The «Médine left» and the denial of Islamism

Accused of anti-Semitism following a tweet, the rapper from Le Havre was a guest at the summer universities of the ecologists and La France insoumise. Where the word Islamism is no longer uttered. At the same time, Gabriel Attal banned the wearing of the abaya in schools.

The central question raised by the ’Médine affair« is that of responsibility. The 40-year-old French rapper, whose father is Algerian and whose mother is French, has been accused of anti-Semitism for a pun on the surname of a granddaughter of deportees, Rachel Khan: »ResKHANpée«, which sounds like »survivor«.

A habitual provocateur, does Médine have anything to reproach himself for? Has he or has he not dabbled in Islamism, that of the «crazy years» before the 2015 attacks in France? Years marked by exalted preaching, where hell was promised to the impure, where unveiled women were worth less than a penny, where Jews were the deceivers who had betrayed the prophet, where every brother, every sister, was called upon to conform to the laws of Islam.

Like others, the rapper from Le Havre has, since the 2000s, been crunching on this Islam set up as a political struggle and first and foremost as revenge, drawing on the victim supremacism of the Muslim Brotherhood - how can it be that the religion that holds the truth doesn't occupy first place in the world? This Islamism, while punchlines and uppercuts did harm to France and placed the younger generations of Muslims, Médine included, in a constant dilemma of identity against a backdrop of their relationship with their parents, who were out to avenge the humiliations they had suffered. Such was the situation.

Clearly define the terms

The most disreputable aspect of this «Islam will conquer» manifesto is that individuals have played and enjoyed two registers, Islam and the West. One day in Islam, another day in the West. Constraint on one side, freedom on the other. All this without any fear of the consequences, the real, terrible ones, the ones that send you to prison at the very least for lifestyle choices judged not to conform to Sharia law. In the West, the worst penalty for deviance is a bad reputation...

You can't absolve people of their responsibility for playing along with an ideology that is as dangerous and backward-looking as any other. Some may now want to move on, and perhaps this is Medina's wish. But first, we need to identify the offending doctrine. Former French Islamists have done this in a courageous way, clearly setting out the terms.

Médine - who is not an Islamist, but a supporter of the movement, or at least has been - elides the issue and brings it back to himself. With him, formula and counter-attack take precedence over distancing. Like a politician, he refers to «errors» and consents to «blunders», even though at the time he was well aware of the radical nature of Islamism, which was firing on all cylinders in terms of identity. Self-centered, he doesn't look the bad old days in the face - think of the red-brown Soral-Dieudonné duo addressing Muslims, including himself. What we expect from him is a critical discourse on an indefensible historical sequence, not a dismissal of it in the form of a "I don't care". mea culpa.

The denial of a certain left

Indeed, in Le Havre, at the summer university of the ecologists held on last week, he went to confession on Marine Tondelier's couch. The head of the Greens was in a hurry to give him absolution. An absolution worth exfiltration of his then brouet. The left, heir to Third Worldism, cannot stand the idea that the dominated, especially when they are the product of colonial history, can have any liabilities. They must be declared irresponsible. This sociologist, who was invited to the annual gathering of French Muslims a few months after the attack against Charlie Hebdo, Didn't he say that «anti-Semitism (among Muslims) is reactive, whereas Islamophobia is primary»? «The victim of racism is him», Jean-Luc Mélenchon reminded us this weekend at the France Insoumise summer university, defending Médine. The people of the suburbs are innocent.

To ask the question of responsibility is to confront the ideology that guides words and deeds. By refusing to admit that Islamism is a political and social fact of life in France, we avoid the drudgery of reality. Faced with this inconvenient reality, part of the left is in denial, and loses itself in revisionism. The unjustifiable is sifted through the sieve of discrimination. The Islamist discourse itself is never taken into account. As a result, the all-out past of the pre-attack period disappears from the radar. The continuity of what officially did not exist is forbidden.

Read also, by the same author Mr. Director of RTS, don't keep quiet about Islamism

Islamism has evolved. Virulent, ultraconservative, it softened after the 2015 attacks. It has found refuge in progressive societal causes. Shrugging off its supremacism, it has adopted an approach based on equivalence: burkini and toplessness, drag-queens and bearded men, feminism and modesty, same battle. Intersectionality, the Folleville embrace of minorities, makes the wearing of a veil equal to the absence of one. But no, there are two opposing visions of the world, two opposing conceptions of women.

Islamism, more than a faith

Attacks on secularism in French schools, which have soared by 120% in one year, bear witness to a balance of power that has never ceased. This is where Islamism comes in, which means more than faith in God. Reacting to this identity-based influence, French Education Minister Gabriel Attal announced on Sunday evening that the abaya, a long Middle Eastern dress worn by schoolgirls in France as an ostensible manifestation of their religious affiliation, would be banned from the classroom at the start of the new school year, in accordance with the 2004 law.

Islamism is part of a competition with the West, which is considered to be losing ground, after Islam itself declined until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Brotherly preachings are quite explicit on this subject: nature abhors a civilizational vacuum, it's Islam's time again. Such is the little music of Islamism. It is not, per se, the music of Muslims, even if a not inconsiderable proportion of them seem to adhere to a conservative religious model, while others among them would do well to dispense with any politico-religious injunction.

Read also, by the same author Let's unite against Islamism

The «Médine left» doesn't want to hear or see any of this. It believes that the dominated are entitled to symbolic compensations, even if these run counter to emancipatory values. No doubt this Left secretly hopes to educate Muslims, to make them lose certain customs at odds with the egalitarian ideals of the revolution. It forgets that, in the eyes of Islamists, Islam is revolution.

Antoine Menusier is a journalist. Editor-in-chief of Bondy Blog from 2009 to 2011 and a former senior reporter at Time and L'Hebdo, he is the author of Livre des indésirés - A history of Arabs in France (Editions du Cerf, 2019). Today, he writes for the Swiss media outlet Watson and contributes to the French magazines Marianne and L'Express.

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