Meeting in Paris at his home with French author and activist Marek Halter. Sharing his frame of mind after recurrent Terror attacks and his views on the challenge offered by jihadism.
Franck Guillory: Three months and a half after Terror attacks orchestrated in Paris by radical islamists, over a month after murders in the Bardo Museum in Tunis, which is your own take on these events. What is your frame of mind?
Marek Halter: We shall always hope for the better… Read the
Bible where it is written that, when creating a disease, God imagines simultaneously
a cure for it. We, human beings, are not God and therefore we are certainly not
as cautious and may take us time to conceive a response. But we will end up
finding one.
Franck Guillory: Very early on, in the
aftermath of Terror attack on Charlie Hebdo on January 7th 2015, French
President François Hollande declared that “we are at war”. Others had already
written or said it publicly… Do you consider that we are at war?
Marek Halter: Yes, it is a war but it is one different from
the wars we have been confronted to so far.
Hitler was
Hitler. The threat was identified and well known. Now we are confronted to an
unprecedented threat with an enemy which seems capable to hit us anywhere and
at any time.
More to the
point, this enemy does not share at all our perception and conception of life
and death. So far, with very rare exceptions, the enemies we have had to fight
wanted to kill without taking the risk to be killed.
Nowadays,
those who are threating us are not scared to be killed. On the contrary, they
see their own death as a promise in after-life.
Franck Guillory: How did we reach such a point?
Marek Halter: This is not just a matter of human development,
misery, suffering as still pretend some generous “beautiful mind”, as Hegel
used to call them.
Radicalization
and growing violence find their origin in a lack of prospect. There are no
ideologies able to help people facing ultimate misery. Nothing, not even a “red
sun on the horizon” as French poet Jacques used to say.
Franck Guillory: Isn’t this radical perception
of Islam, which is also a perversion of Islam – we believe – an ideology in
itself which has come to fill the gap left by the former domineering and then
failed ideologies…
Marek Halter: It is the return of God, a return to God. When
nothing is left, men put their destinies in the hands of God. “Inch
Allah”, “God wishing”…
The second
post-Second World War generation shares a huge responsibility through failing
to offer some collective adventure, a renewed ideological adventure, some hope…
In the name of God, some Muslims are now offering pour souls some adventure. These days, you
can jump in a plane to Turkey, cross the Syrian border and find yourself wearing
a uniform, handling a Kalachnikov machine gun and experiencing some sort of
adventure.
There’s
seemingly nothing else on offer and some souls, unconscious, ignorant don’t
manage to resist the temptation.
Franck Guillory: How could we deter them from
doing so?
Marek Halter: Governments have some options. Some means of
deterrence do exist…
It is
necessary to strengthen secret services, to expand their funding. We should, as
an example, deploy a better control of social networks to counter jihadist
propaganda.
We must
target them where they are. And we should do so without underestimating the
risk of fuelling jihadism and reinforcing our enemies through such military
operations in Middle East and elsewhere where radical Islamism is spreading.
Marek Halter is born in Poland in 1936. Having fled the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto, he returned to the Polish capital city after the war and then moved to Paris in 1950.
To learn more: The Wall for Peace
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