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JANET ALBRECHTSEN
Islamic terror: France’s Benjamin Erbibou says stop blaming West
Brandis has been asked to co-ordinate with state and territory laws to detain indefinitely those guilty of terrorist crimes. Alas, introducing new laws to combat terrorism is only one part of defeating terrorists. The harder task, entirely overlooked by our political leaders, is to change the cultural malaise of victimhood that infects our society and drives people into the hands of an Islamic terrorist ideology.
Combating this cultural malaise is every bit as important as new security laws, says Benjamin Erbibou, who works at an organisation based in Nice that provides grassroots counselling to men and women across France who are at risk of radicalisation and those already radicalised.
Around Nice alone, more than 650 people have been radicalised, many of them travelling to Syria or Iraq. At Entr’Autres (meaning Among Others), Erbibou works with psychologists and Islamic experts who see Muslims aged between 15 and 35 isolating themselves from society in the name of a political and religious ideology.
In the past two years alone, the organisation has worked with more than 100 people where counselling and advice can last from three to 18 months.
“We started to understand that something was happening in (our) suburbs … and there are a few things that we all the time can hear when we talk with the radicalised people,” Erbibou tells me during a long discussion via Skype from Nice last Friday.
Warning No 1: many on the Left won’t like what Erbibou has to say about the relationship between mental illness and radicalisation.
“With all this experience, we have been able to come to some conclusions … It has nothing to do with craziness,” he says.
“It’s a political proposition. Their main objective is very simple, they want to replace democracy and all the values of democracy, the laws of men, with the law of God and they want society that is ruled by sharia. That’s it. They say we have no legitimacy and we have no right to create our own laws.
“So this is a political proposition that is based on something religious.
“We are very clear about that from the work our psychologists do. They (the radicalised men and women) have no psychopathology. Not at all,” he says, pointing out that the same percentage of those with mental illness in the general community appears among those who are radicalised by an Islamic terrorist ideology. Erbibou points to Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the terrorist who killed 84 people in Nice on July 14.
“He was separated, he was depressed, but everybody breaks up, everybody is sad at times in their lives, not every body does what he did … It has nothing to do with mental illness.”
Islamic jihadist recruiters draw in conscripts using different grievance entry points, says Erbibou, including religious identity. And those recruiters are more often from Saudi Arabia than Syria or Iraq, he says, pointing to Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s official and extreme version of Islam.
“When Saudi Arabia expresses condemnation of terrorism, we know what they are doing. We see the recruiters here. And the problem is that when these Saudi recruiters go back to Saudi Arabia, they have created vocations here, some local recruiters start to work in this field.”
Erbibou mentions France’s so-called super-jihadist, Omar Omsen, who, from his fast-food shop in Nice, recruited more than 40 men to fight in Syria.
“Daesh, this new caliphate, it comes to fix something in the Muslim identity,” Erbibou says. “And what we understood is that there is the possibility of getting into this ideology, jihadism, this political ideology, when people break with society — when they stop wanting to integrate into society, when they hate society. They hate France.”
From working closely with young people, Erbibou observes that it’s not just Islamic jihadist recruiters who spread the victimhood message.
Warning No 2: those on the Left won’t like what he says next.
Erbibou says “the most terrible thing we can do for them” is to perpetuate the myth of victimhood. He condemns the mentality that says France and other Western countries are racist.
“If I have a friend who is Muslim, and I tell him all the time that France is racist, that it’s the most racist country in the world, that we live in apartheid France, that French people hate Muslims, what are the chances that he wants to integrate, why would he want to go to work, why would he want to merge in our society?” asks Erbibou.
We may want to take note after a week of hysterical accusations of racism against the Nine Network’s Sonia Kruger and senator-elect Pauline Hanson.
With more than five million Muslims in France, the victimhood narrative is especially dangerous. The horrific terrorist attack in Nice and the dozens of other recent terrorist attacks have a common thread: a toxic mix of victimhood and grievance that leads to retaliation.
Erbibou says while the French government is working to boost the security apparatus of the state, more needs to be done to combat a growing and pernicious victimhood mentality. “There is this left-wing (mentality) in France — still today — that it’s our mistake. It’s because of us. Because we didn’t integrate them. Because we are racist.
“That is terrible,” Erbibou explains, “because these words, these discourses only make them (those at risk of radicalisation) break with society.”
He says other groups in France that work with those who have been, or are at risk of being, radicalised peddle this dangerous message.
“If you keep telling people they are right to complain, to feel that France is racist, and stuff like that, you won’t help France, you won’t help them. You will help only ISIS (Islamic State).”
A flourishing victimhood culture exists in different spheres across Australia, too. Left-wing activists create “Islamophobia” registers and spruikers in the media are only too happy to reinforce the victimhood message to Muslims. Too many academics are steeped in a warped moral relativism. The University of Sydney’s Peter Chen told the ABC’s The Drum last week that the “radical Islamic terrorism” label makes sense only if we describe the West’s attempt to fight against terrorism in the Middle East as “radical Christian terrorism”.
We even have laws that institutionalise victimhood and grievance and offer legal retaliation in the courts. Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act invites people to claim victimhood status because their feelings are hurt. This section invites people to seek a legal response to their victimhood-based grievance in the courts.
When our own laws and many among us promote a perverted sense of victimhood, we shouldn’t be surprised when young men and women who feel aggrieved by the words and actions of others hunt down cartoonists in Paris or gays in an Orlando nightclub or people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice.
The related problem, says Erbibou, is the failure of more people in his country, and right across the West, to speak more proudly about democratic values.
“In France … and I think it’s the same for all the democratic countries, we lost our values, we forgot who we were, we forgot what’s the real basis of our civilisation.”
He makes the caveat that we all must: “Of course not all Muslims are terrorists, we have to remind people of that.”
Erbibou explains the strategy of Islamic State is to ask Muslims to perpetrate terrorist attacks so that French people think that all Muslims are potential terrorists, then Muslims feel discriminated against, making them more susceptible to Islamic State ideology.
“They express this strategy very clearly so we have to protect our fellow Muslims citizens. But this doesn’t mean that we have to close our eyes to what’s happening,” he warns, at the end of our conversation.
It’s all well and good to pass new terrorism laws. It’s appropriate too that Islamic leaders confront problems of their faith. But a broader and deeper look at our culture raises the question: when will our political leaders, and those on the Left who feed the victimhood mindset, open their eyes to how aspects of our own culture may fuel terrorism?
[email protected]
Nocookies
Islamic terror: France’s Benjamin Erbibou says stop blaming West
- JANET ALBRECHTSEN
- The Australian
- 12:00AM July 27, 2016
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Brandis has been asked to co-ordinate with state and territory laws to detain indefinitely those guilty of terrorist crimes. Alas, introducing new laws to combat terrorism is only one part of defeating terrorists. The harder task, entirely overlooked by our political leaders, is to change the cultural malaise of victimhood that infects our society and drives people into the hands of an Islamic terrorist ideology.
Combating this cultural malaise is every bit as important as new security laws, says Benjamin Erbibou, who works at an organisation based in Nice that provides grassroots counselling to men and women across France who are at risk of radicalisation and those already radicalised.
Around Nice alone, more than 650 people have been radicalised, many of them travelling to Syria or Iraq. At Entr’Autres (meaning Among Others), Erbibou works with psychologists and Islamic experts who see Muslims aged between 15 and 35 isolating themselves from society in the name of a political and religious ideology.
In the past two years alone, the organisation has worked with more than 100 people where counselling and advice can last from three to 18 months.
“We started to understand that something was happening in (our) suburbs … and there are a few things that we all the time can hear when we talk with the radicalised people,” Erbibou tells me during a long discussion via Skype from Nice last Friday.
Warning No 1: many on the Left won’t like what Erbibou has to say about the relationship between mental illness and radicalisation.
“With all this experience, we have been able to come to some conclusions … It has nothing to do with craziness,” he says.
“It’s a political proposition. Their main objective is very simple, they want to replace democracy and all the values of democracy, the laws of men, with the law of God and they want society that is ruled by sharia. That’s it. They say we have no legitimacy and we have no right to create our own laws.
“So this is a political proposition that is based on something religious.
“We are very clear about that from the work our psychologists do. They (the radicalised men and women) have no psychopathology. Not at all,” he says, pointing out that the same percentage of those with mental illness in the general community appears among those who are radicalised by an Islamic terrorist ideology. Erbibou points to Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the terrorist who killed 84 people in Nice on July 14.
“He was separated, he was depressed, but everybody breaks up, everybody is sad at times in their lives, not every body does what he did … It has nothing to do with mental illness.”
Islamic jihadist recruiters draw in conscripts using different grievance entry points, says Erbibou, including religious identity. And those recruiters are more often from Saudi Arabia than Syria or Iraq, he says, pointing to Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s official and extreme version of Islam.
“When Saudi Arabia expresses condemnation of terrorism, we know what they are doing. We see the recruiters here. And the problem is that when these Saudi recruiters go back to Saudi Arabia, they have created vocations here, some local recruiters start to work in this field.”
Erbibou mentions France’s so-called super-jihadist, Omar Omsen, who, from his fast-food shop in Nice, recruited more than 40 men to fight in Syria.
“Daesh, this new caliphate, it comes to fix something in the Muslim identity,” Erbibou says. “And what we understood is that there is the possibility of getting into this ideology, jihadism, this political ideology, when people break with society — when they stop wanting to integrate into society, when they hate society. They hate France.”
From working closely with young people, Erbibou observes that it’s not just Islamic jihadist recruiters who spread the victimhood message.
Warning No 2: those on the Left won’t like what he says next.
Erbibou says “the most terrible thing we can do for them” is to perpetuate the myth of victimhood. He condemns the mentality that says France and other Western countries are racist.
“If I have a friend who is Muslim, and I tell him all the time that France is racist, that it’s the most racist country in the world, that we live in apartheid France, that French people hate Muslims, what are the chances that he wants to integrate, why would he want to go to work, why would he want to merge in our society?” asks Erbibou.
We may want to take note after a week of hysterical accusations of racism against the Nine Network’s Sonia Kruger and senator-elect Pauline Hanson.
With more than five million Muslims in France, the victimhood narrative is especially dangerous. The horrific terrorist attack in Nice and the dozens of other recent terrorist attacks have a common thread: a toxic mix of victimhood and grievance that leads to retaliation.
Erbibou says while the French government is working to boost the security apparatus of the state, more needs to be done to combat a growing and pernicious victimhood mentality. “There is this left-wing (mentality) in France — still today — that it’s our mistake. It’s because of us. Because we didn’t integrate them. Because we are racist.
“That is terrible,” Erbibou explains, “because these words, these discourses only make them (those at risk of radicalisation) break with society.”
He says other groups in France that work with those who have been, or are at risk of being, radicalised peddle this dangerous message.
“If you keep telling people they are right to complain, to feel that France is racist, and stuff like that, you won’t help France, you won’t help them. You will help only ISIS (Islamic State).”
A flourishing victimhood culture exists in different spheres across Australia, too. Left-wing activists create “Islamophobia” registers and spruikers in the media are only too happy to reinforce the victimhood message to Muslims. Too many academics are steeped in a warped moral relativism. The University of Sydney’s Peter Chen told the ABC’s The Drum last week that the “radical Islamic terrorism” label makes sense only if we describe the West’s attempt to fight against terrorism in the Middle East as “radical Christian terrorism”.
We even have laws that institutionalise victimhood and grievance and offer legal retaliation in the courts. Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act invites people to claim victimhood status because their feelings are hurt. This section invites people to seek a legal response to their victimhood-based grievance in the courts.
When our own laws and many among us promote a perverted sense of victimhood, we shouldn’t be surprised when young men and women who feel aggrieved by the words and actions of others hunt down cartoonists in Paris or gays in an Orlando nightclub or people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice.
The related problem, says Erbibou, is the failure of more people in his country, and right across the West, to speak more proudly about democratic values.
“In France … and I think it’s the same for all the democratic countries, we lost our values, we forgot who we were, we forgot what’s the real basis of our civilisation.”
He makes the caveat that we all must: “Of course not all Muslims are terrorists, we have to remind people of that.”
Erbibou explains the strategy of Islamic State is to ask Muslims to perpetrate terrorist attacks so that French people think that all Muslims are potential terrorists, then Muslims feel discriminated against, making them more susceptible to Islamic State ideology.
“They express this strategy very clearly so we have to protect our fellow Muslims citizens. But this doesn’t mean that we have to close our eyes to what’s happening,” he warns, at the end of our conversation.
It’s all well and good to pass new terrorism laws. It’s appropriate too that Islamic leaders confront problems of their faith. But a broader and deeper look at our culture raises the question: when will our political leaders, and those on the Left who feed the victimhood mindset, open their eyes to how aspects of our own culture may fuel terrorism?
[email protected]
Nocookies
