Alain de Benoist on Charlie Hebdo

From Greg Johnson’s translation of Alain de Benoist’s comment on the Charlie Hebdo affair:

Here we are dealing with attacks planned in France by individuals radicalized more or less independently. They went gradually from delinquency to jihadism, but they are usually failures at it. They have great composure, know how to use weapons, and are completely indifferent to the lives of others. But still they are amateurs, bungling provocateurs, like the Kouachi brothers who decided to slaughter a magazine staff “to avenge the prophet,” but went to the wrong address, left clues everywhere, had no exit strategy, and forget their ID in the car they simply abandoned. Unpredictable bunglers, which makes them all the more dangerous.

Hard to argue it was a false flag.

It is obviously necessary to wage war on these people by all means necessary. But talking about “total war” does not mean much. The jihadists (or issuers of fatwas) are as representative of Islam as the Ku Klux Klan is representative of Christianity.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I expect to hear from MSNBC, Obama, et al.

Moreover, it is not the jihadists, but Westerners who first raised the specter of the “clash of civilizations” after working to destabilize the entire Middle East and to eliminate all the heads of Arab-Muslism states, from Saddam Hussein to Gaddafi, who had set up roadblocks against radical Islamism. The need to fight against the immediate consequences should not obscure reflection on the root causes.

Right, but one would think that if one is talking about root causes, immigration should also be mentioned. These guys were born in France. It would be so easy given all the jihadist attacks in France for him to say that living together is just not working out. No more immigration. Muslims out of the West.

On April 26, 1999, the leaders of Charlie Hebdo carried cartons to the Department of the Interior containing 173,700 signatures calling for a ban of the National Front. It was a matter of defending freedom of expression! Manuel Valls said that “[Eric] Zemmour’s book does not deserve to be read,” while another minister asked without shame that “TV shows and newspaper columns cease to harbor such remarks.” To say nothing of the Dieudonné case.

That said, let’s be fair: Among those praising freedom of expression when it comes to Zemmour, there are unfortunately very few who are willing to extend it to their opponents. “Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently” (Rosa Luxemburg), which means that we have to defend it even when it benefits those whom we loathe. But that is precisely what the dominant ideology refuses to do, here and in the United States, where the First Amendment allows anyone to say or write what he wants, but where the nonconformist views are even more marginalized than they are in France. Just as the right to work has never provided anyone a job, the right to speak does not guarantee the opportunity to be heard!

Exactly.