French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot are still alive after one month of captivity at the hands of the Islamic Army in Iraq, according to most credible news sources.
Despite having not reneged on the controversial banning of public symbols of religion in public schools, France was victorious in its campaign to win the support of not only Muslim and Arab leaders, both religious and secular, worldwide but of its own ostracized Muslims.
In the wake of the kidnapping of the pair and their Syrian driver, President Jacques Chirac launched a double-edged campaign to release them.
On one hand, he refused to give into the terrorists’ demands of repealing the ban on headscarves, earning nods from the U.S. and its allies in the war on terror. On the other hand, he sent his foreign minister, Michel Barnier, on a campaign to recruit support among Arab states.
Simultaneously, to Chirac’s delight, France’s Muslim community united, for the first time in the country’s collective memory, in a call for the journalists’ release.
The French council of Muslims (Conseil français du culte musulman) sent a delegation to Baghdad to lobby for their release. In Paris, Muslim groups, from moderate to radical, gathered for a prayer for Chesnot and Malbrunot’s release and the return of the headscarf to French schools. An imam directly quoted Chirac in his sermon, a move that is rare and would have been scorned in other circumstances, according to French analysts.
The Union of Islamic Organizations in France and CRIF, the umbrella organization for France’s Jewish community, even arranged for a rendezvous.
An editorial in the daily Le Monde published earlier this month stated, “The events of the past few days show that the Muslim community has taken advantage of the situation to express, more than it ever has before, its attachment to France and its desire for integration and recognition.”
France’s Muslims, while slowly integrating into France’s public and academic institutions, are still largely concentrated in squalid slums in the country’s south and suffer from a large share of the racism sprouting from the country’s adaptation to its status as absorber of migrants from third-world countries.
Since the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intensified in 2000, members of France’s Muslim and Jewish communities as well as others who are not affiliated with either group have become engaged to some degree in a low-grade replica of the war – mostly via words, street attacks, and vandalism.
At the same time, in France, as in the rest of the world, Muslims have been put on the defensive, seeing themselves as the victims of a racist war on terror. France’s Muslims have generally responded or reacted to the state, but until now –despite the republic’s claims to the contrary- were never part of the state.
Yet, North America and supporters of Israel color France as being soft on Muslim incitement and international terror. France’s refusal to participate in the U.S.-led war in Iraq was the prime source of this divergence.
It is precisely the “softness” that alienates France from the U.S. and its allies that has reinforced Muslim and Arab support for France in this time of crisis.
France has succeeded where no other free state could have.
Colin Powell would not plead cordially with leaders of Arab states for the release of U.S. hostages. He would certainly not receive condolence calls from Hamas, Hizbullah and Yassir Arafat.
Because France has managed to find a perch between the West and the Muslim world, it has been able to turn the hostage crisis into a victory both within its borders and in the international arena.