadist Islamism was a deliberate creation of the British Empire dating from the encouragement of the Wahhabis at Deoband as a ploy against incipient Indian nationalism
… and their later import into Britain to assist in the Labour Party’s class war against working people here.
Jihadist Islamism conquered and ruled a massive empire when the British Empire you claim invented it was still centuries in the future.
Let’s face reality. The Arab world has not contributed anything positive to the modern world, and the last contribution of Islam was 600 years ago. Why do we have to accept cultural equivalency as an irrefutable truth?
Is there any chance that someone could mention the unmentionable, which is to say that the very notion of blasphemy is incompatible with the values of a free democracy?
And, to furthermore mention the unmentionable, that persons from societies radically different from our own western societies, will tend to bring their beliefs and behaviors with them?
We have the right, in western societies, to criticize religions, just as we have the right to criticize political figures. We obviously don’t have the right to physically harm people who upset us. Both of these ideas are fundamental to western society itself.
We also have the right, albeit collectively, to determine who lives amongst us. Otherwise, immigrants who settle here for economic reasons only, and who refuse to integrate, more closely resemble invaders, imposing their societies on ours.
Sure there’s no hypocrisy lurking there? ‘Criticise’ means what chez vous? What Charlie Hebdo did was plain and simple mockery, which needs a different kind of defence than what you’ve offered. If you want to define it at all…..
Mockery, sarcasm, parody, cartoons, Spitting Image, and the rest are all valid forms of criticism. Public figures – politicians, sports people, actors, even journalists, – dish it out, and take it, every day. They often get offended, but don’t react with violence. That’s the preserve of the feeble-minded and inadequate, who need the crutch of a supposed supernatural minder.
Charlie was, and presumably still is, an equal opportunities critic. They are happy to have a go at religion across the board, and much else. Their reaction to being told not to was to go ahead and do it. If you like, to demonstrate and exemplify free speech.
To Anglo eyes it all looks sort of old fashioned and quaintly left wing – not because we have become better, but because we have lost our nerve. They may sometimes seem a little adolescent, but then how do our current crop of adolescents occupy their time.
The idea that Charlie only took aim at Islam is completely false. Their very name is a slight on Charles de Gaulle delivered, I believe, just after his funeral.
I am a devout Christian but am not offended if someone makes fun of my Christianity or of Jesus himself. I am confident in my faith both intellectually and experientially (objectively and subjectively) and if Jesus is God he certainly doesn’t need defending with any worldly means – he makes that clear himself to all who say they follow him. Islam sees this as weakness and lack of confidence in my beliefs, and as an accommodation of secular forces, in rebellion against God and his words….these opposing viewpoints, one that helped shape the West and one that still holds in much of the Middle East and Africa plus elsewhere, can never be reconciled. Willing surrender to love or surrender through fear. I accept that there are many examples in history where so called Christianity, in direct rebellion against Christ’s words, abused worldly power to also force submission through control but most Christians today are fully aware of that and are equally horrified as non-believers when it occurs. A reform of Islam meanwhile seems to go against it’s whole raison d’etre or foundation and it’s not helpful (understatement) that all schools of Islam believe that an adult male leaving the faith deserves to die, alongside anyone that blasphemes…
During the Revolution if the Paris mob laid hands on a priest they would beat him to death and parade his head around on a stick. The French secularists have a long and shameful history of being exactly as bloodthirsty and unhinged as the militant Islamists they despise so much.
Do you have a modern day example of this bloodthirstiness among today’s French or are you simply showing yourself as part of the problem?
You could try looking this up.
The numbers killed are reported on a wide range of 30 to 300, but here is a quotation appearing in the Wikipedia entry:
Paris. 1961.
The ‘left’ is now synonymous with non-white interests. It’s not betraying anyone as it’s doing what you expect. It’s not ‘college’ educated white females with silly ideas who are the face of the left – it’s non-Europeans with colonial settler attitudes. The delusions of the ever shrinking ‘white liberal’ matter less and less – they either have to shut up or say what is expected of them.
Europe is balkanising in every conceivable way – the divide on the Charlie Hebdo atrocity and the right to satire, is race and religion.
I would add ‘non-Western’ to your description.
The dog whistling over ‘child grooming’ promoted today is certainly about race and religion. The appeal is to those for whom misogyny and even child abuse is normal enough unless practised by certain ‘others.’ Such hypocrisy is off the scale.
There is a sliver of truth in this – the old industrial cities of Fr and UK were not known for treating their wives and daughters well in their heydays compared to stock-broker suburbs and urban wealth-spots. It is noticeable the rape gangs got most of their tractoin in these areas in UK. Not sure about France but i used to go there as a kid and places like Lyon, Marseille and even Boulogne were as rough as anywhere in London, Cardiff or Glasgow
Largely because the “better kind of people” really didn’t care. Many of them, it seems, still don’t.
What’s ‘child grooming’, sounds like a pathetic euphemism. I think you mean the Islamic supremacist race hate communities who targeted white children for rape and torture for decades as the ‘institutions’ looked on and did nothing?
Nobody thinks child abuse is normal, nor for that matter genuine misogyny. The only thing that would make your statement true is if you have completely redefined both of those terms. Nobody would look at what happened to these girls and consider it “normal” if carried out by gangs of white men.
I suspect you are a troll. If not, either get a grip or make it clear what you are actually saying.
The French Left have lost that mongrel attitude that led to revolution and equality. They bend the knee to a chimera expecting applause, and praise a fascist god, a shabby poor substitute for liberty. The South and the descendants of the pieds-noirs will hopefully rise and take their brothers and sisters to freedom.
The French left have simply been colonised and split like social democratic movements most everywhere, between those who have compromised with capital and those who resist. The latter, together with those resisting on the right, comprise a majority committed to the well being of working people, currently holding the ‘responsible’ propertied ‘centre’ interests to ransom. No ‘freedom’ without economic security.
This is romantic wishful thinking. The modern ‘left’, with a few notable, even noble, exceptions, is almost entirely drawn from a suburban graduate class that is largely parasitic, deriving its livelihood from unearned property wealth and state sinecure. These people are not hard to identify. Anyone who has ever visited North London can find them in every borough.
More of the same – the left refuses to call out the obvious for fear of offending someone. Who exactly? People like these killers, the English grooming gangs, American criminals, and jihadis everywhere take advantage of the left’s syrupy sensibilities.
That, of course, begs the question: why
Pedantry alert: That isn’t what ‘to beg the question’ originally meant but I think the pedantry battle on that one has been lost.
That, of course, begs the question: why
Pedantry alert: That isn’t what ‘to beg the question’ originally meant but I think the pedantry battle on that one has been lost.
That, of course, begs the question: why
Pedantry alert: That isn’t what ‘to beg the question’ originally meant but I think the pedantry battle on that one has been lost.
That, of course, begs the question: why
Pedantry alert: That isn’t what ‘to beg the question’ originally meant but I think the pedantry battle on that one has been lost.
The problem i see coming head on is this: The left made allies of Hamas, rape gangs and pretty much any Moslem who isn’t peaceful and contemplative (IME about 99% of Moslems ARE peaceful and contemplative). This alliance seems based on “my enemies’ enemy is my friend” and “the ends justify the means” even if the means are massacres of the defenceless, mass rapes and throwing homosexuals off tall buildings. Now the public are waking up to this they understandably want justice. Put yourself in Labor’s or Melanchon’s position, you are associated with crimes so abhorrent that if you were lynched on the street or in prison no normal person would give two Fs. This will make the left desperate – and much more dangerous as a result. Their usual mendacity will increase 1000 fold and their vandalism of UK (and Fr) society and economy will ratchet up with it. This will be a big problem in the coming years unless we can find a better way of stopping bad guys with guns/knives/IEDs
IME about 99% of Moslems ARE peaceful and contemplative.
You’re not obliged to say that anymore, you know. Most surveys put the figure at somewhere in the 60s, not 99.
Charlie Hebdo are a set of pseudo-Jacobin nihilists. I agreed with Le Pen when he said he wasn’t Charlie, but was Charlie Martel. What makes France a great country is primarily based on its Catholic and Latin past, not the legacy of the enlightenment and the revolution.
”We are the sons of the Crusaders and we shall not recoil before the sons of Voltaire” – Charles Forbes René de Montalembert
If you ask my opinion, Brits who flirt with the FN or RN’s ideas are flirting with French neo-F-scism.
There was a reason why the British press wouldn’t reprint the Danish cartoons- to prevent a race war. So liberal Brits can ignore 20 years of cover-up over grooming gangs while feeling heroic about the fateful CH provocateurs over rhe channel.
It’s a depressing mess upon which traditional French anti-Semitism then intrudes via this new popular Left.
Hmmm, funny that (before Islam) the French “balance” between freedom and faith wasn’t at all tricky. Good riddance to laïcité which was always a study in anti-Catholicism. Also, the first laws targetting the church were not in 1905. They had been incipient from the start of the revolution in 1789 and were very restrictive then, actually having been mollified over time.
Bizarrely wrongheaded ‘analysis’. . I was there ten years ago and it was a shock. What we have learned since is that over time Charlie Hebdo itself displayed alarming signs not only of moral decline but of self satisfied ignorance.
What goes round comes round, as ever. It’s foolishness at Charlie that fed ‘Islamist menace’ and it’s essential when confronting that not to associate ourselves with them.
Bollix! We need to support those who have the courage to lampoon mediaeval superstition – whatever form it takes.