“We met a Christian family whose daughter has been kidnapped by an emir so he can marry her." When Pascal Bruckner left Paris for Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, he could not have imagined that he would be facing such a dramatic situation - or that so many of his friends would laugh at his solidarity trip.
The famous French novelist and essayist wanted to visit the minorities massacred and dispersed by the Islamic State. “In Erbil there are tens of thousands of refugees of different ethnic types: Christians, Kurds, Sunnis, Yazidis, Shiites", Bruckner tells us.
In addition to the terror, there is the sarcasm with which one must contend.
"Before leaving for Erbil, some of my friends made fun of me. The radicalization of Islam meets the radicalization of the blindness that does not want to see anything, knows nothing, hears nothing. Christianity is mistakenly identified with Western imperialism, and Islam with the revolt of the oppressed. The first is an accomplice of absolute evil, the second is an eternal innocent."
"Christians are not good victims. Jews were expelled from the Arab and Muslim world after the creation of Israel. Today it is the turn of Christians. What began with the Jews continues with Catholics, Protestants, intellectuals, atheists, infidels, liberal Muslims. It is a relentless clock. It is as if radical Islam was planning to delete the two monotheistic religions that preceded it”.
When the war broke out in Gaza in the summer of 2014, there were demonstrations in support of the Palestinian Arabs. But not for Christians. “Nobody in the West wants to fight for the Christians, we suffer a complex of embarrassment. So half of the Christians have already left Iraq. The French Presidential office is struggling to use the word 'Christian'. The Obama administration has done the same thing for the killings at the kosher supermarket. It is a shame language that kills the victims a second time. The semantic issue is crucial."
According to Bruckner, there are many reasons for this silence: “The lack of vitality of the West, our civilization that is over, as at the end of the Roman Empire. And the left has lost everything: communism, Third World, working class in Europe, and there is only Islam, messianic as communism, and a mirage, the promise of the oppressed. For the Left, Islam is the future”.
Bruckner is skeptical about the future of this war: “The attack on Charlie Hebdo is a chapter of this war, as are Copenhagen and Brussels. It is a low intensity war that we can lose if we do not have the strenght to fight it. All means are good: intimidation, murder, censorship and the useful idiots of the far left."
It is a battle between the civilization of life and that of death. “The jihadists say ‘we love death as you love life’, the same cry of Fascists ‘viva la muerte’."
"But then we answered ‘no pasaran’, while today the cry is met with silence. It is an Islamic fascism we must oppose, a new resistance we must form. It will take decades to see the end of this war. But first we must admit that we are at war."