By Giulio Meotti (Italy) Il Foglio
During the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda was in Hanoi wearing an helmet and standing up for the Vietcong. But “Hanoi Jane” could not shoot at American B-52’s, while young Frenchmen know how to go about the cutting off of heads.
The French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has revealed that seven French citizens blew themselves up in Iraq and Syria. Six of them Christians who had converted to Islam.
They are the children of the West at war with the West, the sons of the culture of reason, “the atheists and liars” as they define it in the audios/videos of the Islamic State. This holy war against the “new paganism” is not led by men trained in the madrassas, but in universities whose foundations are based on the “pagan thought” they intend to use to punish it.
They want to defeat the monstrously seductive Europe relying on the wisdom of a single book, the Koran.
In the village of Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, the neighbors of Maxime Hauchard remember him not as a beheader, but as a “good guy, brave, helpful.” The uncle said he “was not capable of hurting a fly.” A young man raised in a Catholic family. As Michael Dos Santos, who was even the catechist.
How to explain such folly? The scholar Olivier Roy says that “in 1970, these young people would turn to Maoism. Today only Islam is seen as a possible utopia. They are not manipulated, they know what they’re doing”. As in the case of Frenchman Pierre Robert, “the emir with blue eyes”, who lived in the Loire with his wife and son, nice garden and beautiful views. Good people. As in the case of Thomas Barnouin, son of teachers, and David Courtailler, who produced cheese in Haute-Savoie, but one day he saw “the lights of a mosque that blinded me.”
And as in the case of Jean-Marc Grandvisir, who before turning to jihad had worked for social services: he took care of the lost youth of the suburbs.
All young people were encouraged by their parents to find their own path in a society that they would have judged “impious”. A post-modern society that had taught them that there is no right and wrong, but only the judgment (hateful) and tolerance (admirable). Hassen Chalghoumi, the imam of Drancy accused of “apostasy” by the fanatics, argues that their conversion is a reaction to secularism.
All children of the good European bourgeoisie see the call of a primordial and uncontrollable force in verse 110 of the Sura of the Koran III, “You indeed practiced the good, forbid evil.” The self indulging doubts and the relativistic choices of the French society found a solution in the homicidal certainty of Islamism. They are the children of our cultural wealth. European youth injured by modernity and happy to swap their life with the thrill of a sacred cause and a fierce revolution sacralized by blood.
It is the fateful end of a continent, Europe, which expelled and destroyed Judaism during the Holocaust, which has now repudiated and terminated Christianity, and which will end with Islam.