Who Is Charlie by Emmanuel Todd

Author:Emmanuel Todd [Todd, Emmanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509505814
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-09-14T06:02:45+00:00

Germany and circumcision

All the classic elements of Islamophobia are present in Germany, to a high degree. They include certain bestsellers ‘made in Germany’ such as Germany is Doing Away with Itself, published in 2010: it has sold more than two million copies. Its author, Thilo Sarrazin, is a Social Democratic politician, born in the heart of Protestant Germany, in Gera, Thuringia. His book caused a scandal, and its publication meant that Sarrazin had to resign from his post on the executive board of the Bundesbank. The original German title of the book, Deutschland schafft sich ab, is well captured by the title of the English translation: it also means ‘Germany is abolishing itself’, and we are forced to admit that Éric Zemmour, with his Suicide français of 2014, is just a modest epigone of an ideological evolution whose centre of gravity lies more to the east and to the north. Likewise, when Charlie Hebdo started systematically to make fun of Muhammad, this satirical magazine was just an epigone of the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which had ‘launched the debate’ in 2005 by publishing several caricatures relating to Islam. The one that drew the widest attention was by the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, showing Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb. Though it was instinctually in solidarity with the ideologues of the North, Charlie Hebdo was to some extent just an imitator. Yet again, it is Protestant Europe that is setting the pace, although the proportion of Muslims in its population is much lower than in France or in the Catholic part of Germany.

Let’s go back a bit further in time: to the murder, on 6 May 2002, of Pim Fortuyn, the leader of a Dutch Islamophobic party, preceding the Charlie Hebdo killings by thirteen years. In the Netherlands, it sparked a national outcry at least as great as that of 7 January 2015 in France. Fortuyn came from the Socialist Party and from northern, i.e. Protestant, Holland.

In 2014, in Germany, the political organization Pegida was founded: the name stands for ‘Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes’ or, in English, ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West’, though this translation loses the twilit nuance of the term Abendlandes (evening land, or the land of the setting sun). A crisis in the movement’s internal growth seems to have curbed the enthusiasm behind its Monday evenings in Dresden – so this too is a phenomenon of the Protestant part of the country.

When we are looking for cutting-edge Islamophobia, however, there are more interesting things going on in Germany than the murky nocturnal gatherings of the Pegida organization: the unconscious of the judicial elites and ordinary folk, an unconscious that shows how easy it is for Islamophobia to converge with anti-Semitism.

At the end of 2010, the circumcision of a 4-year-old Tunisian boy led to bleeding: this was treated at the hospital. A prosecutor brought a case against the doctor, a Syrian, for ‘grievous bodily harm with aggravating factors’. A first court threw the case out.

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