Alexandra Laigl-Lavastine: "Faced with Islamism, some" progressive "intellectuals are dangerous"

Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine is a philosopher and historian of ideas.She published in Grasset the lost thought, Islamism, populism, anti -Semitism: essay on the suicidal inclinations of Europe.

INTERVIEW BY

ALEXANDRE DEVECCHIO@AlexDevecchio

Figarovox: In your latest book, lost thought, written mainly before Charlie's trauma, you consider that we have not taken the measure of the January attacks.Events are tragically right.Are these new attacks surprised you?

ALEXANDRA LAIGNEL-LAVASTINE: C'est plutôt l'étonnement général qui me surprend. Un intellectuel musulman laïc et démocrate me lançait il y a quelques jours: «Les intellectuels progressistes européens se comportent à l'égard des islamistes comme des collabos!». Sévère, mais juste. Jusqu'à présent, les tenants du politiquement correct ont de loin préféré avoir tort avec les islamo-fascistes qu'avoir raison avec les réalistes. Et ce, au nom d'un antifascisme hors de saison, ce qui constitue le comble du paradoxe! Après avoir trop longtemps baissé les bras face au communautarisme et à l'islamisme par crainte de se voir traité d'«islamophobes», il y aurait urgence à ce que nous redescendions de la planète mars pour faire place au réel. Et au courage.

What does the real world teach us? That an open war was declared to the Western world and its most precious, therefore the most fragile humanist and universalists. That this green plague is now planetary and that we are probably only at the beginning. That this war is waged on our soil and that the enemy, today, is both interior as it is external. We knew that the jihadist threat was at its height in France - or rather, we should have understood it. Since January, several attacks have been thwarted, some in a preparatory phase, others of accuracy. Many dormant jihadist cells have been reactivated and we are also aware of mass crimes daily perpetrated by the new barbarians on the vast territories they control. What more do we need? Why this strange amazement, beyond the obviously justified horror that these new attacks arouse, after those of Merah in 2012, of Nemmouche in 2014, after the signs "death to the Jews!" From summer, Daesh's serial beheadings this fall, followed by atrocious killings of the beginning of the year?

Yes, but precisely, why this difficulty in hitting the threat?Are we disarmed intellectually and morally?

If we take a little field, I see several reasons for this incredible blindness, starting with the fact that the spirits are poisoned by more than a decade of "treason of clerics".Elites passed by mistresses in the positive and methodical art of dying your eyes in the face of the rise of the most aggressive and the most retrograde Muslim fundamentalism, on the grounds that evil - hatred, terror, obscurantism - cannot ariseFrom what they believed to be the camp of good, that of the ancient damned of the earth.

This binary and rancid catechism, which dates back to the Third World of the 1960s and which consists in laziness a European world necessarily guilty of a Muslim world on an ontochently innocent, is completely obsolete. All the enlightened Muslims, whose speech we relay very little when it is a question of marrying their fight as yesterday that of the dissidents of the Soviet bloc, however repeat it all day long. But no matter for our self-righteous service, very present in the media, who preferred to stick to a curious practice of magic thought by prohibiting the facts all unwelcome in the universe of their ideological belief. In this, yes, they worked on our intellectual and moral disarmament. This cowardice, coupled with the horrifying loss of the most basic lucidity, reminds me of the word of Yves Montand about his generation, fascinated by Stalinism: "We were dangerous and idiots".

"Dangerous and idiots"?

With a little honesty, there are many intellectuals which, in France, would be well inspired to appropriate this self -critical observation.I would even add an appendix: not content with having become "dangerous and idiots" since September 11, 2001, our "beautiful minds", particularly numerous on the left, also distinguished themselves by their unfathomable cowardice.Indeed, what is this irresponsibility which, for years, has pushed so many opinion makers - journalists, political, virtuous sociologists - to locate themselves so in denial, to be unable to put their watch to thehour, call a cat a cat and

To admit that it is radical Islam which, lately, has a little tend to arm the arms of the assassins and not the hordes of raging Buddhists?

Let us not forget that between 6 and the 10th, we suddenly moved from the thesis, comfortable but false, of "lonely wolves" - and other "lost children of jihad", formulas everywhere used in heart -, to theofficial recognition of a planetary scourge.Let us not forget that Edwy Plenel was still talking about "said Islamist" terrorism in his recent book, entitled for Muslims.Or how to mix in the same postcolonial condescension, terrorists and their tortured.And we could multiply the examples endlessly.Besides, on Friday, June 26 in the evening, the banners "Another lone wolf?"registered Derechef on our television screens.Dizzying regression.

The global intimidation device by "Islamophobia" - intimidation being characteristic of the fascist mentality - did the rest: anyone who did not share this irenic vision was treated as a racist or, more fashionable, "neo-reactionary".Brisons the fire warnings and the fire will turn off itself.This is roughly the toxic state of mind that has dominated for years in France and prevents us, even today, from hitting the extent of the danger.We do not readjust its mental categories overnight.More broadly, it seems to me that Europeans in good faith have exorcised the nightmare of the wars of religion for so long that they find it difficult to imagine its return.However, we always struggle to see what we struggle to conceive.

Did we fall back into the pre-Charlie immediately after?

It is clear that the start will have been very short duration. "Spirit of 11-January, are you there?", Was we wondering a month after the killings. All alibis were already good for thinking about something else. How has such a serious event, carried by the radically new and explosive international context that we know, has been able to lead to such miserable results? To this degree of absence of self, we hesitated between turning the table or overthrowing it. Because now we quickly had to count with the ghosts. They were first believed in remorse and shame, those who had not found any hard enough terms to condemn, among other prowess, the manifesto of the twelve published by Charlie Hebdo in March 2006. A salutary text that stated Without detours which was already dying, namely that after fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, Islamism is a religious totalitarianism that endorses democracy in danger.

But no. It will barely take a day or two to the strikes to re-emerge from the beyond. And to explain what in their twisted rhetoric? That Islamism is not a cancer that proliferates on the evils which ravage the Muslim world, on its dramatic backwardness and on its own failures, but that it proceeds from a very bad West who does not like Muslims. That the real authors of the crimes of January would not be dark apocalyptic killers, but all the "Islamophobes" of France and Navarre ... At least, they were not going to dare to howl, as in the aftermath of the crimes of Merah, at " Reinforcement of the security arsenal ”? Minimum decency requires. Well if. A week after amazement and horror, these false minds that have become literally crazy already warned, not of course against jihadist barbarism, but against ... "the triumph of the party of order". We will learn in stride that it is the National Front which, by dint of "playing on hatred", would be indirectly responsible for carnage. President François Hollande even put a layer in his speech from the Pantheon by evoking, in a highly confusionist plural, "the duty of vigilance in the face of the hatred of democracy" - that is to say three clichés in a proposal. A feat. Or how to cancel the courageous speech by Manuel Valls of January 13. We rub our eyes.

Le livre d'Emmanuel Todd,Qui est Charlie?, vous paraît-il représentatif de cette dérive?

Yes, even emblematic.We went from hibernation to perversion, and from perversion to inversion.Above all, no healthy spirit could have predicted, in its most pessimistic prophecies, the success of a thesis transforming, by a sinister magic round, the murderers into "victims" of racism.Nor imagine that so many microphones were going to be so eagerly tense.So this is that with this bestseller in May, it was no longer a question of fighting radical Islamism, but "radical secularism";And now the worst, to follow Todd, would have consisted less in bloody massacres than in the odious "totalitarian" demonstration (I let you appreciate oxymoron) and naturally "Islamophobic" of 11-January ... in truth, a simple"No" opposed in a massive, spontaneous and responsible manner to barbarians who had just attacked an absolute common civilizational minimum.

Clearly, the crazy spiral of denial did not diminish, as we could have expected: it strangely worsened.We think of the replica of a character of Skakespeare: "I have so long spinned in the error that it is easier for me to continue in this path than to stop on the way".At this level of unreason, we wonder what speech will be entitled to us in a few days ... Let us expect the intelligence law, adopted in May and that it was fashionable to judge "liberticide" inParisian salons, be held for the great culprit of the last attacks and that it would have been better not to vote it so as not to offend "Muslims".In this regard, I note that for incomprehensible reasons, the Republican "hawks" voted against the far left.The cowardice today crosses the entire political spectrum.

You specify in your book that you have been living in 93 for thirty years.What do the Muslims say themselves that you rub shoulders with every day?

You do not imagine how much "normal" Muslims can no longer of this "padamalgam"

absurd-and now criminogenic-which takes the place of ready-to-think of part of our elites.Many of them do not even understand it: "The truth has never stigmatized anyone," said my Tunisian neighbor in January.He added: "On the contrary, it had to be said and that the enemy was finally designated so that we no longer felt to shame the walls of shame".In short, a relief for the majority of them, armed with common sense that we would like to find in our enarchs.As for the local young people, shot at the websites of Dieudonné or Soral, we were of course dealing with a "Zionist plot" the next morning ...

Do public policies conducted since January seem to you up to the task?

The problem comes from what we are fifteen years behind ignition.The Vigipirate plan is essential, but do we know that our courageous soldiers, devoid of handguns, patrol war rifles unusable in urban areas at the risk of provoking carnage?Do we know that in the 93, some town halls gave a few days ago to instruct their municipal police to no longer verbalize women wearing a full veil hiding their faces, even a law was voted and the policeis in principle responsible for enforcing it?Ramadan obliges, no doubt ... that the same local elected officials keep dressing Salafists as associative activists for fear of losing the next elections?This means that our capitulation in the open countryside has persisted far beyond 11-January.And we are getting back to pretend to wonder on all the sets how we got there!

You return back to back the rise of Islamism and that of populism.But populism respects the rule of democratic game while Muslim fundamentalists sows terror and death.Do you not fall, in your turn, in the politically correct that you denounce?

No. When I say that we have a concern to do for the future of Europe-taken between those who no longer think by dint of thought and those who no longer see the limits of poor-thought without thinking of badness- , the logic that governs my reasoning is that of the generation, not the back-to-back dismissal. I mean that by dint of persisting in an obtuse "padamalgam", by giving Islamism the clause of the most excused totalitarian and massacreous ideology, we do the campaign of Marine Le Pen every day , which could, at this rate, go to the beach until the next presidential elections. By refusing to take charge of identity anxieties, cultural insecurity and the feeling of abandonment expressed by more of the majority of Europeans, left and right republican abandon the world to populists. For their greatest happiness and for our greatest misfortune to all. This attitude is suicidal and the outcome will be catastrophic because it is these new training courses which, for sure, will take the implementation of all our cowardice.

Indeed, it is not the establishment of Sharia law that threatens in Europe in brief or medium maturity, but a "heritage populism" all the more presentable since it has skillfully revamped. It would be desirable, there too, to open an eye because these mutant parties began to prosper on the whole of the old continent, as we have just noticed in Denmark-but do we really notice it? In this, the politically correct has not ceased, lately, to feed the politically abject - largely by reaction and by exasperation. It is in this sense that in my eyes, they now make common cause. It seems to me that there is however a boulevard between angelizing xenophilia and demonizing xenophobia, between the strategy of burial and the apocalypse of the "great replacement". It would be high time to borrow it. Unless we secretly prefer the return of a good old "filthy" old-fashioned, which would save our good consciences as exhausting mental contortions in the face of this Islamo-fascism who does not fit. This would in any case be the objective that we can not do better.