ISIS and the 'Islamophobia' Fallacy

Franck Salameh

Society, Europe

Don’t hate Islam. Critique it.

Who does not recall the early 2015 slogan “Je suis Charlie” taking social media by storm, galvanizing the world in solidarity following the ISIS massacre of twelve cartoonists and staffers of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo? And who has not, even in a mere flash of compassion, displayed the various sad iterations of “Je suis Charlie” in subsequent months, on the heels of additional—lewder, more brazen—orgies of carnage perpetrated by votaries of ISIS? Yet, even as “Je suis Paris,” “Je suis Bruxelles,” “Je suis Beirut,” “Je suis Orlando,” “Je suis Nice” and suchlike came to define our modern times’ indignation in the face of depravity, they also illustrated puzzling indolence, impotence, disorientation and aphasia before a millenarian, apocalyptic malady that many remain ill prepared to call by name—let alone combat and maim.

Then came the July 26, 2016 slaughter of a geriatric French priest, on the altar of his church, in the Norman city of Rouen in northern France; a dreadful deed, yet one barely meriting mention, let alone drawing spates of outrage and media brouhahas accorded earlier feats of religious barbarity. Even an otherwise spunky, unvarnished, straight-talking pope would remain speechless at this horror when his pastoral duty might have required he spoke. And so, “Je suis épuisé,” “I am exhausted,” seems to have become the meme of choice; the times’ appropriate, diffident, politically correct response to an abomination otherwise better left euphemized, exorcised, placated, unnamed.

Yet it is precisely this form of resignation that leads to the victory of a radical Islamist party in the 2022 French presidential election in Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian novel Soumission. In Houellebecq’s narrative, the French Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Ben Abbes clinches the presidency by upholding retrograde, misogynistic, patriarchal, archaic ultraconservative values, and squashing the right-wing National Front party in a brief “civil war” (with the help of the “progressive,” “enlightened” rabidly secular Socialist Party), transforming France and Frenchness into an unimaginable, degraded state of being.