This
article is run courtesy of Daily Maverick. To
visit their site, please click here.
The French messenger of mayhem and
destruction linked to al-Qaeda
French police have
tracked down the "scooter killer" - supposedly a
rightwing crackpot they and the media blamed for
"racist" killings in southern France that left
seven people dead in the last week. As alleged
links to al-Qaeda emerge, the story is likely to
have the opposite political effect. By REBECCA
DAVIS.
At first it seemed the story
was clear. A lone gunman, travelling by scooter,
was targeting minorities in the area around
Toulouse. The first, on 11 March, was an army
sergeant of North African
origin, Imad Ibn-Ziaten. He
had previously placed an advert to sell his
motorcycle on the Le Bon Coin website. Having been
contacted by an individual expressing interest, he
arranged to meet the prospective buyer in front of
a gymnasium. But instead of selling his motorbike,
he was shot in the head at point blank range by a
man on a scooter when he arrived at the meeting
point.
Four days later, the gunman struck
again. This time he targeted three uniformed
paratroopers queuing for a cash machine in a town
60km from Toulouse. Two, originally North African,
died instantly. The third, taken to hospital, was
of Caribbean descent. Once again, the gunman
arrived and left by scooter.
These first
two incidents, though horrifying, were
overshadowed by the third. On March 19 the gunman
arrived at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish School in north
east Toulouse, and opened fire seemingly
indiscriminately. Four people, Rabbi Jonathan
Sandler, 30, his two sons Gabriel, 3, and Arieh,
6, and Miriam Monsonego, 8, the daughter of the
school's headmaster, died.
In response,
French President Nicolas Sarkozy articulated what
seemed self-evident at the time: the killings were
motivated by racism. "Of course, by attacking
children, Jews, the anti-Semitic motivation seems
obvious," Sarkozy said. "We don't know what the
motives are, even if one can think, one can
imagine that racism and murderous folly are
linked."
The media's reasoning quickly
concurred. "All of those who have been shot or
killed in and around the city in the past eight
days have had one thing in common," wrote Guardian
columnist Fiachra Gibbons. "They are from visible
minorities. They had names or faces that marked
them out as not being descended, as Jean-Marie Le
Pen would say, from 'our ancestors the Gauls'.
Their roots - both Jewish and Muslim - were in the
Maghreb or the Caribbean."
One reason why
this version became the accepted wisdom was
because of the resurgence of xenophobia, racism
and sexism in France in the past decade. Earlier
this month French Socialist politician Arnaud
Montebourg said he and his partner were surrounded
by a group of around 15 men who yelled "Juden" at
them as they left a restaurant. The word "Juden"
(Jew) is German rather than French, and as such
was a marked choice: it carries particular heft in
racist terminology because of its association with
the Nazis. The men who verbally assaulted
Montebourg also shouted "Le Pen for president", a
reference to the leader of the far-right National
Front (FN) party, Marine Le Pen.
Since
Marine Le Pen took over the party leadership from
her father, Jean-Marie, a year ago, she has
attempted to steer the party away from the stench
of racism. Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the National
Front in 1972. He ran in the 1974 presidential
election, gaining only 0.74% of the vote. By 2002,
however, he did well enough to displace the left
candidate, Lionel Jospin, and come second. Le Pen
was fined €10,000 in 2005 for inciting racial
hatred via disparaging comments about Muslims. But
Muslims weren't his only target. He has also said
HIV-positive people should be isolated from
society, has expressed doubts about the scale and
size of Holocaust gas chambers and criticised the
French national football team for containing too
many black players.
His daughter has taken
a somewhat different route, soft-pedalling the
bigotry and highlighting campaigns against free
trade and the EU, though the party is still
vociferously anti-immigration. To signal the shift
in direction, Le Pen has even made overtures to
the Jewish population in France. Last year she
posed for a photograph with Israel's ambassador to
the UN, for instance. University of Houston's
Robert Zaretsky suggested at the time that the
French Jewish community might be shifting
rightwards due to growing anti-immigrant sentiment
and, unimaginable as it might have seemed a decade
ago, for some French Jews the National Front may
now be a plausible vote.
Le Pen's approach
seems successful. A poll in January found almost
one-third of French voters now support the
principles of the National Front. This is the
highest since 1991, and means the April elections
- long billed as a two-horse show between Nicolas
Sarkozy and his Socialist rival Francois Hollande
- might be an interesting prospect.
In
response to the National Front's growing power,
Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to poach votes, which
necessarily involves steering his own party
further to the right. He has stepped up
anti-immigrant rhetoric significantly. In a TV
debate show at the beginning of March he stated
"our system of integration is working increasingly
badly, because we have too many foreigners on our
territory and we can no longer manage to find them
accommodation, a job, a school." Last month he
appeared to be deliberately stoking the fires of
Islamophobia when he claimed non-Muslims in Paris
were being unsuspectingly sold halaal meat. His
prime minister, Francois Fillon, then jumped on
the bandwagon to suggest that Jews and Muslims
should abandon kosher and halaal practices
altogether because they "don't have much in common
with today's state of science, technology and
health problems". Last week Sarkozy's immigration
chief Arno Klarsfeld suggested a wall be built
between Greece and Turkey to protect Europe from
Turkish invaders.
All in all, there's been
a lot of xenophobic sentiment in the French public
discourse of late. Which is precisely why liberal
media were so quick to seize upon the Toulouse
shootings as evidence that things had gone too
far. "Today in Toulouse we have been given a
horrific illustration of where such delirious
cynicism can lead," Fiachra Gibbons wrote for The
Guardian. You reap what you sow, was the
underlying idea. French politicians have spent
months fomenting hatred and divisiveness, and this
was the culmination. The suspect was presented as
a figure much like Norwegian gunman Anders
Breivik, a fanatical rightwinger on a crusade to
save Europe. It was, clearly, a gift for the left
wing. In the wake of the Jewish school shooting
Socialist candidate Francois Hollande spoke out
against the dangers of "words that influence", a
statement widely interpreted as a criticism of the
current right-wing rhetoric. It was bad news for
Sarkozy and Le Pen, both of whom were expected to
radically temper their language on race and
immigration in response to the killings.
But there's just one problem. Now that
they've tracked down the Toulouse gunman, he turns
out not to be some crazy racist skinhead at all.
He turns out to be Mohammed Merah, 23, a "French
national of North African origin", allegedly
Taliban-trained and on a mission to avenge the
deaths of Palestinian children. This leaves media
outlets like The Guardian with more than a little
egg on their faces in their haste to pin the
racist neo-Nazi tail on the scooter killer.
As the Financial Times pointed out, one
irony was that when news broke of Breivik's
rampage last year, initial reactions were that al
Qaeda was behind it. Of course, it turned out to
be a lone rightwing madman. This time, it looks
like the other way round.
Naturally, this
is like manna from heaven for Marine Le Pen in
particular. When news of Mareh's identity broke
she immediately released a statement saying: "We
have minimised the rise of radical Islam in this
country… we did not want to look it in the face."
France, she said, must wage war against "these
fundamentalist political and religious groups that
are killing our children." The National Front is
now certain to push their claim that the project
of cultural assimilation for immigrants has failed
in the country, and anti-Muslim declarations are
sure to circulate freely. In response, the BBC
suggests that the Socialist party will try to
shift attention to issues like taxation and the
economy, which have less visceral appeal than the
gunning down of children.
Ultimately,
commentators are suggesting this episode may not
have a drastic effect on the election's outcome,
because issues relating to immigration were
already centre stage. But certainly both Le Pen
and Sarkozy look likely to benefit by capitalising
on public fears around terrorism and using this as
a justification to push more stringent immigration
laws. The lesson for the media from the Toulouse
shootings, meanwhile, is to wait for concrete
evidence before ascribing responsibility for
violence. DM
This
article is run courtesy of Daily Maverick. To
visit their site, please click here.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
