It took three incidents for the machine to fire up. It is a machine that produces fear, and which does so by taking short-cuts, as if everything was linked together; from Islam in France to the Islamism of Islamic State, from Syria to a police station in Joué-lès-Tours in west-central France, from Joué-lès-Tours to Dijon, where a car was driven into pedestrians in the city-centre, from Dijon to Glasgow, where a bin lorry ploughed into pedestrians along a crowded city-centre shopping street, and from Glasgow to Nantes, in north-west France, where a van was driven into a busy Christmas market. A global threat, a “war” even, according to the affable doyen of French novelists, Jean d’Ormesson.
As for French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, he took a lead on the tragic series of events, by announcing a red security alert shortly before the Christmas market horror in Nantes had occured. “Never have we known such a large danger regarding terrorism,” he said, speaking during a visit to Montpellier, in southern France, on Monday.
Gosh! Never? So Mohammed Merah, the 23 year-old Islamist Toulouse gunman who killed seven people and wounded five others in March 2012, was a less radical danger? Was 9/11 peanuts? The October 1980 bombing of a synagogue on the rue Copernic in central Paris, which left four dead, was perhaps anecdotal? What about the grenade and gun attack on the Jo Goldenberg restaurant in Paris, on the rue des Rosiers, in 1982, which left six dead and 22 wounded, or the bomb attack on the Saint-Michel metro station in Paris in 1995, when eight people died and another 117 were wounded? Not forgetting the deadly 1986 bombings against targets in the French capital, including the Champs-Élysées and the rue de Rennes. This permanent presence of terrorism carried out in the name of diverse causes was just a pale danger in comparison to what we are faced with today, relayed by rolling news stations?
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The guy who attacked the police station in Joué-lès-Tours with a knife is as dangerous as a Boeing flown into the World Trade Center? The man with a long history of mental illness who drove into bystanders in Dijon is supposed to be connected with a worldwide plot because he shouted ‘God is Great’ in Arabic? Then there’s the driver of the van who rammed into Christmas shoppers in Nantes, a man also on the margins of society, marked by misery and alcoholism, whose name is not Mohammed but Sebastien. Did his mad act, after which he stabbed himself repeatedly, reinforce the certitude that this is a moment of absolute peril?
There is apparently no connection between these three tragic events in France, but there is a collective anguish which links them like a spider’s web, and which politicians and the media only amplify in trying to sweep it away - unless they are actually making best of it to protect and feed themselves.
Thus it is that the far-right Front National party, stamping its feet, has decided that these recent events are the result of terrorism and nothing else, in much the same way that its founder and leader Jean-Marie Le Pen once argued that AIDS was transmitted by tears and mosquitoes. Meanwhile, the government held a crisis meeting on Tuesday, while also explaining that there was no crisis, for Manuel Valls ended up reassuring France by announcing that these violent acts were unrelated, but while also declaring that the Vigipirate national security programme was being strengthened.
Speaking on Tuesday during a visit to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, the French Atlantic Ocean territory that lies off the coast of Canada, President François Hollande declared that “there is but one event that can be clearly regarded as a terrorist act, that of Joué-lès-Tours, but we are fully in action and at the same time we want to show that life continues”.
What is the gift these Father Christmas’s offer the country? Is it the comfort of feeling sheltered and able to enjoy the festive season, or, rather, fear - one that sees people rally around leaders and which boosts their importance and audience.
That is for each one to decide, and a happy festive season to all!
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse