New Charlie Hebdo Book Blames Victims

[Valin]

The Daily Beast:

An inane essay by a radical left-wing French writer claims supporters of 'Charlie Hebdo' are essentially Islamophobic fascists.

Benjamin Haddad

Oct. 17 2015

 

Following the terrorist attacks that struck France in January, four million Frenchmen, in the largest public gathering since the Liberation of Paris, took to the streets under the slogan 'Je Suis Charlie'. It was a rare moment of national unity. Under bipartisan applause at the National Assembly, the socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls praised “those 17 lives [who] were faces of France and symbols of freedom of speech, the vitality of our democracy, of the republican order, of our institutions, of tolerance, of secularism.” Leaders from all around the world gathered in Paris to express their support.

 

But it was all a “sham” says Emmanuel Todd, a French left-wing intellectual whose essay “Who is Charlie?” a controversial bestseller in France, was recently translated into English. For Todd, the event that truly demands study did not take place on January 7th, the date of the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff, or on January 9th with the anti-Semitic murders at Hyper Cacher. It is rather the “hysteria,” a totalitarian unanimity that Todd says is comparable to the Spanish Inquisition, which seized France during the massive marches of January 11.

 

Todd, we are told, is a sociologist. Where other people see rational actors making decisions, he supposedly unveils the true social forces moving unwitting participants. The French thought they were marching to express their solidarity with the victims and their commitment to republican principles such as freedom of speech. Basing his study on maps of the protest across the country, Todd claims instead the 4 millions demonstrators were actually unconscious agents of a dominating, but declining, class: white, bourgeois, formerly Catholic, defending their contested power by advocating for abused pseudo-universal values like secularism. The region where the marches were the most numerous, says Todd, are historically those that fought secularism the most, regions with residual (“zombie”) Catholicism and inegalitarian family structures. The true motivation, Todd says, was Islamophobia. “Focusing on Islam reveals in reality a pathological need by the middle and superior classes to hate someone or something,” Todd writes. Protesters were “sacralising the symbolic violence targeted at a minority religion."

 

(Snip)