The French writer Zineb el-Rhazoui was born in Morocco and apostatized from Islam when she was young. She was a staff writer for Charlie Hebdo at the time of the jihad massacre in 2015, but she was visiting Morocco when the attack occurred, and thus escaped her colleagues’ fate.
In the following video from a French TV panel, Ms. El-Rhazoui brings up a point about Islamic terror attacks that I hadn’t considered before: in most cases, from the point of view of the survivors and victims’ families, justice is not seen to be done. No satisfaction is to be gained from seeing the old suspensus per collum, or the firing squad, or the electric chair, or the needle in the arm, or even the handing down of a life sentence in a court of law. In almost all cases the perpetrators, being determined to claim their martyrdom, are gunned down during an exchange of fire with police or soldiers.
All the survivors ever get is a low-res video of a mujahid falling down in the street and then being surrounded by police. And then they get to read news reports that the alleged perpetrator was allegedly killed, and see interviews in which the killer’s relatives insist that he was innocent, and that the police murdered him. No judge or jury ever hands down a verdict of “guilty”.
As Zineb el-Rhazoui points out, this leaves the survivors and families without a sense of closure. Justice is not seen to be done.
Note: The publication of a new book by Michel Houellebecq is mentioned in this clip; see this Time article for more information.
Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Video transcript:
The German government is considering charging Muslim citizens a “mosque tax” to finance the construction of new mosques. The proposed action is an attempt to replace the foreign funding of mosques in Germany.
