Exactly two months ago, I asked if the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack of five years had happened today, who would side with the victims? I only needed to wait 61 days to get an answer. Some of the most prominent members of our news media would and do side with the terrorists.
France has seen two subsequent devastating terrorist attacks from radical Islamists in the past month. First, school teacher Samuel Paty was slain by a Chechen refugee in a Parisian banlieue after showing his students comics of Mohammed from Charlie Hebdo to teach them about freedom of speech. Not two weeks later, a Tunisian man who hadn’t been in France for a full month stabbed three people to death in a Catholic church in Nice. All of this comes amid half a decade of sustained radical Islamic terrorist attacks, including specifically anti-Semitic attacks.
Unlike presidents of the recent past, Emmanuel Macron has risen to the occasion, taking the lead in honoring Paty as a martyr of free speech. He has vowed to uphold France’s unique secularism in the face of terrorist threats. And how have our media elite responded? By blaming France, of course.
The New York Times opinion page published the take, “Is France Fueling Muslim Terrorism by Trying to Prevent It?” The verdict, of course, is yes: “If anything, it is the French government’s rhetoric that could end up convincing some Muslims that they are indeed different from other French people.” Note the bigoted assumption that this naturally leads Muslims to terrorism. This comes shortly after the entire opinion page leadership was overthrown for publishing a reasoned op-ed by a sitting United States senator that too many staff disagreed with.
But even supposedly straight news coverage of France’s woes has exposed the American media’s disdain of France’s defiance in the face of terror.
The Associated Press, for its part, explained away the attacks by blaming them on the nation’s “brutal colonial past, staunch secular policies and tough-talking president who is seen as insensitive toward the Muslim faith.”
The New York Times news piece breaking the premeditated Paty killing was originally headlined “French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street,” and Vox equated Macron’s crackdown on “Islamist separatism” with one on “Islam” at large, a fact that patronizingly ignores that plenty of assimilated French Muslims demonstrated in support of Paty.
To date, the only retraction of a piece in this genre came from Politico Europe, which fully withdrew a piece claiming that “France’s extreme form of secularism and its embrace of blasphemy” had “fueled radicalism among a marginalized minority.” Yet to retract a piece solely because of public backlash is about as illiberal as arguing that Paty and the three Nice victims had it coming.
The question is why any of these takes or overtly illiberal mechanisms of framing were written in the first place. In Macron, Americans clearly have a champion for free speech. But does France have one in us?
