Last fall we featured an interview with Zineb el-Rhazoui, a young French writer who was born in Morocco. She left Islam at an early age, and is now a secular atheist. In January 2015 Ms. El-Rhazoui was working for the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo at the time of the jihad massacre. However, she was not present at the editorial meeting targeted by the attackers, and so escaped the slaughter.
In the following video, Ms. el-Rhazoui talks about her new book, the terrorist attacks in Paris, and the Islamization of France.
Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Transcript:
| 00:00 | I think that, in fact, | |
| 00:04 | I wouldn’t be able do write a book about January 7th [Charlie Hebdo massacre] | |
| 00:08 | right away. There are things, | |
| 00:12 | after a cataclysm like the attacks, there are | |
| 00:16 | things that you want to freeze, that you want to inscribe | |
| 00:20 | somewhere, so they would remain, | |
| 00:27 | so the individual memory, | |
| 00:31 | it can wish to become resilient in order to heal, | |
| 00:35 | but the collective memory, it has to record | |
| 00:39 | similar tragedies, | |
| 00:43 | because it’s important, if you want avoid for them to happen again. | |
| 00:47 | I chose to start the preface of my book, by the way, | |
| 00:51 | with verse 29 of the sura of At-Tawba [the Repentance]. This is one of the | |
| 00:55 | most controversial verses of the Quranic text, because | |
| 00:59 | of the verses that are calling to jihad | |
| 01:03 | are plenty — contrary to | |
| 01:07 | what Islamic chanters pretend: Islam is religion of peace, | |
| 01:11 | of love, eternally and for all the ages it is the victim of | |
| 01:15 | problems of interpretation to which | |
| 01:19 | one cannot find a solution — in reality, Quranic verses are extremely | |
| 01:23 | clear concerning jihad towards | |
| 01:27 | kuffar, the infidels, | |
| 01:31 | the non-believers, pagans, I don’t know what to call them. | |
| 01:35 | In reality everything that isn’t Muslim | |
| 01:39 | can be a potential target of jihad. | |
| 01:43 | And besides, in Islam the world | |
| 01:48 | is composed of two territorial entities: Dar al-Harb, | |
| 01:52 | the House of War, and Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. | |
| 01:56 | All that hasn’t submitted to Islam — Islam by the way which | |
| 02:00 | etymologically means submission — all that hasn’t submitted to | |
| 02:04 | the Islamic Law is the territory of war and of jihad. | |
| 02:08 | And it’s not I who pretends that, it’s in the Quran, it’s in the Quranic text. | |
| 02:12 | And it’s important to bring it up, | |
| 02:16 | because one can talk about the tragedy of terrorism, the tragedy of | |
| 02:20 | November 13th [Bataclan, Paris], one can talk about the profile of terrorists, | |
| 02:24 | one can talk about the geopolitical complexity | |
| 02:28 | of the world, one can talk about the Syrian war, one can talk about French foreign policy, | |
| 02:32 | talk about the Iraq war, about the USA, whatever! | |
| 02:36 | But in reality there is something with a constant dimension that transcends | |
| 02:40 | all that, and which besides predates the geopolitical | |
| 02:44 | context of today: it’s the dimension of jihad. | |
| 02:48 | And it’s important to bring it up, as reminder also | |
| 02:52 | to those who say: careful, Islam is a religion of peace and love. | |
| 02:56 | One of the testimonies that | |
| 03:00 | Touched me most in that book, even though | |
| 03:04 | it wasn’t the most | |
| 03:08 | violent, on the factual level, | |
| 03:12 | but which touched me enormously on the affective level, | |
| 03:16 | is the [testimony] of Patrick Pelloux. | |
| 03:20 | Why? Because he’s a victim of January 7th. | |
| 03:24 | He was, as the emergency doctor, | |
| 03:28 | the first to arrive at the premises | |
| 03:32 | to establish the death, in fact, of his friends | |
| 03:37 | when he arrived at the premises of the attack on Charlie Hebdo | |
| 03:41 | in the editorial room. Usually he came to joke with his pals, | |
| 03:45 | to have the publication meeting; that day he arrived in a room | |
| 03:49 | of carnage, and it still smelled of gunpowder | |
| 03:53 | from the bullets of Kouachi brothers, who had left | |
| 03:57 | a couple of minute earlier. In fact his testimony touched me | |
| 04:01 | because, because he knew | |
| 04:05 | how to put in words something I was feeling, meaning | |
| 04:09 | still, well, | |
| 04:13 | again, one cannot escape it, voilà, one | |
| 04:17 | reaches the bottom and sinks even deeper, in fact. After all we lived through | |
| 04:21 | on January 7th, well, we had again much more violent attacks, | |
| 04:25 | much more bloody ones, it’s almost a routine. | |
| 04:29 | Voilà. It is, [a routine] rightly so, in my opinion, | |
| 04:33 | already in the idea of | |
| 04:37 | lasting quality, in fact, of all that we are living | |
| 04:41 | in the durability, in fact, of this phenomenon | |
| 04:45 | that touches us, which is the phenomenon of | |
| 04:49 | terrorism that is blind and completely arbitrary. | |
| 04:53 | And I know that it | |
| 04:57 | won’t stop. I know it won’t stop. And it won’t even stop with the | |
| 05:01 | vanishing of the Islamic State. Because the worm is in the fruit. | |
| 05:05 | This ideology is more widespread than people think; | |
| 05:09 | it has caused more brain damage than people think, | |
| 05:13 | and if there are such violent actions, like the ones we saw | |
| 05:17 | at Charlie Hebdo or November 13th [Paris, Bataclan], it’s because | |
| 05:21 | there is an ideological assembly line for this terrorism. | |
| 05:25 | Finally, taking action is only a symptom, | |
| 05:29 | certainly a violent one, of something | |
| 05:33 | that is more widespread, more pernicious, | |
| 05:38 | which also has levels, levels. | |
| 05:42 | And the characteristic of the Islamic ideology | |
| 05:46 | has always been to have one armed hand | |
| 05:50 | invisible, secretive, violent, but also | |
| 05:54 | a show window, a facade towards the street, | |
| 05:58 | that is expressing itself in the society, that is, of course, condemning the terrorism | |
| 06:02 | (how could you NOT condemn it?!). We have, however — | |
| 06:06 | we need you, however, to condemn verse 29 of | |
| 06:10 | the sura of At-Tawba, which I put at the beginning of my preface, | |
| 06:14 | rather than condemn your texts that are calling for committing those massacres, | |
| 06:18 | rather than you continue to perpetually absolve your texts: | |
| 06:22 | careful, interpretation, Islam — religion of peace and love! | |
| 06:26 | Bottom line: Islam is a religion of peace and love, so we found a solution | |
| 06:30 | for world peace. We should all convert, and | |
| 06:34 | it’s a religion that has been the victim of a problem of interpretation! | |
| 06:38 | And today in France, even the leftist do-gooders | |
| 06:42 | adopt this version of events and they think we are stupid, in fact. | |
| 06:46 | If I had a message for the victims of terrorism, | |
| 06:50 | the blood of victims, the blood of the dead of the wounded | |
| 06:54 | shouldn’t be spilled in vain. | |
| 06:58 | The terrorists shouldn’t win. They shouldn’t impose their rules | |
| 07:02 | through their weapons. This is what I want to tell the victims. | |
| 07:06 | I was very saddened | |
| 07:10 | when I found out that when we wanted to | |
| 07:14 | gather testimonies for this book, many people refused to talk, | |
| 07:18 | not because they weren’t ready to talk for psychological reasons, | |
| 07:22 | not because they were traumatized, but because they were afraid | |
| 07:27 | of reprisals. I think that we who talk should be | |
| 07:31 | more and more numerous, more and more | |
| 07:35 | numerous to say what we think, | |
| 07:39 | more and more numerous to denounce terrorism, to show that in reality | |
| 07:43 | we won’t let it win. What is the characteristic of terrorism? | |
| 07:47 | It’s to create a concrete number of victims, but to terrorise, | |
| 07:51 | shut down and scare a much larger number of people. |
I’m going to steal the imagery:
Our “authorities” are useless: their main ‘job’ consists of taking post-atrocity (NOT ‘TRAGEDY’–NEVER “TRAGEDY”) photographs and drawing chalk outlines on the sidewalks.
“Cleanup squads”, if you will.
The ONLY way I can conceive of solving the muslim atrocity problem is by use of what I carry on my hip. Namely a 3″ S&W revolver in .357 caliber. Yeah–arming (or rather letting them ARM THEMSELVES) the potential victims is the only way. Can you recall an atrocity where the perpetrator was NOT at least on the “radar” of the “authorities” of some sort?
They were “known”.
What good is that?
Oh well, I have six (enemy) lives in the gun, plus another dozen or so in my pockets if it comes to that. If I am not the very first targeted by an attack………………………
Too bad nobody in EUrope or our big cities trusts people to act in their own defense.
WHY in the name of all that is Holy was NOBODY at that meeting armed and able to shoot back?
In fact, the primary reason for not allowing Europeans to arm themselves is so they will have no way to individually protect themselves from organized street violence. It’s not a matter of misdirected policy. It’s a known feature of the policy.
The real work is in convincing the people themselves they have a right to protect themselves. Any politician who gets ahead of the people will himself get cut off by the political establishment. Trying to establish the right of the people to bear arms before they are convinced they have the right to protect themselves, is like trying to convince hospitals to maintain a sterile environment before they are persuaded of the existence of bacteria.