Salafists is causing a sensation in Paris. One of its makers is my friend François Margolin.
We got to know each other in the late 1990s when I was reporting from Ahmad Shah Massoud's base in Panjshir and Margolin was doing his first documentary about the Taliban, which had recently come to power in Kabul.
And later when I was covering forgotten wars around the world and he was making the first and so far only film on the phenomenon of child soldiers.
He produced my documentary on Libya, as well as the one I am finishing on the Kurds' war against Daesh.
The fact is that there are few struggles that I have been involved in over the past three decades where our paths have not crossed, beginning with the day in 1979 (our first encounter, I believe) when we found ourselves in Paris protesting, heckling, and, in the end, breaking up a speech by the spokesman (possibly Robert Faurisson, but I am not certain) of a movement that was just starting to become known as Holocaust denial. François Margolin was the survivor of a family wiped out by the Holocaust by bullets in Lithuania; I was the author The Testament of God, published earlier that year.
All of this is to say that I obviously have no doubt concerning the intention of the film that my friend has made with Lemine Ould Salem.
Nor do I have any doubt about the finished film and the effect it may have on people who go to see it in the two Parisian cinemas where it is being shown.
Because unlike those who are discussing it by hearsay or repeating, like broken records, the mantra of wishing neither to know nor to understand, I went to see the film -- twice. In it I find three key virtues.
First, it casts the ideological dimension of jihadism in a sharp relief rarely achieved. Most commentators depict jihadists as unhinged and feeble-minded individuals who are radicalized on the Web and fall into jihad as if by magic. Ould Salem and Margolin demonstrate that the process is much more complicated and well structured than that. They show that lodged deep in the Web are implacable ideologues who adhere to a fundamentalist vision of the world and are committed to total war with the democrats of Europe and the Arab Muslim world. How inconvenient! This is not nearly as simple as telling ourselves that we are dealing with half-wits from impoverished neighborhoods who have been traumatized by a difficult childhood, all of which might be explained away by the famous culture of excuses. But, unfortunately, the film's version is the truth.
Second, Salafists highlights -- and this, too, has seldom been done -- the religious inspiration that motivates these criminals. Yes. Shortly after becoming paralyzed by the legitimate fear of lumping Islam in with Islamism we fell into the opposite trap, the one that Jean Birnbaum, in Un Silence religieux (a religious silence), calls "no-connectionism" -- as in, Islamic radicalism has "no connection with Islam."
Ould Salem and Margolin beg to differ. And they prove their case. By filming preachers, imams, doctors of the faith, and their acolytes who find in the Koran some of their reasons for killing, the filmmakers reveal the matter in all its complexity. Islam against Islam. Murderous Islam against enlightened Islam. The absolute necessity of supporting the adherents of the latter in their long-term war against the former. And, in order to do that, the obligation to get to know, to stake out, and, in the end, take sides on the theological-political battlefield. This is imperative, as the film makes plain.
The filmmakers accomplish yet a third task, one that is crucial for anyone wishing to understand, and, in understanding, to combat jihadism. The film illustrates the appeal -- yes, the appeal; the word cannot be avoided -- of jihadist language to candidates for mass terror. It is enough to watch and listen as the Tunisian owner of the website entitled "the modern Salafist" presents his apologia for cool and trendy sharia. It is enough to hear another promoter describe, in a lulling voice, the paradise that was awaiting the martyrs who went off to mix their blood with those of their victims at the Hyper Cacher and the Bataclan in Paris. Or a third evoking the Gehenna of our unjust, corrupt, and unequal societies -- until proper order can be restored. So goes fascism. So went Nazism, the homicidal nihilism of which was borne along by the enthusiasm that Nazism could inspire in German and European crowds. So went Pol Pot-ism, which would never have blinded (and could not continue to blind) so many opinion leaders and shapers of conscience in the West if it had not been able to build on an ardent, powerful, and frightening desire for purity.
The same holds true of this third form of fascism. Seeking the human face behind the hideous mask is essential if we wish to understand and defuse the sort of promises that Salafist jihadism is making to its henchmen, promises that the film "contextualizes" by means of the scenes of barbarism that are their precise and awful counterpoint.
None of this is pleasant, I concede. And we all know that societies often prefer to kill the messenger rather than listen to the message, though doing so is invariably a tragic mistake. By getting close to the killers, by reporting their well nigh unbearable words, and by revealing the mechanisms by which those words inflame susceptible souls in a growing number of countries, these two great reporters have performed a public service of immense importance.
Translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy