On Losing France

I love Paris. I love France. And I even love the French. And I am sad to lose them.

I know that this is perhaps unusual for an Englishwoman to say. But it is true nonetheless. I grew up going on holiday to France every year. I imbibed the message (true, in my opinion) that France has better food, better wine, better culture and better weather than England. When I was a child, French was the language my parents spoke when they didn't want us to understand, with the result that French was the language that I most wanted to learn.

I have learned French history and French culture, French language and French cooking, French herbs and French geography. At the end of a week in Strasbourg many years ago, I dreamed in French and thought in French.

I consider France to be a country that I belong to. It is mine, by right of love and understanding, along with England and America (Israel, of course, is mine by right of birth, as I am hers). As a historian I can say that France's history is part of my own history.

While I have always loved la France profonde more than gay Paris, Paris is still the heart of the country, and so it is a part of the heart of me. And so please understand that when I say that as Paris falls apart, a part of me does too. I imagine I would feel the same if it were London or New York that was dissolving into chaos. One of my cities can no longer protect her citizens and no longer cares for her Jews. We may not be being expelled as from Anatefka, with our packs on our backs and our children on donkeys, but we are being expelled nonetheless.

It may, in truth, be that France herself would like her Jews to stay, but she has been taken whole as hostage by Islamic terror and is in no position to make demands. She was complicit in her own downfall, but that makes it no better.

In a very small way I start to understand that pain and sadness of the Jews who lost Berlin, the ones who chose to leave when the horror of the Holocaust was still unthinkable. Oh the sadness of watching a country I care about, one that is beautiful and cultured and special to me, slip away. It's a different kind of loss, one that brings to mind this poem by Elizabeth Bishop.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

ISIS Isn't The Problem

I haven't done a media survey of any kind of thoroughness, but i have noticed from a few of the varied articles i read on the Charlie Hebdo attack that there is a new tendency to blame it on ISIS. I have no idea whether ISIS really is behind it (I doubt it, it is not their style), but the speed with which people are embracing that conclusion shows that that is what they want to believe. I think that to blame ISIS is another way of covering one's eyes and sticking one's fingers in one's ears so as not to have to face the truth: that fanatical Islam is a global terror organization that is so effective that its members do not need detailed instructions to follow its creed. 

It makes Western minds feel better if they can point to a hierarchical organized terror group 'masterminding' every plot, as though they were a Mid-East version of the boy scouts earning their badges. Because if they are part of an organization, then the West has an army that they are pitted against. There is a target, we can 'get' their Bin Laden or Hussein or Nasrallah and that will solve the problem. We just need to wipe out ISIS, or Al Qaeda, and then the problem has been solved. But to acknowledge the truth means to accept that we are facing an enemy who lives in every major capital city in the world, and who looks exactly like our colleagues at work, or companions on the bus, our accountants and our street cleaners and our taxi drivers, and who wants to kill us. You. Me. Indeed, they often are our street cleaners and bus drivers. It means realizing that we are facing an enemy that wears no uniform to help us identify it. 

It means acknowledging that we are facing a multi-tentacled self-reproducing organism, rather than a top-down leader-directed organization. If you cut off the head of the latter, it will die. If you cut off the head of the former, you discover that now you are holding a second monster. 

I would like to see the Western media articulate that terrorism is a product of fanatical Islam. It is not a justifiable tool of guerrilla militias with a righteous grievance which will be ended when the grievance is fixed. It is not the product of a sick-minded charismatic leader who grooms vulnerable youths, which will be ended when the leader is killed. It is not the sad consequence of a mentally unstable, twisted mind which can be cured by interventions and medication. It is the clear-headed, cold-blooded, self-motivated result of a bloodthirsty and death-loving ideology, and it will continue to seed itself in new carriers. It can't be stopped by the creation of a Palestinian state, by psychiatric interventions, or by cutting off its head. 

The monster that the West is facing is not going to go away because the West is hiding under the covers. Time for Western media to uncover its eyes and unblock its ears. This monster is real. It won't go away when you turn on the light, but you can't fight it in the dark.