Aldo Sterone on Trèbes, Part Two: The Pointless Death of Arnaud Beltrame

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Below is the follow-up to last night’s video of Aldo Sterone, the Algerian-French auto pundit, talking about the recent Islamic terror attack in Trèbes.

Notes from the translator:

This is the video (in French) that Also Sterone is referring to. The book he mentions wasn’t translated during the thousand years of its existence, even though it is a very important book on the Shariah. If I understand it correctly, it’s as important as Reliance of the Traveller.

Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

00:00   Good day my friends. This morning I learned with a lot of sadness
00:04   about the death of the officer of the gendarmerie.
00:08   Monsieur Arnaud Beltrame, who was a lieutenant colonel of the gendarmerie,
00:12   and who gave his life to be exchanged
00:16   for a hostage, a woman, in fact;
00:20   and what makes me sad as well is to see the politicians
00:24   talk about “his honorable gesture”.
00:28   Since when are those politicians
00:32   aware of the meaning of the word “honor”?
00:36   So today they are trying to —
00:41   sorry for being the wake-up caller — but what I find out today
00:45   is that they are trying to — by this heroic act, on which they
00:49   are focusing all the attention— they are in fact trying to transform
00:53   this story in a “happy ending”, literally. That means that they know
00:57   that people have had enough of negative stories, and if from time to time there is
01:01   a heroic act, or something out of the ordinary which allows for them
01:05   to believe one more time in humanity, then they should be served that.
01:09   And then it helps to make them forget
01:14   absolutely disturbing realities, which they don’t want to
01:18   talk about. For example, the failure
01:22   of the French strategy in the fight against terrorism.
01:26   As if such a thing even exists! Because
01:30   I don’t call “fighting terrorism” having the police
01:34   write down the [names of] the potential terrorists, put them in a file
01:38   which they call an S-file, and then wait until the terrorist acts
01:42   and kills people. If you call that a “strategy of the anti-terrorist fight”,
01:46   sorry, you’re not there yet. That was my first point.
01:50   Secondly, I would like to remind you one thing:
01:54   you know there was this guy, [in France] who was called
01:59   public enemy number one. He wore glasses and he drove a large BMW.
02:03   I think his name was Mesrine. Jacques Mesrine. Voilà; I remember the name now. Jacques Mesrine.
02:07   And Jacques Mesrine — I saw a documentary about him, and he was
02:11   at some point surrounded by cops; he was in a flat in Paris, he was surrounded by cops
02:15   and he asked their chief to come,
02:19   to come upstairs; so the chief arrives.
02:23   He enters the apartment in which he was surrounded. Mesrine serves him champagne.
02:27   They drink, they drink a glass each,
02:31   and then Mesrine decides to follow him and he surrenders to the police.
02:36   If you watch even movies of that time, fictitious, of the time,
02:40   they presented the criminals as having a certain “honor code”.
02:44   At the time there was one.
02:48   With the Islamists, I would like
02:52   to tell you, I thought that the authorities
02:56   understood that since the time Islamists have been attacking France,
03:00   I thought it was a fact that was understood, but in fact I can see that
03:04   it’s not [understood] yet. The Islamists, when they go to commit an attack,
03:08   it’s with intention of killing and being killed. And they strictly
03:12   don’t have any honor “code” in this story.
03:17   I invite you to watch a video, an abominable one made about three weeks ago,
03:21   where for one hour I’m reading a book, (I’ll put it in the description)
03:25   a book by which the bearded ones,
03:29   who train the jihadists, are inspired.
03:33   But not only that. It’s a book you can find in the universities
03:37   of the Islamic world, in the mosques, in the courts, all that; it’s a book
03:41   which is relatively known, but it’s an extremely important book for those who study
03:45   the doctrine and those who are in charge of communicating the doctrine.
03:49   Volume thirteen, page forty, is about jihad
03:53   I brought you , just, voilà, this is
03:57   the first page, and this is page forty
04:02   which I read at about 1:45 of the video
04:06   I told you about. Well, what is it about?
04:10   I can tell you from the memory, I don’t need to look at the text.
04:14   I’ll tell you in Arabic and then I’ll translate it.
04:18   [Arabic]
04:22   So what is it about?
04:26   At the time
04:30   when two armies would meet to fight
04:34   there was always at the beginning, at the beginning
04:38   of the battle, it was a custom
04:42   that one person would come forward
04:47   from the adversary camp and said to Muslims:
04:51   “Send me one of your men! I will fight with him man to man!”
04:55   So they would meet one to one and they would fight.
04:59   So sometimes there would be one duel, two duels, three duels; depending on the motivation
05:03   of both sides. What does this text, this theological text of reverence,
05:07   tell us? What does it say? It says:
05:11   If a non-believer comes forward
05:15   to ask for a duel, man to man,
05:20   sword against sword, or fist against fist, or whatever,
05:24   it is authorized, it is lawful —
05:28   speaking in the Islamic terms — to kill him
05:32   with a shot of an arrow. Because
05:36   he is a non-believer, a mushrik, as he is described
05:40   exactly in the text, which means he’s an associator [with Jews and Christians].
05:44   And there is no word to give him [and to keep].
05:48   So, [you see] cowardice is totally permitted. This means that if this group of gendarmes
05:56   was faced for example with bandits
06:00   surrounded in a bank, who demanded, I don’t know, who demanded
06:05   a getaway car and the possibility of leaving with their booty and a hostage,
06:09   at that point you could still negotiate. You could still try to talk to them man to man;
06:13   if they held a woman hostage, you could tell them: “Listen, let the woman go. Let her go. We have
06:17   all day, we will do it man to man; I’ll come, I’ll replace her, everything will be all right.”
06:22   You could have had this conversation! You could! But with the Islamist terrorists
06:26   IT DOESN’T WORK. They won’t appreciate the gesture.
06:33   They won’t enter in a treaty with you; they won’t
06:37   give you their word and respect it. They won’t talk to you man to man.
06:42   There is no notion of “honor”. You will never manage
06:46   to put them into this logic of “man’s honor”,
06:50   even if it was a thug’s [honor]. It doesn’t exist where they come from.
06:54   Explicitly, they have the explicit
06:58   duty of not doing that with you;
07:04   of not respecting their word given to you. So, ignoring this —
07:10   if we go and recount the story in an extremely factual way —
07:14   The French state
07:18   offered one of its men, a lieutenant colonel
07:22   in this particular case, offered him
07:26   in holocaust, offering him in sacrifice to a terrorist.
07:31   That’s all. I know that there was a story,
07:35   a back story. But the facts are there: the French State offered
07:39   one of its men from the constabulary
07:43   to a terrorist who then assassinated him.
07:47   So what I would advise you, what I would advise you today,
07:51   is to go and be trained by the Algerians,
07:55   to be trained by the Russians, whom you hate, because the media
07:59   told you that Putin is an abominable monster who kills
08:03   the terrorists, or the “moderate rebels”, my bad, sorry.
08:08   I invite you to be trained by the Israelis,
08:12   by the Americans. I’m citing for you nations that don’t offer
08:16   their men to terrorists.
08:20   Today, today,
08:24   This country, which we call France,
08:28   is sending us an image such that
08:32   you ask yourself if they are really like that, or if there’s someone doing this on purpose.
08:40   A similar submission to the terrorists is unheard of anywhere else in the world.
08:45   No country in the world is submissive like that; I’m sorry.
 

17 thoughts on “Aldo Sterone on Trèbes, Part Two: The Pointless Death of Arnaud Beltrame”

  1. Brilliant. Once again, brilliant. This guy is covering ground that no one else is. Islam and the West are incommensurable in the fundamentals. In this case, honor, but his point about Muslim honor (or the lack thereof) ultimately invokes the vastly different conceptions of mankind that are at stake in this cultural clash. One could also add that the West and Islam have vastly different ideas about the sanctity of childhood, as well. Every time I hear about the systemic rape of children (Britain’s grooming gangs) I wonder what sort of children’s literature they could possibly have in the Muslim world. I mean, why would they even bother?

  2. To be fair, the officer may have offered to exchange himself completely by own choice (I don’t know), and may have done so even to reach his target (in a good or if not decisive way) .

    I don’t think we can speak of western honour, unless we delude ourselves, not at official level. Sorry, but it does not work like that, the west has been aggressively expanding by any means that can carry a veneer of legitimacy, and since whenever.

    That does not give justice to the Islamic or Arab reality of approach either, but since when was battle fair? To quote the most recent defense blurb, the idea is to make war unfair, for example.

    And honour? The Arabs have their code of honour, it is different from ours, and we mostly don’t fit into it.

    So to me it looks like our own claims to higher ideals, the intellectual and moral ground sought in combat, are shallow or merely a gesture of goodwill, because to two people trying to kill each other there is only one rule – survival.

    Where survival is no longer an option, then it is maximum destruction, in vengeance or to help those next closest to succeed in maintaining or furthering the clan or way of life or religion or ideal.

    Those at the strings in the west know this, we are being introduced to their reality, one they are better at.

    Enjoy.

    • I disagree .
      Christians are capable of chivalry ,honour and idealism and heroism. .
      Muslims are not .

      • I agree that Christians are capable of all of those, and demonstrate those virtues as chore tenets – absolutely.

        Muslims are not the antithesis they are made out to be either, in my opinion. As people they do show the same attributes, but in a different way.

        Chivalry – well I have witnessed enough of that, from simple kindnesses through to respect for their elders, and including towards women. It is not the western display though, often no more than ceding in a conversation, or readjusting attitude to suit others due. Very simple but real.

        Honour – especially to family, and religious, but also in own law.

        Idealism – sure Muslims have ideals, we don’t appreciate all of them because we are considered inferior in many of them.

        Heroism – Saddam wasn’t a hero ? To his followers he was and is…. there is a long list of Muslim heros, but we don’t or won’t recognise them as such.

        The point is – all of these qualities that exist in people, in the Muslim world, are directed towards a different objective, they follow a different story, in a different setting, one that is at odds with ours, or vice versa.

        BUT the real ( moderately strong insult) in all of this are the ( insults) in our own countries, and in Muslim countries, who are willing to try to ( insult) it all over, to ( insult) over their neighbouring regions, as well as their own nations.

        You know how it would be otherwise? Arabs and Muslims living in their patch of world as they have done for millenia, bothering no one, with western neighbours they respected, by force if need be – at whatever or wherever the border was.

        The fact is we like their resources, and we like own geopolitical dominance, and we are competing in the Muslim world with other, much more powerful than Arab, worldplayers.

        That is realpolitik for you, but I, as Christian or of my conscience, do not like seeing people at war, killing each other. It sucks, it sucks for everyone in whatever you imagine global karma to be.

        So only once this twisted story we live is straightened, once people return to their ” roughly proper places” and start showing the respect they also demand from their neighbours, and a status quo of understanding or distance is established, will we have some kind of peace again.

        God knows, we as people need that peace to expand into, instead of feeding whatever “state” with all that we have that is good.

        • This bit of touchy-feely, I’m-okay-you’re-okay relativism was rather incoherent, especially in the latter half.

          Above I said that the Islamic world and the West are incommensurable in the fundamentals. A Muslim’s conception of certain things–childhood, womanhood, manhood, the role of the person in society, etc.– is not merely DIFFERENT from our own, but involves a considerable cost in human suffering that we in the West deem unjust–and have for some time. Our route to a more just world has admittedly been gradual, but the idea that a person’s life has value in and of itself has been with us for a very long time. Their culture is not merely DIFFERENT in actuality, it systemically tolerates a significant degree of cruelty.

          As for enjoying their resources, that pleasure goes both ways. I often wonder where the Arab world would be if the West hadn’t invented the internal combustion engine.

          • It would be where it was designed I suppose.

            The trouble I have is with the use of a broad swathe to describe a people, and I also understand why we use that approach, particularly when it comes to Islam – with Islam you are either in or out, and if you are out you are next to worthless. That is not my choice, or your choice, it is a choice of that community as handed down to it by its authorities. I would like to think we are able to do better than to mimic it, which is why I simply say it belongs to its own world as per international political and customary standard that recognises every nation’s right to defend its borders and protect its territory to the benefit of its own people first. The Arab countries have no problem with this concept themselves.

            When we profit from its ways though, or when we taint ourselves by joining it in destructiveness, or by visiting destruction on it, we bring its reality back to our own nations.

            That is the black and white of it, the wishy washy will remain for the tide of individuals as you will not find two people the same, nor even agreement on where the definition of the mentioned virtues applies for them to be actually considered a virtue.

        • In addition, those of you who have read Tommy Robinson’s book “Enemy of the State” must recall that when he describes his teenage years in Luton where gangs formed along ethnic lines, the fighting between white Brits and Muslims was conducted along VERY different lines than that between White and Black Brits. He recounts that most of the time, when guys fought, it was a personal encounter, and they could often later move past the conflict and become friends. With the Muslim youths, the conflict was always-already a religious conflict, immediately involved THE GROUP, and there was definitely no development of a better relationship after blows had been exchanged.

        • [Vehement disagreement]. Muslims did not live in their patch of the world bothering no one. If they had they would only be in Arabia. They expanded ruthlessly into most of the Christian Mediterranean, the Byzantine Empire and large swathes of the Indian subcontinent destroying Buddhist culture in northern India and reducing all non Muslims to dhimmitude. [I have reason to doubt your expertise].

    • I’m not interested in the Muslim code of honor.

      I’m interested in practical survival. Any Muslim terrorist will kill his hostages. It is stupid to put oneself under his jurisdiction. The best way to prevent as much loss as possible, and prevent torture, is to kill the terrorists as soon as they’re identified. If the hostages get in the way, they’re better off than under the control of the child-rapist-torturer Muslims.

      The justice of Western intervention in Muslim countries is irrelevant. Even in our actions are unjust and interventionist in Muslim countries, I still have no intention, as far as I am able, to tolerate Muslim terror in our countries. It’s true that idiots like George W. Bush sent troops to build a nation in our image in Iraq, killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and 4,000 US troops for his vanity. But I would still kill any jihadis here immediately, without worrying about right and wrong.

  3. Does anyone know what book he’s talking about. I couldn’t make it out from the speech or from the presumably automated subtitles, and it isn’t in the introduction. Someone in the comments suggested it was al-Mughni by ibn Qudamah al-Maqdisi. That would be the Hanbali equivalent of the Reliance but that was 900 years ago rather than 1000 and I read somewhere that it has 10 volumes rather than 13. Either way I can’t find an English translation.

    Out of interest, here’s a fairly frank mediaeval book about jihad but I don’t know what its standing is among modern clerics and jihadis:

    https://archive.org/stream/TheBookOfJihadByIbnNuhass/The%20Book%20of%20Jihad%20by%20Ibn%20Nuhass#page/n0/mode/2up

  4. I recorded a couple of films about Mesrine from the tv about five years ago, but haven’t watched them yet. So many films and books, so much music and art; life really is too short!

    More seriously, I’d consider it a privilege to meet Aldo. I believe he lives in the UK; can anyone put us in touch?

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