August 31, 2004
The French are learning the hard way that no nation can be neutral in the war on terrorism. Despite President Jacques Chirac's decision not to join the U.S.-led international coalition against Saddam Hussein, France is being held hostage in Iraq by an extremist Islamic terrorist gang that has kidnapped two French journalists. The terrorists are demanding that France rescind a domestic law banning students from wearing Muslim head scarves at public schools.
France's strong opposition to the war in Iraq has not granted its citizens immunity from terrorism. Apparently, that is what the French expected. Now they have discovered, very late in the day, that no one is safe from fanatical terrorists.
The group claiming responsibility for seizing the two journalists calls itself "The Islamic Army in Iraq." The same group kidnapped an Italian journalist last week and killed him when Italy ignored a demand that it withdraw its troops from Iraq.
French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier described the two journalists, both experts on the Middle East, as "two men of good will who have always shown their understanding for these people and their fondness for the Arab and Muslim world."
The terrorists justify kidnapping the journalists to force the French government to lift the scarf ban, claiming it is "an attack on the Islamic religion and personal freedoms." Ayman Zawahiri, the al-Qaida operative believed responsible for some of the deadliest terrorist attacks against international targets in Iraq, said earlier this year in an interview with an Arab television station that the ban on the use of head scarves by Muslim schoolgirls signified that France was "defending the freedom of nudity and depravity" and "fighting chastity and decency." The ban, he said, was "a crime" similar to "the burning of villages with their people in Afghanistan, demolishing houses over their sleeping residents in Palestine, and killing the children of Iraq."
There is no reasoning with fanaticism. As France's influential daily newspaper Le Monde editorialized yesterday, "No diplomacy can claim to be any kind of Maginot line that would protect us better than our Spanish or Italian neighbors from the death wish that has been at work since the attacks of September 11, 2001."
It was about time that the French learned that lesson. But it is to be hoped that it doesn't entail a terrible price and that the lives of two innocent men are spared by their release or, better still, by their rescue and the capture of the terrorists.
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