France's fight for sovereignty against terrorism

France is realising that its problem with Islamist terrorism has metastasized. On Thursday there was yet another attack, this time in Nice. Two people were beheaded and several people were stabbed near Nice Cathedral. There were also reports of the stabbing of a French Consulate guard in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia by a Saudi citizen.

Samuel Paty, a high-school teacher, was the first victim two weeks ago. He showed cartoons of Muhammad featured in the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, in class. The cartoons had been given as a reason for a massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in 2015. Paty  was teaching about freedom of thought and expression and the current threats to these cardinal values of the French republic. For his trouble he was attacked in the street, in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, stabbed multiple times and beheaded by a Chechen terrorist with links to ISIS.

The suspect, Abdoullakh Abouyezidvitch A., tweeted after the attack "In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most merciful, (...) to Macron, the leader of the infidels, I executed one of your hellhounds who dared to belittle Muhammad, calm his fellow human beings before a harsh punishment is inflicted on you." A few weeks before that on September 25, Zaheer Hassan Mehmood attacked and seriously injured two people with a cleaver. Mehmood posted a video on social media just prior to the attack, aiming to justify his actions. He said he wanted to kill people working for Charlie Hebdo because it published cartoons of Muhammad.

Since January 2015, 59 Islamist terror attacks have been thwarted according to French security services. France has borne the brunt of Islamist terror since the rise of ISIS in 2014, but its problems with Islamist extremism go back much further than this. As French Islam expert Gilles Kepel argues, the attacks in 2015 on Charlie Hebdo in January and Paris in November, and in Nice in July 2016, were the violent culmination of a decades-long growth in extremist Salafi and Islamist groups, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and funded by Saudi Arabia and Gulf States.

These organizations feed the disillusionment and grievances of young men and women in France's banlieues. These young people are taught to hate France and its culture as a colonial and anti-Muslim oppressor, practicing at home the same brutality it did in its colonies, an anti-Muslim genocide supposedly imminent. Never mind that this view is detached from reality.

As Petter Nesser argues, the result of the radicalization of communities over decades through the construction of an extremist architecture comprising groups foreign and domestic is that the French security services now number 20,o00 individuals on its Fiche S threat list, 4,000 of whom are considered dangerous. The majority of these individuals are not seen as constituting an imminent threat and are therefore unwatched. However, as Britain learnt in attack after attack in 2017, those deemed low-risk can still leave the streets covered in blood and bodies, the air filled with the silence of the dead and the screams of the dying.

It is in these grim circumstances that French president Emmanuel Macron gave a landmark speech against the threat of Islamism and Islamist separatism back at the beginning of October. In it he warned against the growth of separate communities of Muslims in France, where extremist ideas about the state, religion, gender relations and freedom of thought and speech grow to fruition. He called out the growing reality of hard-line Salafist teachings and Islamist ideology. He argued that this creates a militant culture that holds its own laws above that of France, which "often results in the creation of a counter-society." He called for stricter control of religious schooling, banning home-schooling and banning foreign funding and staffing of mosques.

As radicalization and extremism expert Liam Duffy writes, "Macron's campaign against Islamism … is better understood as a battle for sovereignty than as counterterrorism, an effort to reclaim the 'territories conquered by Islamism.'" Macron wants to liberate "French Islam from foreign influence" as he and his government see this as a form of political subversion aimed against the sovereignty of the French state itself.

President Erdogan of Turkey, for example, has long called for European Muslims to vote and act in accordance with Islamic rather than secular European mores, and has recently stepped up his interference and provocations towards Macron as the embodiment of the Republic. Pakistan's prime minister accused Macron of attacking Islam, and Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad argued that Muslims have a right to be angry and to "kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past." France is responding to attacks on its very nationhood and culture and is now portrayed as the aggressor. Psychopathology is expressed in psychological projection.

The fact that these attacks and subversion are grounded in a form of religious fundamentalism, albeit twisted for ideological ends, makes this force all the more potent. The willingness to kill and die for God, paradise and the Ummah are goals whose attainment has a meaning that, although repugnant in outcome to most, is bone deep for those raised in these militant milieus. Lone-wolf attackers are a myth, and these terrorists are nurtured in communities on fire with rage at France, who they see as the prime representative of an oppressive, anti-Muslim infidel West.

Macron is not simply resisting the odd terror attack here and there, horrific though these are. He is fighting to save the integrity of the French state against an extremist worldview totalitarian in its ends and homicidal in its means. The attacks on him by Islamists at home and abroad are only met in their enmity by the cowardice of those on the left who excuse them. We can only hope Macron succeeds.