The urgent pleas for national unity heard after every terrorist attack
in France are sounding ever more strained as the killers inspired by the
Islamic State group nimbly shift their tactics and targets and confound
the politicians struggling to combat them.
President François Hollande appealed on Tuesday (July 26) for support
from a nation shocked by Islamist militants who slit the throat of an
86-year-old Catholic priest at the altar of his church in a suburb of
the northern city of Rouen. It was the fifth such attack in a year and a
half.
The French share his rejection of this violence, but the issue of how
to confront what one security expert called “this epidemic of terrorism”
is deeply dividing a society that now wonders not if but when, and
where, the next outrage will occur.
Hollande’s Socialist government has stepped up its military action
against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, imposed a state of
emergency and reinforced security to unprecedented levels. But the
attackers keep outwitting the authorities with ever-new ways to shock
the population.
“We must realize that we are in a different era,” said the Rev.
Christian Delorme, a Catholic priest active in dialogue with Muslims.
“France has lived for about 70 years in peace, but that’s finished. The
violence of the world has reached us.”
“A few months ago, this kind of dramatic news came from Mosul or
Baghdad, evoking our compassion for the unfortunate Middle Eastern
Christians being martyred in their chaotic countries,” the daily Le
Figaro said in a front-page editorial. “This horror scene happened
yesterday in a little village in Normandy.”
The impressive unity seen after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine
and a Jewish supermarket in January 2015, highlighted by Hollande’s mass
march against terrorism attended by 40 foreign leaders, has dissolved
under the pressure of the continued shocks.
With next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections firmly in
mind, conservative politicians are now loudly accusing the country’s
Socialist leaders of failing to protect it and proposing solutions the
government says are unconstitutional.
Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, hoping to make a comeback after
losing to Hollande in 2012, has called on the government to be
“merciless” in its response.
“Our enemy has no taboos, no limits and no morals,” he declared. “Legal
quibbles, precautions and excuses for incomplete work can no longer be
tolerated.” Among the measures he demanded was preventative detention
for suspected jihadists, which is not now legal.
Herve Morin, a former conservative defense minister, said France should
“Israelize” its security system, copying the tough approach taken
there. He proposed making Facebook and other social media punishable if
they carry jihadist propaganda and locking up anyone returning from a
stay in Syria. “If we don’t (react), this could end in a civil war,” he
said.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader and serious
challenger for the presidency, responded with a typically anti-Muslim
tweet: “They’re killing our children, murdering our policemen and
butchering our priests. Wake up!”
In his televised address, Hollande acknowledged that France faced an
unprecedented threat of terrorism. “This war will be long,” he said. “It
is aimed at our democracy. That is the target, but it is also our
shield. Our unity will be our strength.”
Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned in a tweet that the jihadists wanted
to “set the French against each other, attacking a religion to provoke a
war of religions.”
The Islamic State group’s French-language magazine Dar al Islam
outlined that strategy early last year under the headline “May Allah
curse France.” It encouraged French Muslims to stage attacks in any way
possible to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash that would drive the Islamic
minority into the radicals’ arms.
It cited France’s long history of fighting in the Muslim world, from
the Crusades through its colonial period to the present day, and accused
Paris of discriminating against its Muslim minority with bans on
headscarves in state schools and face veils in public.
An attack on a church has been expected since at least April 2015, when
police found evidence that a failed terrorist had staked out three
churches in the Paris area. But nobody expected it to occur near Rouen,
where the Rev. Jacques Hamel was killed as he was celebrating morning
Mass.
The Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket attacks claimed 17
lives and targeted journalists and cartoonists who had lampooned the
Prophet Muhammad, and France’s Jewish minority.
By contrast, the next assault struck indiscriminately at popular
entertainment sites such as the Bataclan rock music hall, a soccer match
at the Stade de France and bars and cafes in a hip Paris neighborhood.
The massacre ended with 130 dead and over 400 injured.
The government imposed a state of emergency and tried to pass a law
stripping dual nationals of their citizenship. But the deeply unpopular
Hollande could not muster a majority and the controversial measure was
dropped.
When the European soccer championships held in France from June 10 to
July 10 passed off without a terror incident, Hollande used his annual
Bastille Day television interview to announce that the state of
emergency imposed in November would soon be lifted.
That evening, a nonpracticing Muslim with no apparent link to jihadists
plowed through crowds after a Bastille Day fireworks show in Nice with a
rented refrigerator truck, killing 84. Hollande had to reappear on
television to say the state of emergency would be renewed.
Flustered politicians said the Tunisian-born man had “radicalized very
rapidly,” an admission that intelligence services could not have caught
him.
By targeting a Catholic priest in his church, Tuesday’s attack struck
at a symbol of traditional French life that even non-Catholics could
identify with. The town’s communist mayor was in tears as he met
Hollande — a native of Rouen — who rushed to the scene.
In another embarrassing twist for the authorities, it turned out that
both attackers were listed as security risks by the local police. One of
them even wore an electronic ankle bracelet after serving 10 months in
prison for two failed attempts to travel to Syria to join the Islamic
State group.
Hollande received leaders of France’s main religions at the Elysee
Palace on Wednesday. Paris Grand Mosque Rector Dalil Boubakeur said the
group asked for more security measures, since “even the most humble
house of prayer is a target.”
But the Rev. François Clavairoly, head of the Protestant Federation of
France, admitted, “It’s obvious that putting guards before every church
in this country is absolutely unimaginable and undoable.”
Tom Heneghan is a correspondent based in Paris
Courtesy: Religion News Service
Photo: French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, second from left;
President Francois Hollande, third from left; and Interior Minister
Bernard Cazeneuve, right, look on during a meeting with French
representatives of religious communities at the Elysee Palace in Paris
on July 27, 2016.
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