Gavin Mortimer
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The foreword to Micheron’s book was written by Gilles Kepel, France’s leading authority on Islamism, whose first book on the subject, The Banlieues of Islam: birth of a religion in France, was published in 1987.
Shortly after the twin attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in January 2015, he was asked if the perpetrators were lone wolves. ‘The lone wolf theory is an idiocy,’ he retorted. ‘It’s deployed by pseudo-academics and journalists who follow the news but who don’t study and don’t know the reality of the [Islamic] texts and the actions of the jihadists. It’s a pure fantasy that has never existed. There are individuals who act alone or in pairs but they are part of a network, they have been inspired.’
For a decade France has been on the frontline of the Islamist war on Europe, and for that reason it has a more profound understanding of the scale of the challenge. They have learned that the lone wolf narrative is convenient but delusional; that only the eradication of the ecosystems that nurture the likes of Mohamed Merah, Larossi Abballa and Abdoullakh Anzorov, the teenager killer of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty, will bring the barbarism to an end.
Britain is a significant way behind France in its comprehension of Islamic extremism, and the appalling death of Sir David Amess may reveal yet again the inability – or the unwillingness – to confront this grim reality. The newspapers this morning are full of ‘lone wolf’ descriptions. The ‘UK faces wave of “lone wolf terror attacks from bedroom radicals”’ is just one such headline.
Many in Britain can no longer bring themselves to even utter the word ‘Islam’ so, to paraphrase Kepel, they deploy idiocy. France has now armed itself intellectually for the fight, but Britain is still running scared.
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