FRANCE & ALGERIA
Prusak, Bernard G
France & Algeria nudging from the forensic evidence, investigators have indicated that a Decembers, 1996 subway bombing in Paris was likely perpetrated by the same Algerian terrorists responsible...
...While the French Islamic community expressed its outrage that such crimes would be committed in the name of Islam, Le Pen shamelessly exploited "this tragic incident...
...In the aftermath of the latest bombing, Henri Tincq, Le Monde's religion correspondent, quoted the hopeful words of the rector of a suburban Paris mosque: "It is in distress and misfortune that we recognize one another as brothers" (December 6, 1996...
...But do things really come down to Islam versus "the West," or to humanity against barbarity, here and there...
...In 1995, the violence swirled around the ex post facto election of Algerian President Liamine Zerouril...
...Terrorists like the Armed Islamic Croup cast a pall upon Islam and give ammunition to French xeno-phobes like Jean-Marie l.e Pen and his National Front faithful...
...As the philosopher Paul Feyerabend reflected toward the end of his life, there is no such thing as a "culturally authentic" murder...
...and the Algerian terrorists have all stigmatized "globalization...
...First he took a swipe at the French government for having imperiled the monks, then he turned on the monks themselves for having cared for injured fighters on both sides in the French-Algerian colonial war...
...France & Algeria nudging from the forensic evidence, investigators have indicated that a Decembers, 1996 subway bombing in Paris was likely perpetrated by the same Algerian terrorists responsible for similar attacks the year before...
...Against his own earlier relativism, he argued that culture is not an envelope, but the mode of our openness to life and its mysteries...
...Zeroual had been made president in 1994 by fiat of the military, which had seized power in 1992 to pre-empt the election of an Islamic government that was, ironically, antipathetic to democracy...
...The subway bombings, as well as the May 19% executions of seven French monks who lived in the mountains of Algeria, did little more than play into the hands of belligerents in a purported "clash of civilizations...
...A friend has told me that now, on the Paris subway, there is only silence and suspicion...
...Like today's Chinese and Iraqi tyrants, Le Pen & Co...
...Will the barbarians win...
...A different conception from ours of civic loyalism," he noted-as if the monks had thereby made themselves anathema (Le Monde, May 26-27,1996...
...In what the French newspaper Le Monde has called "the Algerian night," this manipulation cries out...
...The Armed Islamic Group, militants in Algeria's raging civil war, has repeatedly demanded that France cut its political and economic ties with Zeroual's regime...
...The rhetoric of opposing cultures disguises a primitive lust for power and disparages civilization and culture...
...BERNARD G. PRusak Bernard G. Prusak is Commonweal's 1996-97 editorial intern...
...Despite these pretexts, however, it is clear that the indiscriminate killings served no positive political goals...
...But indifferent to contradiction, they preach the same hate and practice the same stupid acts of violence the whole world over...
...This time, the violence came on the heels of a new constitution that banned Islamic parties and granted the president discretionary power...
...The reaction to the monks' murders makes for an instructive example...
Vol. 124 • January 1997 • No. 2
