Terror in France

The Rise of Jihad in the West

Gilles Kepel, Antoine Jardin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400884643
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The virulent new brand of Islamic extremism threatening the West In November 2015, ISIS terrorists massacred scores of people in Paris with coordinated attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, cafés and restaurants, and the national sports stadium. On Bastille Day in 2016, an ISIS sympathizer drove a truck into crowds of vacationers at the beaches of Nice, and two weeks later an elderly French priest was murdered during morning Mass by two ISIS militants. Here is Gilles Kepel's explosive account of the radicalization of a segment of Muslim youth that led to those attacks—and of the failure of governments in France and across Europe to address it. It is a book everyone in the West must read. Terror in France shows how these atrocities represent a paroxysm of violence that has long been building. The turning point was in 2005, when the worst riots in modern French history erupted in the poor, largely Muslim suburbs of Paris after the accidental deaths of two boys who had been running from the police. The unrest—or "French intifada"—crystallized a new consciousness among young French Muslims. Some have fallen prey to the allure of "war of civilizations" rhetoric in ways never imagined by their parents and grandparents.This is the highly anticipated English edition of Kepel's sensational French bestseller, first published shortly after the Paris attacks. Now fully updated to reflect the latest developments and featuring a new introduction by the author, Terror in France reveals the truth about a virulent new wave of jihadism that has Europe as its main target. Its aim is to divide European societies from within by instilling fear, provoking backlash, and achieving the ISIS dream—shared by Europe's Far Right—of separating Europe's growing Muslim minority community from the rest of its citizens.

PART I

THE INCUBATION PERIOD: FROM CLICHY TO SARKOZY

Between 2005 and 2012, a great change took place in French Islam. Only seven years separated the riots from the massacre perpetrated by Merah, but this very dangerous period was a time of missed opportunities. Paradoxically, the spectacular return of jihadi terrorism to France in March 2012 coincided with the beginning of a campaign that led to the election of François Hollande as president of the Republic. Hollande owed his victory in part to the fact that Muslims voted for him in large numbers. It was followed by National Assembly elections that included, for the first time, more than four hundred candidates from Muslim immigrant families. By seeking election, they declared themselves full-fledged members of the nation.

But alongside this ostensible political integration of a group previously excluded from most social institutions, an underground movement appeared. The third generation of French Islam emerged in 2004–2005, between the Stasi Commission¹ and the riots. This generation sought to free itself from the state supervision promulgated by former Interior minister Pierre Joxe’s Council for Reflection on French Islam (Corif) and its successor, Nicolas Sarkozy’s French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM); it claimed full citizenship, with the same rights enjoyed by Christians and Jews.

The decoupling of this new political citizenship from its fragile social bases, added to a fractured Islamic religious field in France, created favorable conditions for the development of what its advocates call “total” Islam. The latter offers an imaginary alternative solution to the deadlocks in society that is all the more attractive because it manages to absorb, in part, the pre-existing radical utopian ideals of both the left and the right wings. It can also serve as a substitute for them, as is shown by the unprecedented increase in conversions to Islam.

This movement has been accelerated by the changes international jihadism has undergone. In January 2005, the Syrian-Spaniard Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, alias Abu Musab al-Suri, published online The Global Islamic Resistance Call (Da’wat al-muqawamah al-islamiyyah al-’alamiyyah). This 1,600-page manifesto conceived terrorism in Europe as the main vector of the battle against the West and identified the “poorly integrated” younger generation of Muslims as its preferred instrument. This text breaks with al-Qaeda’s previous strategy, in which the leaders assigned agents from the Middle East to carry out attacks on the United States; instead, it gives priority to offensives in European countries, with the intention of fomenting civil wars in order to make them implode.

These ideas slowly matured as young jihadis left Europe to be trained on battlefields in Iraq and then Afghanistan, producing the milieu from which Mohamed Merah emerged. Conversely, the political integration of young French people from Muslim immigrant families was demonstrated by their willingness to vote and run for office in March 2012, at the very time when Merah committed the massacres in Montauban and Toulouse in the name of jihad—and as an enemy of society.

It is this political integration, the key to building a pluralist French society based upon shared values, that is deeply threatened by the emergence of jihadism at its very heart.

¹ A French commission headed by Bernard Stasi that was created in 2003 to reflect on the application of the principle of secularism in France. (Not to be confused with the former East German secret police, also known as the Stasi.)

1

2005, THE PIVOTAL YEAR

The terrible riots that shook France in autumn 2005 and that forced the government to proclaim a state of emergency—the first since the end of the Algerian War and to be seconded as of the January 2015 jihadi attacks (still implemented until the summer of 2017)—took place in the context of deep national and international upheavals.

These riots occurred at a watershed moment when a new generation of young Muslims burst onto the scene, seizing control of the streets for three weeks in the areas where they resided. During the following decade, this irruption would take the form of both participation in elections and the assertion of Islamic identity. Many banlieues voters would register to elect thousands of officials in municipal, general, and regional councils. In the 2012 parliamentary elections, some 400 candidates out of 6,000 would be descendants of postcolonial immigrants; they were seeking, for the first time in history, to embody national sovereignty. Half a dozen of them would be elected members of Parliament, while the same number would become senators.

The riots were a rite of passage corresponding to the transition to a new age of French Islam, in which a generation born and brought up on French territory came to the foreground and shook up the Islamic institutions that had been controlled by earlier generations whose members had migrated to France from the southern or eastern Mediterranean shores and West Africa. This phenomenon occurred at the very time when the international radical Islamic movement began its own mutation. Whereas al-Qaeda had had a pyramidal structure with Osama bin Laden at the top and the United States as a target, as was shown on 9/11, the new approach was structured on a bottom-up, network-based model. It took Europe as its primary target and sought to recruit its “soldiers”among young Muslim Europeans.

During this period, bloody attacks committed in neighboring countries, such as in the United Kingdom in 2005 and when the caricatures of the Prophet were published in a Danish newspaper, had repercussions throughout the world. These events foreshadowed what would happen ten years later on a still greater scale, first in Paris and then in Copenhagen, while ISIS was expanding in Syria and in Iraq and when thousands of young Europeans had already joined the jihad.

The complex connection between the demographic and cultural changes in Europe and the transformations of jihadism are crucial for understanding what happened during the pivotal decade extending from the riots of 2005 to the attacks carried out in 2015 by ISIS.

THE DOUBLE TRIGGER FOR THE RIOTS

The most consequential outcome of the 2005 riots was that the children of postcolonial immigrants emerged as political actors. These young people took control of the streets in the banlieues to which they felt relegated. The three-week spectacle of vandalism, looting, burning of cars, and harassing of police officers sent an existential message to the rest of French society that left deep scars. However, the staging and the location of violence were carefully limited. The participants themselves restricted the violence to a register that was chiefly symbolic: between October 27 and November 18, only four deaths were associated with the events, including those of two teenagers electrocuted when taking refuge in an electrical transformer in Clichy-sous-Bois—the initial catalyst for the revolt. The riots’ consequences were mainly self-destructive and included the burning of the public infrastructure—the housing projects, schools, gymnasiums, post offices, and means of public transportation—of which the rioters were, like other inhabitants of the banlieues, the main users. The incidents spread like wildfire all over France, creating a staggering mass effect for which the media provided both a vector and an echo chamber.

The sensationalist leitmotif Paris is burning, frequently repeated in American newspaper headlines, was false: Paris did not burn. Not only did the police take care to keep the riots outside the capital’s beltway, but the rioters themselves proved incapable of leaving their own neighborhoods, to which the burning was limited. Contrary to what some people claimed, there was no national organization or coordination. This reactive and spontaneous movement was indefatigably fed solely by the vagaries of its own media and television image, its passionate upsurge giving way to an equally rapid subsidence. As was explained by young people from Clichy-Montfermeil, who had been directly involved in the riots or who had witnessed them, the riots were essentially limited to a few hours after dusk. The skirmishes occurred until their instigators got tired and went to bed in the same housing projects where the fighting had taken place—sometimes right below their own windows.

Continuous reporting in the media made it seem that the action was incessant and omnipresent when in fact it was spasmodic and circumscribed. The reality of the riots was largely dissociated from the way it was presented, but the scope of the phenomenon and its excesses led to an emotional interpretation that tended to exacerbate it.

The riots had two triggers. Noting this duality allows us to gauge the gap between the reality of the events and their representation. The first trigger was the death of two teenagers, one of Malian origin and the other Tunisian, who were electrocuted on October 27 when they tried to avoid arrest by hiding in a transformer. But this tragedy led to only a momentary reaction limited to the Clichy-Montfermeil area. The second trigger occurred at nightfall three days later, when stones were thrown at the police and the latter responded with a tear gas grenade that landed at the entrance of a crowded mosque. The sight of the worshipers choking and panicking gave new impetus to a weakening movement and extended it, over the course of a few days, to the majority of the housing projects in banlieues throughout France.

However, the account of the riots produced for general public consumption included only the dramatic episode of the electrocution, whereas it was the gassing of the Bilal mosque that provided the springboard for the events and caused their stupefying spread throughout the country. The tragic deaths of the two teenagers, Bouna Traoré and Zyed Benna, who had not committed the burglary of which they were suspected, supplied the occasion for an emotional response that is easy to understand and identify with and that gave the revolt a moral justification. This justification proved all the more necessary when the damage reached an unprecedented level, with more than nine thousand cars burned in the course of three weeks and tens of millions of dollars in damages incurred—and the majority of the population overcome by fear and indignation.

Less than two years later, in June 2007, the trauma would win the presidency for Nicolas Sarkozy, the hardline minister of the interior during the riots. And yet, as is shown by interviews with participants and witnesses in Clichy-Montfermeil that were published in Banlieue de la République (Gallimard, 2012), it was the “gassing of the mosque”—a normative Grand Narrative of the event that deprived it of its accidental character and turned it into a deliberate offensive launched by the police against Muslim worshipers—that remained the principal vector of the uprising.

In 2005, Islam was becoming an irrepressible marker of identity in the banlieues. The incident at the mosque dramatized the stakes involved at the very time when the younger generation, born in France, was competing with older generations, born and brought up in the Maghreb or the Levant, for the right to speak on behalf of Muslims. By revolting, they positioned themselves as the true defenders of the honor of their families—whose dignity, they claimed, had been deeply wounded by the profanation of their place of worship during their time of collective prayer.

As was explained by Hassan (a community activist who became a local elected official), after the spontaneous riots by the adolescent peers of Bouna and Zyed on Thursday, October 27, 2005, the situation could have been quickly calmed down by the intervention of the “elder brothers,” who organized a silent march on the following Saturday. But then came Sunday, October 30:

Things were turbulent near the Bilal mosque. Tear gas bombs were landing inside the mosque’s enclosure, and there, in fact, it wasn’t only the fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds, but all those who were peaceful! When you see your mother come out of the mosque and collapse, or your grandmother, because it was Ramadan, the sacred month, right in the middle of prayers. In these neighborhoods, the young people feel abandoned, completely neglected. It was that, not the death of Zyed and Bouna, that snowballed all over France!

Nasser, another community activist whom the media asked to speak for the young people in Clichy, and who was later a candidate in the parliamentary elections, described the tempo of the violence:

It was Ramadan, so the young people were eating, I remember, at 6:30 p.m., and then they went to where the action was, for a short time, three or four hours. Then they went home. These young people have other things to do!

Ramadan thus supplied the temporal framework for the two events that triggered the uprising: Bouna and Zyed were hurrying back to their families’ apartments so as to be on time for the breaking of the fast when they were forced to take refuge in the transformer, and the worshipers had assembled in large numbers in the mosque after the ftour (the meal eaten at sundown during Ramadan) in order to perform the sacred month’s extra prayers. But although Ramadan ended on November 2, the riots continued for another two weeks. Thus the social and collective dimensions of the event went beyond the religious context. Nonetheless, the feeling that a sacrilege had been committed by the police not only served as an initial catalyst but also provided, according to Hassan, the rational justification for the violence:

What set everything off was the attack on the mosque. What happened was not right, and what happened afterward still less: there were no apologies, nothing. People said to themselves that in France, a Muslim is worthless these days. A Muslim matters only during elections. Had it been a Jew or a synagogue, the reaction would not have been the same.

Bilal, a pious thirty-year-old computer engineer who was praying in the mosque when the tear gas bomb landed outside, constructed a vivid personal account of the event whose apologetic character seeks to rationalize the revolt’s violence by putting the blame on the police:

The women who were upstairs [in the mosque, in the area reserved for women] were poisoned by the grenades that were thrown outside. I was crying. People said: it’s war. The guns they used to shoot their tear gas bombs looked like military rifles. It was scary to be facing them.

For Hamza, a Turk and an Islamic activist who was also present at the mosque and who stated that he “had tried hard to calm the young people who were throwing rocks,” the atmosphere of war made his mediation impossible. He even situated the confrontations in the context of the conflict between Palestinian Muslims and Israel as it was seen on television:

Bringing in helicopters over the housing blocks automatically made people think of Palestine. That was what one heard most often: “Look, this must be what our Palestinian brothers have to endure!”

FROM PROFANATION TO BLASPHEMY

The rationalization of the revolt as a reaction to the deliberate profanation of an Islamic place of worship by the state and its police force was facilitated by the international political context in which it occurred. However, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not the only international conflict that added fuel to the fire. In Denmark, on September 30, 2005, one month before the events in Clichy-Montfermeil, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in reaction to what its editors saw as a trend toward self-censorship within the media on issues related to Islam.

This initiative sought to respond to the trauma arising from the assassination of the film director Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam a year earlier. He had made a short film entitled Submission, echoing the meaning of the Arabic term islam. (French novelist Michel Houellebecq would give the same title to his famed novel published on January 7, 2015, the day of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.) In the film, Quranic verses are projected onto a nude female body—verses that Van Gogh and his scriptwriter, Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalia-born atheist and erstwhile Muslim, considered hostile to the cause of women. Van Gogh was attacked and his throat cut on the street by a twenty-seven-year-old Netherlander of Moroccan ancestry. This event deeply upset the Netherlands, which had up to that point advocated unlimited multiculturalism. Moreover, French Jacobinism had been scorned there, especially after the Stasi Commission¹ recommended that conspicuous religious signs be prohibited in the schools, a recommendation that was made law on March 15, 2004.

The outraged reaction to the blasphemy against the Prophet’s person in the Jyllands-Posten, publicized in the Muslim world by Danish Islamists, won the support of certain governments in the Middle East. The latter did not share the Islamists’ ide...