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The Paris rally: Three questions

It was a very good thing that millions of French citizens and leaders from around the world gathered in Paris on Jan. 11 to declare “war” on what French President Francois Hollande called “radical Islam.”
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January 14, 2015

It was a very good thing that millions of French citizens and leaders from around the world gathered in Paris on Jan. 11 to declare “war” on what French President Francois Hollande called “radical Islam.”

I’d like to pose a few questions, nevertheless.

Why didn’t the American president or vice president go to Paris?

The left-wing government of France is way ahead of the left-wing government of the United States. The Obama administration refuses to identify any aspect of Islam — not radical Islam, nor fundamentalist Islam, nor jihadi Islam — as an enemy. Indeed, the president has called for a world summit in Washington next month — without mentioning the word “Islam” or “Islamic” or even “terror.” It is called, amazingly, a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.

Here is the White House Statement: 

“On February 18, 2015, the White House will host a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism to highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting, or inspiring individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence, efforts made even more imperative in light of recent, tragic attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, and Paris.”

Not only has the Obama administration refused to identify anything Islamic about Islamic terror, it has even refused to engage in what his predecessor called the “War on Terror.” Almost immediately after President Barack Obama came to office, the Defense Department dropped the term. The preferred term was “overseas contingency operations,” as anodyne a term as “violent extremism.”

That is probably the ideological reason the president was one of the few major world leaders not to attend the Paris rally — and why he wouldn’t send Vice President Joe Biden or even Attorney General Eric Holder, who was in Paris on the day of the rally. Obama is exquisitely uncomfortable with anything that identifies the world’s terrorists with anything Islamic, even “radical Islam.” 

Why wasn’t such a rally held in Africa?

The murder of the courageous staff of Charlie Hebdo for the crime of drawing cartoons of Muhammad and the murder of Parisian Jews for the crime of doing nothing but being Jews were evil acts. 

But such evils are committed regularly by violent Muslims in Nigeria, Mali, Kenya and elsewhere in Africa. Far more civilians in those countries have been murdered, not to mention tortured, raped and enslaved. In Nigeria, young girls are kidnapped and then sold as sex slaves. Their lives are destroyed in their early teens and their suffering will end when they die — which happens quickly if they try to flee. 

As reported this past week in The New York Times (which has lost much of its moral authority because of its refusal to publish a single cartoon from Charlie Hebdo on the grounds that it has Muslim readers who may be offended): “In a single week from Dec. 27, the Nigeria Security Tracker kept by the Council on Foreign Relations counted about 56 people killed by Boko Haram in the region, and 40 abductions.”

Just in the last week, Boko Haram murdered as many as 2,000 men, women and children in northern Nigerian villages. People who stayed in their homes were simply burned alive in their homes. And more than 20,000 people were rendered homeless refugees. All in one week.

The Washington Post reported in October, “Since July 2009, when the Boko Haram conflict escalated, at least 11,100 people have died.

And Christians in Nigeria are regularly targeted for mass murder. According to Christian sources, 1,783 Nigerian Christians were killed last year just for being Christian.

But there has been no rally against Islamic terror in Nigeria, or in Mali, or in Kenya, where non-Muslims are regularly murdered by Islamists, scores at a time.

Why not?

Because the West values Western lives more than African lives. (The West cares about Africans only when persecuted by whites.) And because Western elites are preoccupied with other causes than slavery and mass murder, in particular, carbon emissions. This is as true at the Vatican as it is at The New York Times.

Why so few “Je Suis Juif” hashtags or signs?

All over France, people wore buttons and displayed signs reading “Je Suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) in honor of the brave writers and illustrators of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. The Eiffel Tower itself was illuminated with the words “Je Suis Charlie.” 

That was entirely the right thing to do. But, in comparison, why did so few people wear a button or display a sign reading “Je suis Juif” (“I am a Jew”)? After all, Jews were just as much targeted as the Charlie writers — and Jews have been murdered repeatedly by Islamists in France.

Wouldn’t that have been a huge victory in the war against “radical Islam”? Nothing would disturb Islamists more than seeing non-Jews identify with Jews. Nothing. They hate Jews buying kosher groceries even more than they hate cartoonists who “insult Islam.”

The problem is that it takes far less courage for a Frenchman to wear an “I am Charlie” button than to wear an “I am a Jew” button.

Why is that? Because in France, as in Europe generally, cartoonists are far more popular than Jews.


Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host (AM 870 in Los Angeles) and founder of PragerUniversity.com. His latest book is the New York Times best-seller “Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph” (HarperCollins, 2012).

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