Re: Kidnapping Catholics
At least one Frenchman gets it. This is from Friedmans column today:
“The most important threat [to the West] is Islamic terrorism,” said Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, and one of the few French intellectuals to support the ouster of Saddam. This is not a war with the Muslim religion, he stressed, but with a violent “fascist” Muslim minority. “We [in the West] have always been allied against fascism since the Second World War,” he said. “We have to be together, America and Europe, because our enemies are the same, Muslim extremism and fascism,” but right now, unlike in Bosnia, “we are apart.”
Mr. Kouchner blames Paris for having been too quick to threaten a U.N. veto and blames even more the Bush team for having been too quick to go to war without a real U.N. alliance, and for mismanaging postwar Iraq. At least he cares. Most of his countrymen, I sense, are hoping Mr. Bush will fail in Iraq so that the ends will never justify his unilateral means. It’s quite amazing, when you consider that Europe, with its large Muslim minorities, needs the moderates to win the war of ideas within Islam so much more than America.
I spent Friday morning interviewing two 18-year-old French Muslim girls in the Paris immigrant district of St.-Ouen. (It is about a mile from the school where in March 2003 a French Muslim girl, who had refused the veil and rebuffed the advances of a Muslim boy, was thrown into a garbage can by three Muslim teenagers, who then tossed lighted cigarette butts into the can and closed the lid.)
Both girls I interviewed wore veils and one also wore a full Afghan-like head-to-toe covering; one was of Egyptian parents, the other of Tunisian parents, but both were born and raised in France. What did I learn from them? That they got all their news from Al Jazeera TV, because they did not believe French TV, that the person they admired most in the world was Osama bin Laden, because he was defending Islam, that suicide “martyrdom” was justified because there was no greater glory than dying in defense of Islam, that they saw themselves as Muslims first and French citizens last, and that all their friends felt pretty much the same.
We were not in Kabul. We were standing outside their French public high school - a short ride from the Eiffel Tower.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/opinion/23friedman.html?oref=login&hp