“We are there in 2022, we are still fighting against things that we thought had disappeared from a modern, democratic society”, regrets the editorial director of Charlie Hebdo, Riss, Wednesday January 5 on franceinfo, on the occasion of the publication of a special issue of the satirical weekly, seven years after the Islamist attack which decimated its editorial staff.
franceinfo: You wrote an editorial on what you call “the myth of the cool Islamist”. What’s this ?
Riss: He is an Islamist who makes believe that his conception of society can be compatible with our democratic values, who is not necessarily aggressive or not necessarily violent, but who quietly imposes his methods and religious rules on everyone and nobody dares to say anything. When you read the testimonies of certain jihadists who are incarcerated in French prisons – I am thinking, for example, of testimonies which were collected by researcher Hugo Micheron – this is what they say. They clearly say that we have to change our strategy, that we have to penetrate French society other than through violence and intimidation, because that does not work. It’s a sort of grassroots activism, every day. There are requirements which are not a priori aberrant, we do not dare to oppose them, in schools, in companies. And at the end of the day, in the end, it creates an atmosphere where religion is imposed when it should not be present at this point.
What is the difference between your speech and that of Eric Zemmour on the alleged “great replacement”?
We can see that these speeches, when they are made by people like Éric Zemmour or Marine Le Pen, are a bit like the Trojan horse of a xenophobic and anti-immigrant speech. We can see that their obsession is immigration. So I think we have to decouple that from migration issues. This is what perverts. This is what also makes it difficult to understand what is going on. The far right creates an amalgamation between these questions of religion in society and immigration. However, this is not our talk at all. They are two different things and I think they have to be approached differently.
You attended several days of the trial of the November 13 attacks. Why ?
To see a little the extent of the task that awaited the magistrates. How to get to make clear what is not clear. In this kind of trial, like that of the attack aimed at Charlie hebdo, at first, everything is confused. There is a lot of information that we do not understand ourselves, even when we are a victim, and it is true that we expect a trial to be educational. Of course, it’s always a little intriguing to have people in front of you who have sowed death, who have sought to kill us. We know they are human. This is not a scoop. It is unfortunately terribly human to want to kill your neighbor, it is not very original. It’s about trying to figure out what’s on their mind.
And what’s on their minds?
I am unfortunately not very surprised. It’s still quite poor intellectually. These are pretty mediocre reasoning. It’s really low ceiling, it does not fly high.
“In fact, this Islamic thought is a kind of totalitarianism where you have to impose your conception on others on the pretext that it is of divine essence. We are there in 2022.”
Riss, editorial director of Charlie Hebdoto franceinfo
We are still fighting against things that we thought had disappeared from a modern, democratic society.
Do you happen to not think for a few hours about what happened on January 7, 2015?
A few hours, yes, but it’s true that we think about it all the time. I think it’s like that for all the victims of attacks, those of November 13 in Paris and Saint-Denis or July 14 in Nice. It’s not the same life as before. It is not possible to find the life before. It’s hard to describe, but we have to live with a part of ourselves that is amputated. It’s like an amputation. It’s half of my life. All these people that I knew, who brought me things, with whom I worked for years, who are no longer there, who left in an abnormal way, in a violent way … They were taken from us, they were stolen from us. Part of ourselves has been stolen from us.