France is Facing Up to Islamism, So Why Can't Britain?

Spiked : Watching Novembre, Cédric Jimenez’s 2022 dramatisation of the manhunt for the perpetrators of the November 2015 Bataclan massacre, what stands out is the gaping chasm between how France and Britain have reckoned with jihadism – an ideological threat that has irrevocably altered both our societies, far more than we would care to admit.

Looking back, the days of the Bataclan attack now feel like something of a fever dream. In 2015, ISIS loomed large. Suicide bombers and Kalashnikov-wielding jihadists attacked western European targets. At the same time, their fellow fanatics taunted us on social media from the Middle East, as they boasted of their new sex slaves and flaunted their public executions. They had hauntingly familiar accents. In Britain at least, the caliphate episode and its deadly reverberations have largely been memory-holed. Perhaps it’s just too difficult to comprehend that nearly 900 of our own citizens defected to an openly genocidal terror state.

France, though, has made a better hash of reckoning with all this. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Between the moment the Kouachi brothers burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in January 2015 and when Father Jacques Hamel had his throat slit on camera in July 2016, some 239 people had their lives taken by jihadists in France. As many as 2,000 people are thought to have abandoned France for ISIS or other jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria.

France has since held a series of high-profile trials on the massacres at Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan theatre and the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, where 86 people enjoying a Bastille Day fireworks display were mown down by a truck-driving jihadist. These trials have not only served to pass judgement on the authors of this terrorism against innocents, but have also helped the public comprehend this low-level insurgency and offered a kind of societal closure.

French publishers have followed suit, with high-profile works including Gilles Kepel’s Terror in France (2017), Hugo Micheron’s Le jihadisme français (2022) and La colère et l’oubli (2024), which translates roughly as ‘the rage and the forgetting’, and Hakim El Karoui and Benjamin Hodaye’s Les militants du djihad (2021). All of which have grappled intellectually with the phenomenon of French jihadism and can easily be found in high-street bookstores.

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