Following the murder of a French priest by Islamic State-linked terrorists, a group of prominent French Muslims issued an unambiguous and strongly worded condemnation of this and previous attacks. Bernard-Henri Lévy was among many who greeted the statement with enthusiasm—observing that it contained “not a scintilla of denial”—until he noticed a troubling detail:
The letter begins with an enumeration of the recent terrorist acts that have beset France. It does not omit Charlie (“the murder of cartoonists”), Bataclan (“the murder of young people listening to music”), of Magnanville (“the murder of a pair of police officers”). Nor, of course, does it fail to mention Nice (“the murder of men, women, and children celebrating the national holiday”) or Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (“the murder of a priest celebrating Mass”). Clearly, it purported to present an exhaustive list of the attacks.
Except it left one out. And what it left out was the hostage-taking at the kosher supermarket on January 9, 2015, which occurred less than three years after Mohamed Merah’s murders at the Jewish school in Toulouse. . . .
[A] slip like this cannot be allowed to go unremarked. And, given the prominence of those who signed the letter, it cannot fail to be upsetting. . . . One cannot purport to oppose Islamic State’s intention to immerse France in blood and fire and then, when the time comes to count the dead, display selective memory.
And above all, one cannot claim to be seeking a way out of an “intolerable situation,” one in which denial feeds the problem and confusion sows seeds of division and suggests the possibility (God forbid) of the war of all against all, while at the same time soft-pedaling the anti-Semitism that is, like it or not, one of the signs and, perhaps, one of the sources of what Abdelwahab Meddeb, the great scholar of Tunisian origin, called the “malady of Islam.”
Read more on Algemeiner: http://www.algemeiner.com/2016/08/04/bernard-henri-levy-a-long-awaited-and-critical-appeal-falls-short/