Je Suis Charlie - A Good Wind
Blowing from France 

By: Marian Horvat, Ph.D.

Heads of State from around the world flew into Paris on Sunday, January 11, 2015, to take part in a massive street march against Muslim terrorism. The demonstration – reported to be the largest in the country’s history – was to express collective indignation against the Al Quaeda-inspired attack against a satirical newspaper in Paris - Charlie Hebdo - that dared to published cartoons ridiculing Mohammed. 

 

A million indignant people marched in
Paris on January 11 to protest Islamic terrorism

Two terrorists – whose names do not deserve mention – entered the newspaper office with Russian Kalashnikov rifles shouting “Allahu akbar” (Allah is great!) and killed 10 members of its staff and two policemen who came to their defense. Eleven others were wounded.

The same day, another Muslim from their cell group shot a police woman and a jogger, and then attacked a grocery store in Paris’ Jewish sector and held 24 customers hostage. The siege ended with four more deaths of innocent civilians, raising the total murders to 17.

The Muslim terrorists obviously hoped with this tactic to start the New Year of 2015 by frightening and cowing our soft West into submission and fear. This bold attack, they seemed to be thinking, would certainly silence any criticism of Islamism since everyone knows that there are Muslim terrorist pockets planted in all the major cities worldwide.

Instead, surprisingly, the opposite happened. France became angry and indignant. The good Catholic militancy that once characterized this country and earned it the title the Eldest Daughter of the Church, long slumbering and even feared dead, ignited over these attacks of Islamic terrorism. And the free world – if such it can still be called – looked to France, felt its fire, and echoed its defiant response.

First in France, then everywhere, came the rallying call Je Suis Charlie - I am Charlie. That is say, I stand with Charlie Hebdo, I ridicule Mohammed and I am against Islamic terrorism.

The newspaper itself announced the next day it would not alter its policy of publishing critiques of Islamism and Mohammed. Several European newspapers, in an expression of solidarity and the protection of free speech, ran the cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed on their front pages. When one of them, a German tabloid in Hamburg, was firebombed, the editors stated defiantly that they would not be intimidated by the terrorists.

The courage to resist Islamic terrorism has even extended to the United States. Today the super-liberal Los Angeles Times published an editorial cartoon about the Charlie Hebdo murders. And the notoriously leftist Time magazine in its online Foreign Affairs section published a strong critique of our pro-Islam Barak Obama’s absence at the Paris demonstration yesterday.

 

Heads of State lead the Paris march;
Barack Obama is absent

The article by Senator Ted Cruz is titled “Our President Should Have Been There” and notes:

“On Sunday, leaders representing Europe, Israel, Africa, Russia, and the Middle East linked arms and marched together down Place de la Concorde in Paris. But, sadly, no one from the White House was found among the more than 40 Presidents and Prime Ministers who walked the streets with hundreds of thousands of French citizens demonstrating their solidarity against radical Islamic terrorists.

“The absence is symbolic of the lack of American leadership on the world stage, and it is dangerous.“

Cruz continues addressing Islamic terrorism. “We must, as Americans, demand that our nation summon the will to stand up and lead the effort against it.”

What happens next?

The important question now is what will happen next?

Cruz himself poses the question in his editorial: “Our choice now is either to confront this intolerable threat to our liberty, or to continue to respond to the attacks as if they are isolated incidents that we might be able to prevent if we would only stop somehow ‘provoking’ them.”

We can foresee the liberal media banding together to pretend that these attacks were “isolated” violent acts that do not reflect Islamism. The attempt is already being made to channel the Charlie indignation into an ”opportunity” to seek dialogue with the “real” Islamism of peace and tolerance, which we know does not exist.

 

The neo-Nazi PEGIDA in Germany
organized a march in Dresden

There is also a chance that the Nazi populist groups that are spreading across Europe will usurp the reaction to fuel their false-right agenda. For example, Le Pen’s National Front party, known for its anti-immigrant stance, is playing on the incidents to increase its popularity. Record numbers are also allying against “’Islamisation’ in Germany under the "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident" (PEGIDA), known for its Nazi sympathies.

Clearly what would be needed to shepherd this good reaction would be a militant and courageous response from the Catholic Church.

I do not think, however, we can expect this from Pope Francis, whose short critique of the Paris attacks stressed that the attackers were “enslaved by deviant forms” of Islamism. Instead of condemning the religion that has inspired horrendous attacks on Catholics throughout the Mideast, he called on Muslim leaders in particular to condemn “extremist interpretations of their faith.”

It is hardly the needed call for a new Crusade against an Islamism that threatens to overrun the West in a urban guerilla war against Christianity.

We should pray that Our Lady raises a Catholic leader or group who knows how to take advantage of this good reaction and undertake that much-needed Crusade that would have the double aim of the fight against Islam and the restoration of Christendom. If this does not happen, the good ‘Je suis Charlie’ tide will soon recede and be forgotten… 

Without good leadership, the Je suis Charlie movement will fade
away and the West will continue to sink in its fallacious tolerance