Scene from Farid ud-Din Attar's "Conference of the Birds" (painted c. 1600)
31 de janeiro de 2015
The Argumentative Jew
To the women and men of Kesher Israel
The most common understanding of
disagreement, in the private sphere and the public one, is that it
represents a failure. A single understanding, a shared understanding, is
preferred to a multiplicity of understandings, which is rejected as an
epistemologically fallen condition. We begin with many, but we aspire to
one: The grip of the holistic fantasy is profound. Disagreement is a
kind of fragmentation, but we wish to be made whole. The many factors
that are responsible for intellectual disharmony—rhetorical, conceptual,
psychological, cultural, political—are regarded pejoratively as
impediments that need to be refuted or discarded, as obstacles in the
way of a higher arrangement. That higher arrangement is consensus. Who
does not prefer consensus to conflict? Is quarrelsomeness not a vice?
Surely a quarrel is a kind of conflict, a state of affairs in need of
correction. A quarrel demands resolution and reconciliation. To see
things differently is to surrender to difference, whereas sameness or
similarity of perspective brings us closer and even unites us. The dream
of intellectual concord is also a dream of social concord. The
abolition of disagreement, when it is not coerced, is a promise of union
and peace.
Recently I came upon a fine example of this consensualist mentality.
In 1943, not long before she starved herself to death in England in
solidarity with the people of occupied France, Simone Weil wrote a short
essay called “On the Abolition of All Political Parties.” It was
published posthumously in 1950, and it has recently appeared in an
English translation by my late friend Simon Leys. Weil begins her essay
with an endorsement of Rousseau and proceeds to develop her own
alarmingly Rousseauist vision of perfect society-wide agreement.
“Rousseau took as his starting point two premises,” she writes. “First,
reason perceives and chooses what is just and innocently useful, whereas
every crime is motivated by passion. Second, reason is identical in all
men, whereas their passions most often differ. From this it follows
that if, on a common issue, everyone thinks alone and then expresses his
opinion, and if afterwards all these opinions are collected and
compared, most probably they will coincide inasmuch as they are just and
reasonable, whereas they will differ inasmuch as they are unjust or
mistaken. It is only this type of reasoning that allows one to conclude
that a universal consensus may point at the truth. Truth is one.” Weil
describes these assumptions as the basis of “our republican ideal.”
There exists, of course, another republican ideal, which recognizes the
inevitability, and even the nobility, of “faction” and chooses
compromise and respect over conformity and massified certitude. Reading
Weil, one yearns for Madison. Weil’s remarks also nicely illustrate the
way in which a horror of disagreement may culminate in a philosophical
monism. It is hard to stay away from metaphysics when one’s subject is
truth.
But there exists another school of thought about these questions. It
may be found in ancient and early modern India, as Amartya Sen showed in
his great essay “The Argumentative Indian,” but its most sophisticated
and most robust home is in Judaism, from its beginnings in ancient
rabbinical literature all the way to the present day. The Jewish
tradition—the tradition of the argumentative Jew—is a long and great
challenge to the consensualist mentality. It repudiates, sometimes in
theory, always in practice, the cult of unanimity. It displays an almost
erotic relationship to controversy. (Like all erotic relationships,
this one sometimes devolves into decadence, which in the early modern
centuries was known as pilpul.) In the Jewish tradition,
disagreement is not only real, it is also ideal—at least in the
unredeemed world, which is the only world we know. In its millennia of
disputations, even mistaken opinions are not without legitimacy.
Minority opinions are not obsolete opinions: They are preserved
alongside majority opinions because their reasoning may one day be
useful again. Arguments that are adjudicated practically remain alive
theoretically. Indeed, both sides of a particular argument may be “the
words of the living God.”
The full text of the talmudic passage is this: “Rabbi Aba said in the
name of Samuel: For three years the house of Shammai and the house of
Hillel disagreed. The former declared: the law should be made according
to us, and the latter declared, the law should be made according to us.
Then a heavenly voice proclaimed: These opinions and those opinions are
the words of the living God, and the law is according to the house of
Hillel.” The passage seems to shut down the very debates that it has
just sacralized—except that the establishment of the law does not
dissolve the legal discussion. The argument survives the decision, which
is made among the elders according to majority rule, so that the
community may function. But the argument was never itself purely
functional. It was, instead, intrinsically valuable. (A practical spirit
motivated also the medieval and early modern enterprise of legal
codification, but insofar as the codes represented a suspension of the
work of analysis, a claim to intellectual closure, they were ferociously
opposed.)
This same epic quarrel between the house of Hillel and the house of
Shammai is described in a mishnah as “a quarrel for the sake of heaven
[which therefore] will endure.” The endurance of a quarrel: What sort of
aspiration is this? It is the aspiration of a mentality that is
genuinely rigorous and genuinely pluralistic. The tradition of
commentary on that mishnah is a kind of history of Jewish views on
intellectual inquiry—from the Levant in the 15th century, for example,
there is Ovadiah Bertinoro’s remark that “only by means of debate will
truth be established,” an uncanny anticipation of Milton and Mill, and
from Hungary in the 19th century there is the gloss by Rabbi Moses
Schick, who himself had a role in a community-wide schism, that
“sometimes it is our duty to make a quarrel . . . For the sake of truth
we are not only permitted to make a quarrel, we are obligated to make a
quarrel.”
And argument is emphatically man-made. In the talmudic passage cited
here, we witness a moment of high religious drama: the abdication of the
divine from the human quest for truth. The heavenly voice announces the
permanent validity of both sides of an argument and leaves the labor of
clarification in our hands. The sacralization of disagreement in
Judaism is accompanied by the renunciation of any heavenly role in the
attempt to verify legal and philosophical propositions. There is even a
midrash that imagines God himself sowing the Torah with perplexities, by
imbuing each of his edicts with “49 reasons to rule ‘pure’ and 49
reasons to rule ‘impure.” We are not given the answers. We must find
them. At least intellectually, this God has absconded.
“It is not in the heavens”: The scriptural phrase became a recurring
refrain. Disputation is an entirely immanent activity. This is an
extraordinary expression of confidence in reason and in the mortals who
engage in reason. In this practice of earthly self-
reliance, thought is preferred to epiphany, and revelation is a thing of the past. (There are a few works of medieval Jewish jurisprudence that claim to derive their rulings in one way or another “from the heavens,” but a close inspection of their conclusions shows that their claim to a transcendent origin of human opinion is a theological and literary conceit.) Since the end of prophecy and divination, ideas and practices must be validated by principles and by reasoning from principles. Certain problems, to be sure, will not find their solutions, as the ancient rabbis said, until the arrival of Elijah, that is, until the advent of the messiah; but that is really a mythological way of saying that those problems are, to borrow the old phrase of a British philosopher, essentially contested. We are to learn to live with disagreement and not to think less of it because it cannot be miraculously consummated.
reliance, thought is preferred to epiphany, and revelation is a thing of the past. (There are a few works of medieval Jewish jurisprudence that claim to derive their rulings in one way or another “from the heavens,” but a close inspection of their conclusions shows that their claim to a transcendent origin of human opinion is a theological and literary conceit.) Since the end of prophecy and divination, ideas and practices must be validated by principles and by reasoning from principles. Certain problems, to be sure, will not find their solutions, as the ancient rabbis said, until the arrival of Elijah, that is, until the advent of the messiah; but that is really a mythological way of saying that those problems are, to borrow the old phrase of a British philosopher, essentially contested. We are to learn to live with disagreement and not to think less of it because it cannot be miraculously consummated.
Learning to live with disagreement, moreover, is a way of learning to live with each other. Etymologically, the term machloket refers to separation and division, but the culture of machloket
is not in itself separatist and divisive. This is in part because all
the parties to any particular disagreement share certain metaphysical
and historical assumptions about the foundations of their identity. But
beyond those general axioms, the really remarkable feature of the Jewish
tradition of machloket is that it is itself a basis for
community. The community of contention, the contentious community, is
not as paradoxical as it may seem. The parties to a disagreement are
members of the disagreement; they belong to the group that wrestles
together with the same perplexity, and they wrestle together for the
sake of the larger community to which they all belong, the community
that needs to know how Jews should behave and live. A quarrel is
evidence of coexistence. The rabbinical tradition is full of rival
authorities and rival schools—it owes a lot of its excitement to those
grand and even bitter altercations—but the rivalries play themselves out
within the unified framework of the shared search. There is dissent
without dissension, and yet things change. Intellectual discord, if it
is practiced with methodological integrity, is compatible with social
peace.
The absence of the God’s-eye view of an issue, and the consequent
recognition of the limitations of all individual perspectives, has a
humbling effect. A universe of controversy is a universe of tolerance. Machloket
is not schism, and the difference is crucial. Though disagreement may
lead to sectarianism, most disagreement in the history of this
ever-thinking people has been contained, and has been brilliantly
developed, on this side of sectarianism. I do not mean to exaggerate the
loveliness of the system: There has been heresy and there has been
heterodoxy, and Jews have persecuted other Jews for their opinions.
Intellectual integrity is always a risk to community, because some minds
may think themselves, rightly or wrongly, beyond the limits. But the
tradition of Jewish debate, especially legal debate, is striking for how
rich it remains within the limits. Whether or not heresy and heterodoxy
are forms of heroism, it is important to acknowledge that fidelity, and
the internal growth of a tradition inside its carefully examined
boundaries, may also be heroic.
Thus described, the Jewish model of quarrelsome unity may be hard to
grasp. Can a religious way of life really endure such a high degree of
inconclusiveness? Or put differently, can pluralism comport with
absolutes? The conventional answer, in our time, is that it cannot, and
so it must be something else. It must be perspectivism, or pragmatism,
or relativism. The contemporary discussion of these questions by Jewish
commentators has been rather slavishly dominated by the anti-rationalist
clichés of contemporary philosophy. My own view is that any attempt to
relieve the argumentative tradition of its rationality; or to seek a
release from its dissonance, by denying either its commitment to truth
or its commitment to many-mindedness; or to reduce rational argument to
the emotional expression of an individual or a group—all this represents
both a misunderstanding of the achievement of the Jewish style of
controversy and an impoverishment of it. Reason is often depicted as
repressive and orthodox, but it is in fact open-ended and infinitely
patient, which is why thinkers in our times are still arguing with
thinkers in ancient times and building upon their work. The enterprise
of argumentation is ancient but not antiquated.
Truth may be one, as Weil said—but even so, what is it? We live in
the arduous interim between the belief in truth and the discovery of
truth. It is never too late for a rational objection or a logical
advance. The contemporary anxiety about reason is misplaced: Emotion is
private and opaque, but reason is public and lucid. This is proven on
every serious Jewish bookshelf. Judaism evolved and progressed and
flourished as an alliance of the heart and the head. The heart alone
would not have sufficed, certainly not for a tradition whose essential
act is the act of interpretation.
30 de janeiro de 2015
Comida
"We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic."
Numbers 11:5
29 de janeiro de 2015
Roupa
16th-century watercolour of a Jew from Worms, Germany. The rota or Jewish ring on the cloak, moneybag, and garlic bulb are symbols of antisemitic ethnic stereotypes
28 de janeiro de 2015
27 de janeiro de 2015
70 anos
Barbara Doniecka, 80, was registered with camp number 86341.
Doniecka was 12-years-old during when she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother.
26 de janeiro de 2015
25 de janeiro de 2015
Maurice Sendak
At each window Gimpel knocked with the hammer and called out, "No one leave your house tonight. A treasure has fallen from the sky and it is forbidden to step on it."
Vida
The poor eyesight of koalas has led to the species evolving to greet through nose touching and is a common way for koalas to determine if they are encountering a friend or a foe.
24 de janeiro de 2015
Homem
%2Bscan%2Bof%2Ba%2Bhuman%2Bbrain%2Bwith%2BParkinson%27s%2Bdisease.jpg)
A computerized axial tomography (CAT) scan of a human brain with Parkinson's disease, showing atrophy.
França
Malian born Lassana Bathily attends his citizenship ceremony at the
Interior Ministry in Paris, France. Bathily, heralded as a national
hero, was awarded French citizenship by the government after he saved
several hostages during the January 9 hostage siege at a HyperCacher
market in Paris.
23 de janeiro de 2015
Intestino
לעשות רצונך אלהי חפצתי ותורתך בתוך מעי
“To do what pleases You, my God, is my desire;
Your Torah is in my innermost parts [within my bowels]"
Psalm 40:9
França
How a City in France Became a Mecca for Islamists
A visit to Roubaix, home of alleged Jewish Museum killer Mehdi
Nemmouche. Second of a five-part series on anti-Semitism in France.
French National Police Intervention Group arrest a suspected radical Islamist group member in Roubaix, April 2012
This is the second of a five-part series, France’s Toxic Hate.
Once upon a time, in the extreme north of France, a few steps away
from the Belgian border, the town of Roubaix was called “the city of the
thousand chimneys” in reference to the many textile factories that gave
it its distinctive shape and energy. Eager to work, ready to fight—“The
mecca of socialism” was its other nickname; the town remained a bastion
of the left from the mid-19th century to the last municipal
elections—workers from all over Europe would populate the red-brick
streets of its neighborhoods and the many guinguettes
for which the town was otherwise known. Today, as the broken, dirty
streets that I visited last week indicate, Roubaix is devastated by a
40-percent unemployment rate. It maintains an astonishing crime rate of
84 incidents per 1,000 inhabitants and is classified by the government
as the largest “high-priority security zone” in the country. This is
where Mehdi Nemouche, the alleged Brussels Jewish museum killer, was born and partly raised.
Place Faidherbe is a double row of unkempt windows and crooked walls supporting the two-story houses of the miserable neighborhood of Le Pile. On the other side of the street, in front of a tepid grocery store—and an empty storefront that was once a Muslim tea room and is now just a ghostly window blind shop—stand three grayish off-white trailers in a semi-circle. From one of the trailers, a heavyset blonde woman sells sandwiches and lukewarm beers to two middle-aged men, who then sit on a stone bench to eat and drink and watch the slow traffic of passing cars. A young Arabic man appearing at my side and crossing the street calls the two men “bums” as he passes. “What are these bums doing here?” he says aloud for no one in particular. The bums in question are the only Caucasian people in sight. Around them, women of all ages go about their business, wearing, all of them, the heavy dark cotton dresses and the black scarf of observant Salafists.
Place Faidherbe is a double row of unkempt windows and crooked walls supporting the two-story houses of the miserable neighborhood of Le Pile. On the other side of the street, in front of a tepid grocery store—and an empty storefront that was once a Muslim tea room and is now just a ghostly window blind shop—stand three grayish off-white trailers in a semi-circle. From one of the trailers, a heavyset blonde woman sells sandwiches and lukewarm beers to two middle-aged men, who then sit on a stone bench to eat and drink and watch the slow traffic of passing cars. A young Arabic man appearing at my side and crossing the street calls the two men “bums” as he passes. “What are these bums doing here?” he says aloud for no one in particular. The bums in question are the only Caucasian people in sight. Around them, women of all ages go about their business, wearing, all of them, the heavy dark cotton dresses and the black scarf of observant Salafists.
Unsurprisingly, he hit a wall. That wall took the shape of a “Committee of the Mosques”—a lobby set up for the occasion, gathering five of the six mosques of the city. According to political researcher Gilles Kepel, the structure of that committee was openly inspired by the one of the same name that had burned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1989 in Bradford, England—a town with which, incidentally, Roubaix is, to this day, officially twinned. So, the mayor got scared, stepped back, withdrew his complaint, and ended up celebrating the end of Ramadan in the Quick halal fast-food restaurant along with the distinguished members of the committee that he had intended to overcome.
In between, the polemics in Roubaix became so fierce as to attract national attention. From Paris, Marine Le Pen stepped in, denouncing in the “Quick Burger case” of Roubaix an example of what she called “the forced Islamisation of France.” A socialist mayor defended by the leader of the extreme right-wing party was certainly a new moment in the politics of cultural diversity, and Le Pen’s National Front won a few more points in the polls, as a result. (Today, a “compromise” has been reached: The Quick Restaurant remains exclusively halal, but it doesn’t publicize that fact to avoid alienating non-Muslim customers. As for what fate is in store for La Condition Publique, nobody knows.)
One could argue, somewhat sarcastically, that what had started in England at the end of the 20th century with the Rushdie case as a serious issue involving blasphemy and the freedom of literary imagination was followed in France in 2010 by the stupid question of what kind of meat bad hamburgers should be made of. Was Islam looking bad or was France demonstrating, one more time, its neurotic sensitivity to identity issues? It was perhaps with the latter question in mind—or with an all too certain answer to it—that Alissa Rubin of the New York Times came here one year ago to report—and managed to spectacularly miss what was going on in the city.
“When you look at the demographics, in two or three generations, all of France will be like Roubaix,” Bertrand Moreau, the chief spokesman for the mayor’s office at the time, told Rubin. To judge from her article, titled, “A French Town Bridges the Gap Between Muslims and Non-Muslims,” she was more than convinced. “Roubaix’s multicultural approach,” she enthusiastically wrote, has “diminished the ethnic and sectarian tensions that have afflicted other parts of France.” It has “blurred the difference between Muslims and non-Muslims.” Today, she wrote, “the city stands out for its efforts to take discreet but pointed steps to promote an active Muslim community.” Yet a look at the streets of Roubaix shows very little blurring of differences: Rather, it shows the elimination of nearly all cultural signifiers and actual people who are not Muslims. The last synagogue was destroyed here in 2000, and since then a Jewish presence in Roubaix, once the capital of the global shmata business, is unheard of.
Anti-Jewish prejudices, on the other hand, are alive and well in Roubaix. According to the French historian and researcher Michel Wieviorka, whose 2005 book La Tentation anti-Semite (The Anti-Semitic Temptation) presents the result of an investigation he conducted with the young Roubaisiens of Arabic/Muslim background, found that a majority—like, in fact, the majority of that same religious-ethnic and age group in the country at large—sees Jews, Israelis, and Americans as virtually of the same hateful species: They want to control the media, they support Israel, they make war, they discriminate against Arabs—and, more generally, are behind “the global order,” in which the inhabitants of Roubaix are very definitely the losers. (“Jews control everything in the French government” as Sarah, a Parisian young woman interviewed in the recent anti-Israel demonstrations in Paris put it bluntly to a reporter.)
***
In the early 1980s, as an idealistic and not-so-confident aspiring young writer, I found a job in a counter-cultural magazine called Sans Frontière. Without Borders, its name in English, was a twice-monthly journal defending non-discriminatory policies for migrant workers and dedicated itself to fighting racism. Its managing team was mostly composed of left-wing political refugees from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and its only two French-born journalists were, significantly, Jews—a Sephardic girl and me.
Sans Frontière was the first publication in France to investigate the rising situation in what was not known yet as the “Cités”—those high-rise blocks built in the ’60s and early ’70s in the French suburbs for a middle class that was actually leaving them. The high-rises turned out to be a magnet for migrant workers, who for decades had been confined in tiny rooms of miserable hostels, in forced celibacy—and were now beginning to settle in France for good with their wives and children, thanks to a new law of “familial reunification.” What those children wanted, who they were, if they even existed—no one knew or cared. The political right never did, and the left, led by François Mitterrand, had just come to power in a campaign based on the mythic appeal of the memory of Leon Blum and the Popular Front, and was ill-prepared to deal with such a population. As a result, everybody looked away. Except, of course, the National Front, whose rise was just beginning—and racist French cops, who were shooting these children down at a scary, regular rate. Some 40 kids were thus killed in the suburbs, and in broad daylight, either from windows or in police custody, between 1981 and 1983.
That same year, with the help of a Catholic Worker priest, Sans Frontière set up what would come to be known in French political parlance as La Marche des Beurs, or The Arab March (beur being slang in French for Arab): Thousands of youngsters from migrant backgrounds, of both sexes, walking across France end to end, asking for social equality and assimilation.
In Roubaix, although we never met at the time, Slimane Tir, then 27, was leading the way. “It was an ecstatic moment,” he recalls, his eyes shining at the memory. “The victory of an ideal of republican equality! Equal at last! At last we had a voice! We were citizens!”
But what I want to know is what happened since then. Today a gray-haired mustachioed little man of 61, and actually looking pretty much like his father who left Kabylie in 1956 to come and work in a textile factory, Slimane Tir stands at City Hall as municipal adviser elected from the Green party. Is it true, I ask him, that he is not just Green, but “Green Green” as Marine Le Pen says—that is, half-ecologist, and half the Trojan horse of the Islamists inside the left? Is it true, I ask, that his brother-in-law Ali Rahini works with Tariq Ramadan?
“I talk to you about citizenship, and you answer with my brother in law!” he answers with a broad, if slightly forced smile. “You have to take into account what happened everywhere after the Arab March. I was very much involved in local actions here. In the neighborhood called l’Alma-Gare we were trying to create alternate multicultural social structures. But we were not listened to by the politicians. The socialists had been afraid of the Arab March and did all they could to kill everything that was emanating from it. And politicians at large, they put in place all the conditions for the integration movement to die. Did they fill the gap with anything? No. Migrants were left alone. Meanwhile, the Muslims had only caves to pray in—no mosque, and it was very humiliating. And from Algeria, the Islamists were implanting networks. And in France lots of mayors are buying social peace with the imams without any regard for who they were. So, I felt I had to do something. I had to help the Muslims against the Islamists.” Even if it meant bringing in Ramadan? “Why not?” he answers. “He’s a Muslim philosopher.”
‘I felt I had to do something. I had to help the Muslims against the Islamists.’
Here are a few things Slimante Tir does not say: It is in the early
1960s that the demographics in Roubaix started to change—when most
migrant workers in Roubaix began to come from Algeria, and a good deal
of them were harkis—those
Algerians who fought with the French during the war of independence and
came to France afterward only to be locked up in camps and fiercely
humiliated by racism, for decades considered as traitors by their fellow
citizens. Since then, what happens in Algeria has a direct impact in
Roubaix. In 1992, Roubaix saw the first big rally in France in support
of the Islamic Salvation Front, ISF, one of the main military
organizations fighting the civil war that was raging at the time in
Algier. (According to Gilles Kepel, Roubaix’s proximity with Belgium was
making the city an easy spot for transferring weapons and money to the
ISF.) The same year, on rue Archimède, in l’Alma-Gare—the very
neighborhood where Slimane Tir had dreamed of building a leftist
commune—the al-Dawa mosque was built. The mosque reportedly had strong
ties to the ISF and sent people to fight for the “Islamic cause” not
only in Algier, but in Bosnia as well.The al-Dawa mosque was especially active in converting the Ch’ti—as we call the local French people of the north. In 1994, the same way Muhammed Merah, the Toulouse killer, would fly to Pakistan seven years later, or Nemmouche flew to Syria nine years later, two recently converted youths from Roubaix, Christophe Caze and Lionel Dumont, flew to the Balkans to fight with the Mujahadeen international brigades affiliated then to Osama Bin Laden. Back in Roubaix, in 1996, Caze and Dumont became famous as the main members of le gang de Roubaix—an organization of 10 people that they had set up and that in the winter of that year began robbing banks with the goal of using the loot to finance jihad. On March 28, 1996, the police attacked the gang hideout in L’Alma-Gare and in the ensuing shoot-out, four gang members died. Most of the others went to jail except for Dumont, who escaped. (Dumont, who is said to have had his first contact with Islam as a peacekeeper in Somalia, while he was serving in the French army, was spotted in 2003, in Malaysia, where he’d joined Jemaah Islamiyah, the terror group responsible for the Bali bombing that caused 202 victims in October of the previous year. Dumont had married a Muslim woman—a German of Portuguese origin who was working in a tourist agency. Arrested in Munich the same year and extradited to France, he has been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison, where he remains despite repeated attempts to escape.)
It was also in Roubaix, in the mid-1990s that Tariq Ramadan began his international career—by giving conferences through two different associations aimed at youths, Le Collectif des Musulmans de France (The French Muslims Collective) and Rencontre et Dialogue (Dialogue and Encounter) the latter co-founded by Slimane Tir’s brother-in-law Ali Rahni, with subsidies from City Hall.
The rationale for this was that, if the al-Dawa mosque gained in influence among the Muslim population at large, Slimane Tir and his brother-in-law could offer City Hall an alternate to the ISF influence. They could also give to the specific harki population of Roubaix a less-Algerian-oriented version of Islam. (Ramadan is famously linked with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which his grandfather helped to create.) By becoming Muslims their own way, harkis would indeed get out of the caves and recover dignity. In effect, two versions of a Salafist Islam started to compete—with predictable results.
In 2004, Ali Rahni was forced to back down after he had invited as speaker Hassan Iquioussen, an Islamist predicator born in France from Moroccan background who had helped Ramadan to set up the French Muslims Collective and had just been caught saying this: “Jews are stingy. They live in ghettos like rats and respect nothing. They are the top of betrayal and felony. … After World War I, they became even meaner than before. What do they do in Europe? What I’ll tell you will shock you, but it’s the books that say it today, they’ll be together with Hitler, the Zionists. And for what? To push the Jews outside Germany!” And so on.
“But he apologized, didn’t he?” answers Slimane Tir about Ramadan, when I remind him of that story.
***
On May 30, the very day Mehdi Nemmouche was caught, far to the south in Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of the city of Lyon, the socialist Deputy Mayor for Sport, Ahmed Chekhab, 30, was secretly taped by the manager of a sporting association with whom he was in conflict. The recording ended up on the Internet: “You do that to me although I’m a Muslim like you?” Chekhab is heard saying. He goes on: “You prefer Zittoun? You prefer the Jew? That’s what you want, don’t you? That’s what you like! You don’t like it when people like you are in place and wanna help. You’d rather have the fucking bastard to fuck you hard! That’s what you want! You want the Jew to fuck you!” Since Ahmed Chekhab is a Socialist, the party was asked to take action, and a few days later, the “sanction” fell: Ahmed Chekhab was nominated as the head of a commission dedicated to fighting racism and anti-Semitism.
The same way the socialists probably genuinely believe they can teach Ahmed Chekhab a lesson (once at the head of a commission dedicated to fighting racism and anti-Semitism, he’s going to have to study! He’s going to have to take notes, and his views will change!), Roubaix’s authorities felt they could safely counter the ISF’s influence by supporting a different teaching—that of Tariq Ramadan. It seems safe to say that the result has not been the social peace that its supporters hoped for.
“Mehdi was a teenager when Islam began to be really important here,” Souleifa Badaoui, Nemmouche’s lawyer after he turned to delinquency, says to me. “You had initiation classes in public schools about Islam here, you had conferences on Islam in town halls and town gymnasiums. It was everywhere!”
Badaoui is a round, warm, energetic, woman in her late thirties who was raised, with her nine sisters, not far from what is now the Abou Bakr mosque. Some of the girls do Ramadan, others don’t, and all of them are now lawyers or social workers. We have lunch in the courtyard of her favorite hangout in Roubaix, a restaurant that specializes in delicious barbecue and grilled meat. With us is Leïla, Soulifa’s youngest sister, a beautiful young woman who just turned 23 and is doing her training course as a law practitioner. “I even see people I know, friends, people who studied with me and have diplomas and work,” Badaoui tells me, “and suddenly they turn to so-called Islam, and it’s over.” “What do you mean it’s over?” “Well, they lose their jobs, to begin with.” “How so?” “Because they just can’t work! Not in the state they’re in. With the beard, the djellabah, the refusal to talk to any woman, me included!” It is hard for me to imagine that in a city with a 40 percent unemployment rate people voluntarily leave their jobs over religion. But, she says, “it’s not really voluntarily, it’s more like a consequence they accept. They used to call Roubaix the Mecca of socialism, now it’s just Mecca. The Mecca of French Islam.”
‘They used to call Roubaix the Mecca of socialism, now it’s just Mecca. The Mecca of French Islam.’
After lunch I decide to stay alone in the courtyard under the sun to
think of the dynamics of Muslim resentment toward the Jews. Is any of
this relevant to explain Mehdi Nemmouche? Is anything? It may be that he
found in 1990s Roubaix the serpent’s eggs to nurture his hatred—but
still: When he was 3, the social services considered his depressive
mother unfit for motherhood and placed him in a foster family, the
Vasseurs, who raised him with three other adopted kids, in a little
village away from Roubaix—an environment largely removed from the city’s
Muslim turmoil. Sure, he would see his aunts now and then, he would go
to school in Roubaix as a teenager, and at 17, he went to live with his
harmless grandmother in the poor Roubaix neighborhood called La
Bourgogne. How do you go from that to killing four people because
they’re Jewish? What made him so porous to such a distant, erratic
environment? What lit the first fire of hatred? How does individual
anger get trapped into collective neuroses?Should I take into account France’s relationship with its own past and its own history? Could Roubaix exist without the Algerian war—without the way the French colonials treated the Arabs, without the way Algerians treated themselves (Roubaix counts 300 killed in rivalries from the Algerian revolution), without the way the French treated the Harkis? Is the problem here Islam, only Islam, or is it France, and French irrational guilt?
Thierry, the white owner of the restaurant, comes to me as I reflect on all this. He wants to know what I write, what it is to be a writer, and he tells me about his restaurant, how he opened it two years ago, how he’s always been a man of the right, believing in free enterprise, and how taxes and socialist government policy kill him. (“There’s a dictatorship in this country, it’s the fourth Reich!” he says.) We speak of the Brussels killing, and the sin of “communitarianism” that he believes has befallen the country. “Because of the government, France is fractured now in various communities and they all hate each other,” he argues. And then he continues: “Listen to Manuel Valls, the interior minister. Google his last speech and you’ll see. You’ll hear. There’s a community he puts above the others. I won’t tell you more. But there’s a community that thinks they’re above all, they have protection. And it’s not going to end well.”
Back in Paris, I Googled the speech in question. It’s a speech made after the demonstrations last winter when anti-Semitic cries were heard in the streets for the first time since World War II. The group that the minister was trying to reassure was the Jews.
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/179500/frances-toxic-hate-2-roubaix
Sefarad
"Ki eshmera Shabbat", Abraham ibn Ezra
"Si observo el Shabat, Dios me protegerá.
Es una señal eterna entre Él y yo.
Está prohibido cargar objetos
emprender viajes, o hablar de
asuntos corrientes, de asuntos
comerciales y de temas del reino.
Sólo meditaré en la Torá de Dios,
que me dará sabiduría.
Releeré la Torá de Dios que
me hará más sabio.
En ella encontraré paz para mi alma.
Así como para la primera generación
mi santo Dios hizo un milagro,
otorgándoles pan doble, así mismo
duplicará mi comida cada viernes.
Dios dictó una ley religiosa que
prescribe la presentación del Pan
de Proposición.
Por eso, está prohibido torturarse,
según los sabios, excepto en el
Día del Perdón (Yom Kippur).
Es un día que impone respeto,
un día para deleitarse, de pan y
buen vino, de carne y pescado.
Los que estén alegres ese día
conseguirán la alegría.
Porque es un día en el que Dios
me llena de felicidad".
Es una señal eterna entre Él y yo.
Está prohibido cargar objetos
emprender viajes, o hablar de
asuntos corrientes, de asuntos
comerciales y de temas del reino.
Sólo meditaré en la Torá de Dios,
que me dará sabiduría.
Releeré la Torá de Dios que
me hará más sabio.
En ella encontraré paz para mi alma.
Así como para la primera generación
mi santo Dios hizo un milagro,
otorgándoles pan doble, así mismo
duplicará mi comida cada viernes.
Dios dictó una ley religiosa que
prescribe la presentación del Pan
de Proposición.
Por eso, está prohibido torturarse,
según los sabios, excepto en el
Día del Perdón (Yom Kippur).
Es un día que impone respeto,
un día para deleitarse, de pan y
buen vino, de carne y pescado.
Los que estén alegres ese día
conseguirán la alegría.
Porque es un día en el que Dios
me llena de felicidad".
22 de janeiro de 2015
21 de janeiro de 2015
Segundo Templo
Remnants of the 1st century Stairs of Ascent, discovered by B. Mazar, to the entrance of the Temple Courtyard.
Pilgrims coming to make sacrifices at the Temple would have entered and exited by this stairway
Pilgrims coming to make sacrifices at the Temple would have entered and exited by this stairway
20 de janeiro de 2015
França
Who Is Mehdi Nemmouche, and Why Did He Want To Kill Jews?
In the first of a five-part series on growing anti-Semitism in France, an intimate look at the alleged Brussels Jewish museum shooter
Belgian Vice-Prime Minister and
Interior Minister Joelle Milquet, French Interior Minister Bernard
Cazeneuve, and Brussels Jewish Museum president, Philippe Blondin, take
part in a ceremony in honor of the victims of a shooting at the Jewish
museum in Brussels, on June 4, 2014.
This is the first of a five-part series, France’s Toxic Hate.
***
Nine a.m., rue Carnot, one of the quietest, most opulent-looking
streets of Versailles, and the terror choreography’s already in full
swing: strident sirens, red flashlights, flashbulbs, and yelling of the
press. Two black cars with tinted bulletproof windows and circled by a
squad of motorcycle cops enter the paved rectangular courtyard of a
venerable edifice. The Sun King Louis the XIV had it built in 1672 for
his wife Thérèse of Austria; she housed her horses here. After her
death, the queen’s stables went to Adelaïde de Savoie, Duchess of
Bourgogne, then to Marie Leszczynska, Queen of France, and finally to
Marie Antoinette. Then the revolutionaries used it as a jail, butchering
14 prisoners there during the 1792 September massacres. Now it houses
the Court of Appeal, whose task today is to debate the fate of Mehdi
Nemmouche, the alleged author of the Brussels Jewish museum killings.
Faces hooded, M-14s in hand, .38 caliber pistols on the side, the mute black silhouettes of the RAID team—the French equivalent of the SWAT—check every one of us as we pass the freestone walls and, across the courtyard, take the wooden staircase leading to the first floor where the court hearing takes place.
Faces hooded, M-14s in hand, .38 caliber pistols on the side, the mute black silhouettes of the RAID team—the French equivalent of the SWAT—check every one of us as we pass the freestone walls and, across the courtyard, take the wooden staircase leading to the first floor where the court hearing takes place.
Nemmouche, handcuffed and with three RAID men to guard him, enters
the court’s glass cage at 9:43. He’s 29, midsize, with black hair. He
wears a colorless pair of jeans and a shapeless pullover, and he bears
no sign of the brutal determination so obvious on the picture that the
authorities gave to the press—an image that was probably taken at the
police station of Roubaix, his city of birth, near the Belgian border,
back in 2005 or so, when he was just another juvenile delinquent. No
signs of fear, embarrassment, or shame. No trace, either, of the scary
militia aura emanating from the museum surveillance videos that showed
a black-and-white, blurred, muscular man, cap on his head, sunglasses
on his eyes, and—just like Muhammed Merah, the Toulouse killer, had two
years ago—a GoPro camera attached to his chest so he could film his
murders.
Inconsequential, almost transparent, as he voices his civil status, answering in an assured monotone voice the three female judges facing him, Nemmouche could be any of the unnoticed kids that wander in my neighborhood in Paris all day long, from some café-bar to one of the many temporary employment agencies and back to the bar for another espresso, another beer, another petty larceny, just to kill boredom and pass the time.
Last May 24, a Saturday, at 3:27 p.m., according to the accusatory file, a man appeared at the doorstep of the Jewish Museum of Belgium. Out of his bag he pulled a Magnum .357 and fired. The bullets hit Emanuel and Miriam Riva, a couple of Israeli tourists in their mid-fifties who had just entered the place. Each was struck in the back of the skull, and they died on the spot. (Later on, a witness showing up a few minutes after the killing would post on his Facebook page a picture of Miriam’ s body lying in her blood, her hand still carrying the museum’s pamphlet program; what her children, ages 15 and 16, living in Israel, thought of the photograph is not known.) Letting go of the Magnum, the shooter then took from his bag a Kalashnikov, aimed it at a 65-year-old woman by the name of Dominique Sabrier, and shot her, also in the head.
A retired art publisher of Polish descent, Sabrier had left France for Brussels only two months before. Her reason for moving, ironically enough, was, according to her friends, the anti-Semitic atmosphere that now permeates France. The Toulouse killing had scared her, as had the hate demonstration in Paris the previous winter—when, for the first time since World War II, anti-Jewish slogans were chanted in public in the French capital. In Brussels, a city Sabrier knew, she hoped to live a quiet retirement. She had registered for law classes at the Free University of the town and was volunteering as a tourist guide at the museum.
Alexander Strens, 25, found the time to seek refuge under his reception desk—before the killer found him and shot him, once again in the head. Strens, hired at the museum’s communication department the previous year, was the only victim still alive after the shooting. Sent to the Saint-Pierre hospital of Brussels, he was declared brain dead there the next day. He died on June 6, raising the murder total to four. Although Strens’ mother is Jewish, his father is a Muslim Berber from Morocco and, in accordance with the wishes of both families, he was buried in the Muslim cemetery of Taza.
Then, with Strens—and with no more reason than it had when it started, the massacre ends. The surveillance video shows the shooter running away, bag in hand. He disappears.
***Inconsequential, almost transparent, as he voices his civil status, answering in an assured monotone voice the three female judges facing him, Nemmouche could be any of the unnoticed kids that wander in my neighborhood in Paris all day long, from some café-bar to one of the many temporary employment agencies and back to the bar for another espresso, another beer, another petty larceny, just to kill boredom and pass the time.
Last May 24, a Saturday, at 3:27 p.m., according to the accusatory file, a man appeared at the doorstep of the Jewish Museum of Belgium. Out of his bag he pulled a Magnum .357 and fired. The bullets hit Emanuel and Miriam Riva, a couple of Israeli tourists in their mid-fifties who had just entered the place. Each was struck in the back of the skull, and they died on the spot. (Later on, a witness showing up a few minutes after the killing would post on his Facebook page a picture of Miriam’ s body lying in her blood, her hand still carrying the museum’s pamphlet program; what her children, ages 15 and 16, living in Israel, thought of the photograph is not known.) Letting go of the Magnum, the shooter then took from his bag a Kalashnikov, aimed it at a 65-year-old woman by the name of Dominique Sabrier, and shot her, also in the head.
A retired art publisher of Polish descent, Sabrier had left France for Brussels only two months before. Her reason for moving, ironically enough, was, according to her friends, the anti-Semitic atmosphere that now permeates France. The Toulouse killing had scared her, as had the hate demonstration in Paris the previous winter—when, for the first time since World War II, anti-Jewish slogans were chanted in public in the French capital. In Brussels, a city Sabrier knew, she hoped to live a quiet retirement. She had registered for law classes at the Free University of the town and was volunteering as a tourist guide at the museum.
Alexander Strens, 25, found the time to seek refuge under his reception desk—before the killer found him and shot him, once again in the head. Strens, hired at the museum’s communication department the previous year, was the only victim still alive after the shooting. Sent to the Saint-Pierre hospital of Brussels, he was declared brain dead there the next day. He died on June 6, raising the murder total to four. Although Strens’ mother is Jewish, his father is a Muslim Berber from Morocco and, in accordance with the wishes of both families, he was buried in the Muslim cemetery of Taza.
Then, with Strens—and with no more reason than it had when it started, the massacre ends. The surveillance video shows the shooter running away, bag in hand. He disappears.
Brussels is the capital of Europe. The day after the shooting, an
election was held for a new European parliament. Xenophobic nationalist
parties across the continent were predicted to win a lot of seats even
before the killing, and as soon as the news broke the already
perceptible tension among the continental political class was imbued
with a new sense of frailty and paranoia: Was the scheduling of the
massacre just a coincidence? Or was a message being sent—and by whom?
Europe was under siege, no doubt, and humiliated, too.
The mayor and various members of the Belgium government showed up at the scene. King Philippe declared himself “outraged,” while the U.N. Security Council condemned “the terrorist attack” and its “probable anti-Semitic motivations,” and from Jerusalem, adding to the humiliation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the rise of anti-Jewish feeling on the continent. The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and E.U. Foreign Secretary Catherine Ashton, denounced an “intolerable attack against the values of Europe,” while European Parliament President Martin Shulz, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and French President François Hollande all made the trip to the museum three days after the killing to pay homage to the victims.
In the meantime, though, on Sunday May 25, the people of Europe spoke, sending to the E.U. Assembly some of their worst representatives, like those of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, who had won some 26 percent of the Greek electorate, and Marine Le Pen’s National Front, who was now considered, with its 25 percent of the valid votes, the leading political party in France.
So, who was responsible for this disaster—the destabilization, the humiliation, and the shame? The Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir, in its coverage of the shooting, may have hinted at a one generally held answer when it used the word “settlements” to describe the real estate held by the Jewish community in town, of which the museum was a part—as if Europe was no more natural or suitable a home for Jews than the West Bank. (Never mind that the theme of the museum exhibition at the time of the attack was the antiquity of the Jewish presence in Belgium dating back to early Christianity.)
The arrest of the French-born Nemmouche on May 30 did nothing to stop the confusion. If anything, it even emphasized the weird discrepancy at work in the wake of the shooting, between tragedy radiating worldwide on the one hand and globalized provincialism of conspiracy theories on the other. As the police story goes, Mehdi Nemmouche was apprehended in Marseilles during the routine control of a Eurobus from Amsterdam that was known to be commonly used by petty drug traffickers on their way to Algeria. Asking for Nemmouche’s I.D., the cops spotted a gun at his side and decided to make a move. They searched his bag, found not only a cap similar to the one seen in the video but the Kalashnikov used at the museum, bullets by the dozens, and a miniature GoPro camera with a video inside showing those weapons, with Nemmouche’s voice over the images claiming responsibility for the attack. (The camera, apparently, had not been working well during the killing.) But the more disturbing finding turned out to be a simple white sheet on which Arabic words had been painstakingly drawn with a felt-tip pen. Once deciphered, the inscription revealed itself to be the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIS—the most deadly terror group to have emerged out of the Syrian conflict.
Now, as questionable as some details of this official version may be—was it really a routine check, or did someone snitch?—the problem remains: How to coherently put together, on the one hand, the AK-47 and the way it was used—in cold blood, the shooter hitting his target each time and then vanishing calmly in the streets—and, on the other, Nemmouche’s adolescent look, the fact that he so amateurishly kept his weapons with him on a bus so widely used by delinquents and therefore so obviously under scrutiny?
On the social networks, that question has been used as “proof” that Nemmouche is in fact innocent and that the story he told—that he found or bought the bag—was true. But then there is the rudimentary ISIS flag, and there is the evidence, brought by the investigation, that on Dec. 31, 2012, Nemmouche left France for Brussels, London, Beyrouth, and Istanbul, on a trip to Syria where he indeed spent 11 months training with ISIS. Composed in part by ex-members of the old Saddam Hussein national guard, partly from Sufi tribes, and led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—the self proclaimed “caliph” of Iraqi background who until recently was as discreet with cameras as Osama Bin Laden was voluble—ISIS counts, according to official estimates, some 5,000 soldiers in Iraq and 12,000 in Syria, a surprisingly low number considering the advance of its troops on the ground. ISIS compensates for its lack of men by a communication strategy based on unabashed terror and open barbarism; its videos of mass murders posted on the Internet has had such an impact on the Iraqi regular army, four times superior in numbers, that Iraqi soldiers regularly flee from combat, leaving the roads open to the ISIS militias.
Now, to judge from the prisoner’s two aunts shyly sitting at the end of the courtroom, I’m not the only one to find preposterous any kind of connection between all this and Mehdi Nemmouche’s daily life as a petty delinquent in La Bourgogne, the proletarian neighborhood in Roubaix-Tourcoing where he was raised by his grandmother. La Bourgogne is one of those French hot “cités” where the police do not go by night and where unemployment has hit the roof. It’s also where Nemmouche’s two aunts happen to live. I spotted the two slim middle-aged women a bit earlier when Nemmouche entered the cage, briefly looked at the public, and winked at them, a sign to which they answered with a weak smile and a pale gesture of the hand. Since then, they’ve been visibly at pains to understand the point of the session, or what their nephew’s lawyer, Apolin Pepiezep, a 40-year-old African from the Ivory Coast, was talking about.
Back in the courtyard to wait for the police cars to leave at the end of the hearing, I can see there’s definitely something going on between them and Pepiezep. They’re actually arguing. “We’ve been trying to send clothes to Mehdi but you wouldn’t let us!” says one. “You forbid us to have any contact with him!” “Look,” he answers aggressively, somewhat disdainfully, “you understand what you want. But I never forbid you anything. He just doesn’t want to speak to you, that’s all!” Then he turns his back and, leaving the aunts at a loss, departs to speak to the press.
Later, on the phone with me, the attorney justified his attitude by
citing Nemmouche’s concern with protecting his family from any
connection with his situation. Not a good point, since the whole family
has been interrogated by the police in the days following the
shooting—testimony that is now permanently on record. Pepiezep also put
the blame on Souleifa Badaoui, Nemmouche’s previous lawyer back in
Roubaix, accusing her of being a publicity hound. “She shouldn’t have
brought the family to the court,” he told me. “They have no purpose
whatsoever there!” Whether Pepiezep is really appointed to the court or
picked up by Nemmouche is, in fact, unclear. It’s at Pepiezep’s request
that the court gathered this morning, to decide whether or not Nemmouche
should be tried in Brussels, as Belgium demands, or in France, under
the suspicion that his rights to a fair judgment wouldn’t be guaranteed
if he were extradited. Both Belgium and France being European countries,
the matter should hardly be a point of argument—there’s no
“extradition” inside of the European Union as the prosecutor
sarcastically reminded Pepiezep. But Nemmouche and his lawyer both
insist that, once delivered to Belgium, Brussels would not hesitate to
transfer him to a “third country”—namely Israel. However groundless the
assumption may be, of course—Jerusalem has never made any demand in that
sense—it’s good material for anti-Semitic propaganda on the social
networks.
When asked by the judge at the end of the hearing if he had anything to add, Nemmouche stood up to emphasize that point again—“I’ll answer your questions only when I have guaranteed my rights not be put into Israel’s hands”—I saw the two little aunts totally overwhelmed as much by the purpose as by the fierce militant mechanic voice with which Nemmouche was suddenly expressing himself. Here, at last, was a glimpse of the brutality radiating from his official pictures and from the surveillance video.
***The mayor and various members of the Belgium government showed up at the scene. King Philippe declared himself “outraged,” while the U.N. Security Council condemned “the terrorist attack” and its “probable anti-Semitic motivations,” and from Jerusalem, adding to the humiliation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the rise of anti-Jewish feeling on the continent. The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and E.U. Foreign Secretary Catherine Ashton, denounced an “intolerable attack against the values of Europe,” while European Parliament President Martin Shulz, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and French President François Hollande all made the trip to the museum three days after the killing to pay homage to the victims.
In the meantime, though, on Sunday May 25, the people of Europe spoke, sending to the E.U. Assembly some of their worst representatives, like those of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, who had won some 26 percent of the Greek electorate, and Marine Le Pen’s National Front, who was now considered, with its 25 percent of the valid votes, the leading political party in France.
So, who was responsible for this disaster—the destabilization, the humiliation, and the shame? The Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir, in its coverage of the shooting, may have hinted at a one generally held answer when it used the word “settlements” to describe the real estate held by the Jewish community in town, of which the museum was a part—as if Europe was no more natural or suitable a home for Jews than the West Bank. (Never mind that the theme of the museum exhibition at the time of the attack was the antiquity of the Jewish presence in Belgium dating back to early Christianity.)
‘He’s nice kid, Mehdi, he’s a nice kid, how could he end up doing such a thing?’
That same idea seemed to animate the deranged response of the Belgian
extreme-right deputy Laurent Louis, who, earlier in May, had organized
with the French comedian Dieudonné an anti-Semitic rally in Brussels.
When forced to issue a statement in order to exonerate himself from any
connection to what had just happened, he implied that the massacre was
nothing but a conspiracy carried on against him personally by his
“enemies” (namely, the Jews) to discredit his action. And maybe not
surprisingly in such a context, it fell to the esteemed Muslim
intellectual Tariq Ramadan to openly express the view that the murders
at the Jewish Museum were part of some larger Jewish conspiracy: “The
two Israeli tourists targeted at the museum,” he tweeted on May
27—choosing the word “targeted” despite evidence that the victims had
been chosen randomly—“worked for the Israeli services.” Ramadan’s sole
ground for this statement, it seems, was that the Rivas were public
accountants—that is, they worked for the state in which they lived. In
Ramadan’s mind, anyone working for the State of Israel, apparently, was a
spy and therefore a potential legitimate target for murder. The attack,
he added, was “a diversion offensive to hide the true motives and the
real perpetrators” of the deed: The Israelis, in other words, were
sacrificing their agents in order to gain political propaganda points.
Needless to say, Ramadan’s tweet made its way through the social
networks, where it became a common meme and was integrated into news
reports of the shooting as an interesting theory to explore.The arrest of the French-born Nemmouche on May 30 did nothing to stop the confusion. If anything, it even emphasized the weird discrepancy at work in the wake of the shooting, between tragedy radiating worldwide on the one hand and globalized provincialism of conspiracy theories on the other. As the police story goes, Mehdi Nemmouche was apprehended in Marseilles during the routine control of a Eurobus from Amsterdam that was known to be commonly used by petty drug traffickers on their way to Algeria. Asking for Nemmouche’s I.D., the cops spotted a gun at his side and decided to make a move. They searched his bag, found not only a cap similar to the one seen in the video but the Kalashnikov used at the museum, bullets by the dozens, and a miniature GoPro camera with a video inside showing those weapons, with Nemmouche’s voice over the images claiming responsibility for the attack. (The camera, apparently, had not been working well during the killing.) But the more disturbing finding turned out to be a simple white sheet on which Arabic words had been painstakingly drawn with a felt-tip pen. Once deciphered, the inscription revealed itself to be the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIS—the most deadly terror group to have emerged out of the Syrian conflict.
Now, as questionable as some details of this official version may be—was it really a routine check, or did someone snitch?—the problem remains: How to coherently put together, on the one hand, the AK-47 and the way it was used—in cold blood, the shooter hitting his target each time and then vanishing calmly in the streets—and, on the other, Nemmouche’s adolescent look, the fact that he so amateurishly kept his weapons with him on a bus so widely used by delinquents and therefore so obviously under scrutiny?
On the social networks, that question has been used as “proof” that Nemmouche is in fact innocent and that the story he told—that he found or bought the bag—was true. But then there is the rudimentary ISIS flag, and there is the evidence, brought by the investigation, that on Dec. 31, 2012, Nemmouche left France for Brussels, London, Beyrouth, and Istanbul, on a trip to Syria where he indeed spent 11 months training with ISIS. Composed in part by ex-members of the old Saddam Hussein national guard, partly from Sufi tribes, and led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—the self proclaimed “caliph” of Iraqi background who until recently was as discreet with cameras as Osama Bin Laden was voluble—ISIS counts, according to official estimates, some 5,000 soldiers in Iraq and 12,000 in Syria, a surprisingly low number considering the advance of its troops on the ground. ISIS compensates for its lack of men by a communication strategy based on unabashed terror and open barbarism; its videos of mass murders posted on the Internet has had such an impact on the Iraqi regular army, four times superior in numbers, that Iraqi soldiers regularly flee from combat, leaving the roads open to the ISIS militias.
Now, to judge from the prisoner’s two aunts shyly sitting at the end of the courtroom, I’m not the only one to find preposterous any kind of connection between all this and Mehdi Nemmouche’s daily life as a petty delinquent in La Bourgogne, the proletarian neighborhood in Roubaix-Tourcoing where he was raised by his grandmother. La Bourgogne is one of those French hot “cités” where the police do not go by night and where unemployment has hit the roof. It’s also where Nemmouche’s two aunts happen to live. I spotted the two slim middle-aged women a bit earlier when Nemmouche entered the cage, briefly looked at the public, and winked at them, a sign to which they answered with a weak smile and a pale gesture of the hand. Since then, they’ve been visibly at pains to understand the point of the session, or what their nephew’s lawyer, Apolin Pepiezep, a 40-year-old African from the Ivory Coast, was talking about.
Back in the courtyard to wait for the police cars to leave at the end of the hearing, I can see there’s definitely something going on between them and Pepiezep. They’re actually arguing. “We’ve been trying to send clothes to Mehdi but you wouldn’t let us!” says one. “You forbid us to have any contact with him!” “Look,” he answers aggressively, somewhat disdainfully, “you understand what you want. But I never forbid you anything. He just doesn’t want to speak to you, that’s all!” Then he turns his back and, leaving the aunts at a loss, departs to speak to the press.
Still from surveillance-camera footage recorded inside the Jewish Museum in Brussels. (Belgian Federal Police)
When asked by the judge at the end of the hearing if he had anything to add, Nemmouche stood up to emphasize that point again—“I’ll answer your questions only when I have guaranteed my rights not be put into Israel’s hands”—I saw the two little aunts totally overwhelmed as much by the purpose as by the fierce militant mechanic voice with which Nemmouche was suddenly expressing himself. Here, at last, was a glimpse of the brutality radiating from his official pictures and from the surveillance video.
Three minutes’ walk outside the tribunal building, at a terrace under
the shade of the nearby gardens surrounding the famous castle, I meet
the aunts for coffee. In, of all places, Versailles! Its statues of
ancient royal heroes, its perfume stores, its market gardeners, its
homogeneous ethnicity: What could be farthest from that quiet bourgeois
country-like luxury than these two women? Leïla, at 50, works in a
packaging factory, and Aïcha is unemployed. Roubaix, where they were
born and raised, was once the capital of the working class, the “Mecca
of socialism,” was its nickname. It is now the poorest city in France—and the Mecca of French Islam.
But neither one nor the other of these women seem ostentatiously religious. In fact, they’re not even Arabic but Kabyle, Berber from Algeria. More surprisingly, they’re also Harkis. During the Algerian war of independence the word, derived from the Arabic Haraka (“movement”), described the Algerians who fought with the French against the Liberation National Front. Once the war was over, France rewarded them with disgraceful politics: The Harkis not left behind to be slaughtered were parked for decades in internment camps—in fact, the very same that had been used for Jews in the 1930s—and left there until the mid 1970s to be guarded by members of the ex-colonial administration.
Once they got out of the camps, though, and despite the daily racism and petty humiliation they had to face, the Harkis became the more silent and integrated into the Muslim population. Or should I say more resigned? They had no place to go back to—and, in the ’70s, would have been killed as traitors if they had tried to return to Algeria.
Because the family settled in France before the war, it seems Nemmouche’s aunts never knew the internment camps. Leïla is the smaller, with short hair around a round face, while Aïcha has a low jaw, a long nose, and long curly black hair. Despite their differences, they share the same lack of makeup, the same lack of color on the skin of their thin bodies, the same lack of words as they try to make sense of that overwhelming reality: Their nephew being charged with assassinations in the context of a terrorist enterprise. And they also share the same lack of any real rebellion on their pallid faces, which express nothing but the banal sufferings and misfortunes of the poor: “Do not say we’re Harkis if you write anything in France, we do not want to be shamed by our neighbors.” “He’s nice kid, Mehdi, he’s a nice kid, how could he end up doing such a thing, if it’s him?”
And as they deliver for me the long, gray, sad commonplace that is, for them, Nemmouche’s story, I can’t help wondering if it’s not against that—the excruciating boredom of such a narrative—that he first rebelled: his birth in April 1985 to a small shopkeepker in Roubaix who never recognized him (and who still lives there today) and a somewhat depressive mother—Leïla and Aïcha’s sister, whose name is never pronounced and who seems to have been “a bar girl,” as Souleifa Badaoui, the lawyer, would later tell me. (And it is true you could meet a lot of girls like that, back in the early 1980s in France, rebellious kids fleeing from conservative immigrant families, hating themselves for doing so, searching for a place to land and be accepted and finding nothing but bars, and the men in the bars.) The Vasseurs, a foster family, sheltered Nemmouche in a little village near Roubaix when he was 3, at the social services agency request, who judged his mother unfit for the task of motherhood. “We always wanted to take him, we always insisted,” says Aïcha, “but her mother would never let us.” Paid by the state for doing the job, the Vasseurs raised Nemmouche between three and five other children of which he was the sole “Maghrébin.” And his grandmother at La Bourgogne finally succeeded in taking him in 2002, when he was 17. He never kept contact afterward with the Vasseurs. His first conviction came two years later, in 2004, two months of jail for violence; then in 2006 for driving without a license; then in 2007 again for rebellion. “Inform me if I must do some approach to meet you for I am now incarcerated,” he writes to Souleifa Badaoui after a series of sentencings that same year, this time for robberies and hold-ups, for which he served a total of five years. He was released from prison on Dec. 4, 2012. Three weeks later, on the 31st, he left for Syria.
***
There is little doubt that Nemmouche radicalized himself in prison. Karim Mokhtari, who was sentenced to 10 years in the mid-1990s after he tried to rob a drug trafficker and accidentally killed him with a shotgun, reveals in his book Redemption how easy it is to be approached by Islamists there. “In prison,” he told me, “there are two things you catch as soon as you get there. One is how lonely you are, and the other is how lonely you don’t want to be. So you look in the courtyard and you ask yourself, to which group do I belong? There are the junkies, there are the dealers, there are the rapists, and so forth. And there are the religious. Cleaner than the rest, they also seem to suffer less, they take care of each other. I watched them for a week, then the improvised Imam came to me to ask if I were a Muslim and I said no, not yet, and he introduced me to someone freshly converted—a European—who taught me the first rudiments of Arabic, the first prayers and rituals. And it went on from there.”
After the conversion rate started to turn the group into a force of some sort, the administration decided out of precaution to dismantle the religious group: The imam was transferred. He came to Mokhtari’s cell, as Mokhtari told me: “ ‘Listen’ he said, ‘I’m being transferred and I must leave. But you, your mission as a Muslim is to kill. Kill miscreants anywhere you find them. You need to keep in touch for that even when you’re out so do it. And if you need military training, we have places for that too.’ ”
“That’s when I realized what I was going into,” Mokhtari said. He was the son of a violent mixed marriage, and his French mother got divorced and remarried to a racist Frenchman who lived on welfare and off robbery. Still, as I listen to Nemmouche’s aunts, I wonder: What’s really relevant in that story, what explains anything? Mokhtari started to get regularly beaten by the man, who also woke him up at 4.a.m. on Saturday nights to take him along with him on his robberies of villas and apartments while Karim kept watch. But despite an incomparably more violent background than Nemmouche endured, Karim Mokhtari never turned to terrorism. Today 36, he manages different associations and groups that specialize in the reintegration of detainees and runs psychological sessions to help the wards: If Muslims make up roughly 12 percent of the French population, in prison their number amount to more than 60 percent of the national total of detainees, making Islam the first religion of prison life. According to the political scientist Gilles Kepel, “The main prison ward union F.O. Pénitentiaire thinks it has no choice today but to negotiate with Islamists if they want to have a chance to keep a semblance of peace. The same way they used to do with the mob.”
“We French have a specific problem with Syria,” argues Raphaël Glucksmann, the son of the philosopher André Glucksmann, who works on human rights issues. “We’ve been arguing since the beginning of the Syrian conflict that it was a just war. That Assad’s a butcher and should be disposed of. So, in that sense, Syria’s a place that legitimizes every aspiration to jihad. If you put aside the anti-Semitic element, what those youngsters are doing is actually in accordance to our own analysis. They have the courage to do what we do not dare to do. But you can’t put aside the anti-Semitic element. So, we want to help the Syrian opposition, and at the same time we’ve got to treat as potential terrorists the French people that act accordingly!”
According to Gilles Kepel, the Syrian momentum is but the latest episode of a more general renewal—“a postmodern Salafist Jihad of the poor,” as he calls it, as theorized by a Syrian engineer named Abu Mussab al-Suri, who trained in France and has written many thousands of pages that have been posted on the Internet. In those pages, al-Suri argues in favor of training young Europeans from migrant backgrounds to be later sent back to Europe to be sacrificed to the greater cause of jihad. Jewish secular places like museums or schools—not synagogues—are listed among the first targets—with the goal of deliberately victimizing Muslims, creating ethnic “Islamophobic” conflicts in Europe—and later on, religious war. It is, interestingly enough, the very same project that could be heard in the 1990s in some circles of the French extreme right. Why France has become so sensitive and porous to al-Suri’s ideas is another story.
***
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/178958/frances-toxic-hate-1-nemmouch
But neither one nor the other of these women seem ostentatiously religious. In fact, they’re not even Arabic but Kabyle, Berber from Algeria. More surprisingly, they’re also Harkis. During the Algerian war of independence the word, derived from the Arabic Haraka (“movement”), described the Algerians who fought with the French against the Liberation National Front. Once the war was over, France rewarded them with disgraceful politics: The Harkis not left behind to be slaughtered were parked for decades in internment camps—in fact, the very same that had been used for Jews in the 1930s—and left there until the mid 1970s to be guarded by members of the ex-colonial administration.
Once they got out of the camps, though, and despite the daily racism and petty humiliation they had to face, the Harkis became the more silent and integrated into the Muslim population. Or should I say more resigned? They had no place to go back to—and, in the ’70s, would have been killed as traitors if they had tried to return to Algeria.
Because the family settled in France before the war, it seems Nemmouche’s aunts never knew the internment camps. Leïla is the smaller, with short hair around a round face, while Aïcha has a low jaw, a long nose, and long curly black hair. Despite their differences, they share the same lack of makeup, the same lack of color on the skin of their thin bodies, the same lack of words as they try to make sense of that overwhelming reality: Their nephew being charged with assassinations in the context of a terrorist enterprise. And they also share the same lack of any real rebellion on their pallid faces, which express nothing but the banal sufferings and misfortunes of the poor: “Do not say we’re Harkis if you write anything in France, we do not want to be shamed by our neighbors.” “He’s nice kid, Mehdi, he’s a nice kid, how could he end up doing such a thing, if it’s him?”
And as they deliver for me the long, gray, sad commonplace that is, for them, Nemmouche’s story, I can’t help wondering if it’s not against that—the excruciating boredom of such a narrative—that he first rebelled: his birth in April 1985 to a small shopkeepker in Roubaix who never recognized him (and who still lives there today) and a somewhat depressive mother—Leïla and Aïcha’s sister, whose name is never pronounced and who seems to have been “a bar girl,” as Souleifa Badaoui, the lawyer, would later tell me. (And it is true you could meet a lot of girls like that, back in the early 1980s in France, rebellious kids fleeing from conservative immigrant families, hating themselves for doing so, searching for a place to land and be accepted and finding nothing but bars, and the men in the bars.) The Vasseurs, a foster family, sheltered Nemmouche in a little village near Roubaix when he was 3, at the social services agency request, who judged his mother unfit for the task of motherhood. “We always wanted to take him, we always insisted,” says Aïcha, “but her mother would never let us.” Paid by the state for doing the job, the Vasseurs raised Nemmouche between three and five other children of which he was the sole “Maghrébin.” And his grandmother at La Bourgogne finally succeeded in taking him in 2002, when he was 17. He never kept contact afterward with the Vasseurs. His first conviction came two years later, in 2004, two months of jail for violence; then in 2006 for driving without a license; then in 2007 again for rebellion. “Inform me if I must do some approach to meet you for I am now incarcerated,” he writes to Souleifa Badaoui after a series of sentencings that same year, this time for robberies and hold-ups, for which he served a total of five years. He was released from prison on Dec. 4, 2012. Three weeks later, on the 31st, he left for Syria.
***
There is little doubt that Nemmouche radicalized himself in prison. Karim Mokhtari, who was sentenced to 10 years in the mid-1990s after he tried to rob a drug trafficker and accidentally killed him with a shotgun, reveals in his book Redemption how easy it is to be approached by Islamists there. “In prison,” he told me, “there are two things you catch as soon as you get there. One is how lonely you are, and the other is how lonely you don’t want to be. So you look in the courtyard and you ask yourself, to which group do I belong? There are the junkies, there are the dealers, there are the rapists, and so forth. And there are the religious. Cleaner than the rest, they also seem to suffer less, they take care of each other. I watched them for a week, then the improvised Imam came to me to ask if I were a Muslim and I said no, not yet, and he introduced me to someone freshly converted—a European—who taught me the first rudiments of Arabic, the first prayers and rituals. And it went on from there.”
After the conversion rate started to turn the group into a force of some sort, the administration decided out of precaution to dismantle the religious group: The imam was transferred. He came to Mokhtari’s cell, as Mokhtari told me: “ ‘Listen’ he said, ‘I’m being transferred and I must leave. But you, your mission as a Muslim is to kill. Kill miscreants anywhere you find them. You need to keep in touch for that even when you’re out so do it. And if you need military training, we have places for that too.’ ”
“That’s when I realized what I was going into,” Mokhtari said. He was the son of a violent mixed marriage, and his French mother got divorced and remarried to a racist Frenchman who lived on welfare and off robbery. Still, as I listen to Nemmouche’s aunts, I wonder: What’s really relevant in that story, what explains anything? Mokhtari started to get regularly beaten by the man, who also woke him up at 4.a.m. on Saturday nights to take him along with him on his robberies of villas and apartments while Karim kept watch. But despite an incomparably more violent background than Nemmouche endured, Karim Mokhtari never turned to terrorism. Today 36, he manages different associations and groups that specialize in the reintegration of detainees and runs psychological sessions to help the wards: If Muslims make up roughly 12 percent of the French population, in prison their number amount to more than 60 percent of the national total of detainees, making Islam the first religion of prison life. According to the political scientist Gilles Kepel, “The main prison ward union F.O. Pénitentiaire thinks it has no choice today but to negotiate with Islamists if they want to have a chance to keep a semblance of peace. The same way they used to do with the mob.”
‘You, your mission as a Muslim is to kill. Kill miscreants anywhere you find them.’
According to official French estimates, some 800 youngsters are on
their way to Syria or, like Nemmouche, already back. Some of them are
from a poor migrant background, some have done time, sure, but others
just converted to Islam from middle-class French Catholic families,
including an increasing number of teenage girls. What they do have in
common, is that they return—when they do return—trained and, often
enough, armed. The issue is so serious that a new law presented at the
National Assembly July 8 proposes to forbid foreign travel
to anyone suspected of participation in future terrorist activity. But
how does one know this, exactly? And if a government forbids its
citizens to travel in one country, where does it stop after that?“We French have a specific problem with Syria,” argues Raphaël Glucksmann, the son of the philosopher André Glucksmann, who works on human rights issues. “We’ve been arguing since the beginning of the Syrian conflict that it was a just war. That Assad’s a butcher and should be disposed of. So, in that sense, Syria’s a place that legitimizes every aspiration to jihad. If you put aside the anti-Semitic element, what those youngsters are doing is actually in accordance to our own analysis. They have the courage to do what we do not dare to do. But you can’t put aside the anti-Semitic element. So, we want to help the Syrian opposition, and at the same time we’ve got to treat as potential terrorists the French people that act accordingly!”
According to Gilles Kepel, the Syrian momentum is but the latest episode of a more general renewal—“a postmodern Salafist Jihad of the poor,” as he calls it, as theorized by a Syrian engineer named Abu Mussab al-Suri, who trained in France and has written many thousands of pages that have been posted on the Internet. In those pages, al-Suri argues in favor of training young Europeans from migrant backgrounds to be later sent back to Europe to be sacrificed to the greater cause of jihad. Jewish secular places like museums or schools—not synagogues—are listed among the first targets—with the goal of deliberately victimizing Muslims, creating ethnic “Islamophobic” conflicts in Europe—and later on, religious war. It is, interestingly enough, the very same project that could be heard in the 1990s in some circles of the French extreme right. Why France has become so sensitive and porous to al-Suri’s ideas is another story.
***
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/178958/frances-toxic-hate-1-nemmouch
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