“While amateur videos from that night have been circulating all over the internet, the daily newspaper’s journalists have provided almost no visual support for the facts they are describing.” JOEL SAGET/AFP
FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE – For the lawyer, the lack of media coverage of the shooting that left six injured outside a church in London on Saturday 14 January and the acts of vandalism in Catholic buildings symbolizes the double standards of the media and the political left.
Gilles-William Gold Nadel is a lawyer and essayist. Every week he decodes the messages for FigaroVox.
Sunday, January 15 at 8:30 am, Le Figaro publishes a lengthy article reporting that a seven-year-old girl died in a shooting after Saturday’s shooting at a Catholic church in London that left five others injured is in critical condition. The faithful had come to attend a mass in honor of a mother and daughter who died in November. At 10 a.m., the public broadcaster France Info broadcasts a lengthy report on an alleged “new George Floyd case” in distant Los Angeles, but doesn’t give a second to the tragic events in our nearest England. At 1 p.m., France Inter devotes long minutes to the demonstrations in Tel Aviv but is silent on the London drama.
The Saint-Louis-Roi church in Champagne-au-Mont-d’Or was vandalized last Tuesday. Father Martin Charcosset, parish priest, published in a press release: “The objects present in the church: candles, books, vases, etc. were thrown on the ground. The crib placed in front of the altar was turned over and damaged. The Stations of the Cross and the paintings of the choir are essentially destroyed”. Belatedly informed by social networks, I bitterly tweeted: “My imagination is powerless to describe the media reaction if it had been a mosque or a synagogue”. In fact, the agreed press was silent. Without the so-called “specialist sphere” the community communiqué would have remained a dead letter. These crèches, which cause a stir in city halls, make no noise when they fall to the ground. The Stations of the Cross by silent Christians are also daily physical attacks, second in proportion to those of the Jews and far ahead of those against Muslims.
The Bordeaux court itself recognized that the building at issue was not constructed for religious purposes.
Gilles William Gold Needle
Another more insidious persecution over which Christianity has the sad virtual monopoly: judicial and administrative initiatives not only against nativity scenes, but also against representations and traces of Catholicism, even when there is no religious intent. Thus, the Administrative Court of Appeal of Bordeaux, upholding the decision of the Administrative Court of Poitiers, ordered the municipality of La Flotte-en Ré on the island of the same name to remove a statue of the Virgin Mary in the middle of a crossroads in the aforementioned town.
It is the association La Libre-Pensée 17 that led to this decision because it called for the application of the 1905 law on the separation of church and state. It is not my intention to discuss the legal merits of the decision. It would still have to be written. The city’s first magistrate, Jean-Paul Heraudeau, provoked “a ridiculous controversy” and stressed that the building was “part of the historical heritage” of Flotte-en-Ré. I would have added from its cultural landscape. The Bordeaux court itself recognized that the building at issue was not built for religious purposes but was offered by a family who only wanted to celebrate the great good fortune that their child soldiers had returned from the war alive and well. This is reminiscent in some respects of the orderly demolition of the statue of Saint-Michel des Sables d’Olonne, which was doomed to the same disastrous fate despite a popular referendum overwhelmingly in favor of its preservation.
Let’s put it bluntly: under contempt for the old religion, contempt for the old white man.
Gilles William Gold Needle
But what questions me much more is the attitude of these thinkers who are supposed to think freely. I can’t remember any of these militant secularists ever taking legal action against a much more enterprising and new religion in our aging country. I’ve never caught any of them attacking a public street prayer or an outfit with religious connotations at a school in the Republic. The law of 1905 separating church from state was painfully passed when the first became too concerned with the affairs of the second. I do not have the impression that the religion of Christ is the first danger today, threatening both the state and secularism. For this reason, it seems obvious that our so-called freethinkers are the first prisoners of the deadly ideology of the time. This secular ideology, which, for example, cannot comprehend without screaming blasphemy that a genocide of Christians may have been committed in the Vendée. This ideology of love for difference worships the distant but loathes the near.
With submissive reverence she spares the seeking religion of “the other”, but despises the helpless adherents of the old religion. She spreads her bile everywhere. One recent example among a thousand. Daniel Cohn-Bendit was the presenter of the program “C à vous” on France 5 this week. In a consensual atmosphere, he was able to state without contradiction that France is suffering from a terrible lack of immigration. Even if this does not seem to be the majority opinion of the population. It is, he undeniably declared, a “conspiracy” whose main conspirators, named Ciotti and Le Pen, are denigrating the migration phenomenon. Finally and above all came this courage that I submit to the wisdom of my reader: “Between us, if the French identity were only the people of the RN and Zemmour, you would have to flee the country, you will not stay there any longer, it is terrible” .
Beneath the cobblestones the beach, and beneath that ugly cobblestones aversion to the old and leniency to the newcomers. Let’s put it bluntly: under contempt for the old religion, contempt for the old white man.
SEE ALSO – London: six injured after shooting at church