French philosophers back teacher in hiding after islam article

PARIS, Oct 2, 2006 (AFP) - France's best-known philosophers published an open letter in Le Monde newspaper Monday expressing support for Robert Redeker, the teacher who is in hiding after receiving death threats for an article attacking Islam.

The writers -- who include Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain Finkielkraut and Andre Glucksmann -- urged the French state to defray Redeker's expenses while he is under threat "just as the English authorities did not hesitate to do during the Rushdie affair."

Redeker, a 52 year-old father of three and philosophy teacher at a lycee near Toulouse, is receiving round-the-clock police protection and changing address every two days after receiving death threats for his September 19 article in the right-wing daily Le Figaro.

In it he described the Koran as a "book of extraordinary violence" and Islam as "a religion which ... exalts violence and hate".

"It is very sad. I exercised a constitutional right, and I am punished for it -- here in the heart of the republic," Redeker was quoted as saying in the open letter.

"The authorities oblige me to keep moving. I am homeless. As a result I am in a desperate financial situation, as all the costs are at my expense," he was quoted as saying.

Redeker's supporters compared him to British writer Salman Rushie, "hounded for 15 years across the planet" over his book "The Satanic Verses", as well as to Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh, killed "like a dog" in Amsterdam in 2004.

"A handful of fanatics brandishes alleged religious laws to jeopardise our most basic freedoms. To which threats are now added the murmurings audible across Europe about the 'provocations' we must avoid in order not to antagonise these supposed foreign sensibilities," the writers said.

"Times are getting tough in Europe. Now is not the moment for cowardice," they said.

Redeker, who has published several books of philosophy, wrote his article in reaction to the fury unleashed in Muslim countries by Pope Benedict XVI's references to Islam in an address in Germany two weeks ago.

Likening Islam to communism, Redeker said that "violence and intimidation are the methods used by an expansionist ideology ... to impose its leaden cloak on the world".

He also compared the Prophet Mohammed unfavourably to Jesus Christ, describing the founder of Christianity as a "master of love" and the founder of Islam as a "master of hate".

C'mon, you can't fault them for coming to his defense. On the contrary, it must be noted that they are the ONLY ones who have done so. This poor guy says that he is homeless, is moving around at his own expense. Rushdie moved around at the government's expense. Now consider this. The French government will pay for all kinds of ridiculous, frivolous things but not this. The French government and the overwhelming majority of the French people have MUCH of which to be ashamed. But these philosphers, even if their action is patently useless, at least showed some modicum of courage. The typical European response to any suffering is to raise the right hand, place it on the right cheek and make the sound of a barnyard animal in labor. Note their response to Kosovo, Darfur, ......... They simply do not care anymore than to offer platitudes. At least the philosophers did something, no matter how trivial. Sometimes the pot needs to be stirred. Now we'll see how the rest of France responds.

The Communist "Nation" published a "Letter to the American Left" by B-H Levy that begins in a rather promising way. Evidently he is offering advice on how to fix the left, but it's still pretty striking and amusing:

Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.

I know, of course, that the term "left" does not have the same meaning and ramifications here that it does in France.

And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an authentic "left" in the United States, in the European sense.

But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking.

And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the other side--to the contrary, through the looking glass of the American "left" lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or Thoreau, is thoroughly enigmatic. The 60-year-old "young" Democrats who have desperately clung to the old formulas of the Kennedy era; the folks of MoveOn.org who have been so great at enlisting people in the electoral lists, at protesting against the war in Iraq and, finally, at helping to revitalize politics but whom I heard in Berkeley, like Puritans of a new sort, treating the lapses of a libertine President as quasi-equivalent to the neo-McCarthyism of his fiercest political rivals; the anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot in one of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the ultimate (and most Machiavellian) laboratories of the "enemy," staring in disbelief when I say I've spent quite some time exploring them; ex-candidate Kerry, whom I met in Washington a few weeks after his defeat, haggard, ghostly, faintly whispering in my ear: "If you hear anything about those 50,000 votes in Ohio, let me know"; the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton who, when I questioned them on how exactly they planned to wage the battle of ideas, casually replied they had to win the battle of money first, and who, when I persisted in asking what the money was meant for, what projects it would fuel, responded like fundraising automatons gone mad: "to raise more money"; and then, perhaps more than anything else, when it comes to the lifeblood of the left, the writers and artists, the men and women who fashion public opinion, the intellectuals--I found a curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or irritability, when confronted with so many seething issues that in principle ought to keep them as firmly mobilized as the Iraq War or the so-called "American Empire" (the denunciation of which is, sadly, all that remains when they have nothing left to say).

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060227/levy

It's not often that you find anything this readable in the Nation.

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