Mick Hartley

Back in September, French high-school philosophy teacher Robert Redeker published an op-ed in Figaro entitled “What Should the Free World Do in the Face of Islamist Intimidation?”, claiming that Islam exalted violence and hatred. It was a week after the Pope’s controversial remarks about Islam had been loudly condemned throughout the Muslim world. To no one’s surprise, except perhaps the unfortunate Redeker, the irony-free response from those offended at having their religion accused of exalting violence and hatred was to send death threats, and to publish Redeker’s address, with a photograph of his house, online. Redeker and his family have been on the run ever since.

Christian Delacampagne, professor at John Hopkins University and a friend of Redeker’s, looks at the French response to these events:

[T]he vast majority of responses, even when couched as defenses of the right to free speech, were in fact hostile to the philosophy teacher. The Communist mayor of Saint-Orens-de-Gameville, echoed by the head of Redeker’s school, deplored the fact that he had included his affiliation at the end of the article. France’s two largest teachers’ unions, both of them socialist, stressed that “they did not share Redeker’s convictions.” The leading leftist human-rights organizations went much farther, denouncing his “irresponsible declarations” and “putrid ideas.” A fellow high-school philosophy teacher, Pierre Tévanian, declared (on a Muslim website) that Redeker was “a racist” who should be severely punished by his school’s administration. Even Gilles de Robien, the French minister of education, criticized Redeker for acting “as if he represented the French educational system”—a bizarre charge against the author of a piece clearly marked as personal opinion.

Among members of the media, Redeker was scolded for articulating his ideas so incautiously. On the radio channel Europe 1, Jean-Pierre Elkabach invited the beleaguered teacher to express his “regret.” The editorial board of Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, characterized Redeker’s piece as “excessive, misleading, and insulting.” It went so far as to call his remarks about Muhammad “a blasphemy,” implying that the founder of Islam must be treated even by non-Muslims in a non-Muslim country as an object not of investigation but of veneration.

To be sure, Redeker’s language had not been gentle. But since when has that been a requirement of intellectual discourse in France? One can often find similarly strong language in, say, Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and on whose editorial board Redeker has long served. Yet, to judge by the response to his “offense,” large sectors of the French intellectual and political establishment have carved out an exception to this hard-won tradition of open discussion: when it comes to Islam (as opposed to Christianity or Judaism), freedom of speech must respect definite limits.

How did France reach this point?

Well worth a read.

The present generation of Orientalists is omnipresent in the French media, unavoidable on radio and television. They assure the country that the progressive Islamization of European suburbs, plain for all to see, poses no danger. They suggest that the problem with Israel is its very existence. They inspire the open sympathy with Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran that can be found in newspapers like Le Monde and Libération. And they encourage the use of the term “Islamophobia” (a coinage of Iranian clerics) in order to delegitimize all those who might be tempted to disagree with them—individuals like Redeker. […]

When I finally reached Robert Redeker by e-mail a few weeks after he had gone into hiding with his family, he was still astonished by his fate. “I never thought that such a thing could happen in our old Republican France,” he wrote to me in a short, stoic message. Neither did I. But things have changed. What was once unthinkable in France has already come to pass.