Saturday evening, November 18, during a village festival in Drôme, Thomas, 16, was stabbed to death by a gang of young people who had come to disrupt a community ball. As too often, it is on X (formerly Twitter) that the controversy takes off. The new faces of the extreme right and their army of anonymous accounts seize the boy’s still warm body to distill their ready-made thoughts. Eric Zemmour recycles his “francocide”, when his young lieutenant, Stanislas Rigault, takes “the bet” – no doubt he thinks he is in the sports lottery – that the suspects “will have names with immigration connotations”. The day before, on Friday, in Villecresnes in Val-de-Marne, a septuagenarian attacked Mourad, a gardener, in the throat and cut him with a cutter after insulting him as a “dirty bugnoule”. A story of a poorly parked van. Here is Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his recovering cohort who denounce a “vile attempt at Arabophobic throat-slitting”.
The living room scavengers are out. The symmetry of the images is striking. It is Marion Maréchal who films herself, facing the camera, to say that Thomas’ murder is an act of “anti-white racism”, the start of a “civil war”. It is Louis Boyard, LFI deputy, also facing the camera, who denounces the silence of the media, the laxity of the justice system – which did not recognize the racist nature of the attack – and considers this crime as undeniable proof of ‘a rise in racism in our country. Quick, quick… my kingdom for a news item.
Dramatic selective indignation, on both sides of the chessboard. They set their sights on the tragedy of their choice. Choosing your battles is one thing: it is the characteristic of political groups, and certain news items can obviously be a symptom of this. Rigorously selecting its dramas for clientelist purposes, even as they impose themselves on the rest of the country, is another. This is the difference between the populist and the democrat. The first experiences drama, fears, primary instinct, while the other fights against these facilities to weave a social project. At LFI as at the far right, the dramas are not commented on and denounced for what they are: they are in the service of a demonstration. And the suffering of families is nothing other than the fertilizer of a political agenda, of a segment of the electorate. The fuel for a cultural and identity battle.
Impossible, therefore, for a large part of our political class to condemn, in the same breath, the racist attack suffered by Mourad and the barbaric murder of Thomas. Too rare decency of the moment: the rebel François Ruffin has questioned this new rule of “hemiplegia” and “half-blindness” in this area. What conclusions can be drawn ? That the politician who says nothing about these tragedies consents to them? The observation is even more distressing: sometimes, our political leaders are one-eyed by choice, disregarding compassion, society and especially the victims and their loved ones.