Ara Toranian – Aggressions and threats against the Armenians of France
August 3, 2020 – by Ara Toranian:
The fact has gone unnoticed. Yet the anti-Armenian raid that took place in Décines is staggering.
The fact has gone unnoticed. As if Décines was not in France and the events that took place there on July 24th did not call into question the security of citizens and the fundamentals of the Republic.
Yet the anti-Armenian raid that took place there and the images anyone can view on the 1francoturc Instagram page are staggering. We first see the account holder haranguing in Turkish a group of young people who repeat in chorus behind him: “We do not know fear! We are the soldiers of the mountains! Our home is heaven! In places that make your head spin! We do not know any obstacle, we cross it! I am the Turkish commando. I am the Turkish commando. I am the Turkish commando ”. Wearing the T-shirts with the effigy of the “Gray Wolves”, they make with their fingers the sign of the fascist organization and put themselves in condition to go on the attack.
Their target: a few hundred Armenians, who came with their families to express their solidarity with Armenia, after the military clashes on its border with Azerbaijan on July 12 and the following days. This peaceful and authorized rally in which Laurence Fautra, LR mayor of the city, and Danièle Cazarian, LAREM deputy of the constituency, took part, however, was able to take place.
But it came at the cost of a pitched battle lasting several hours between the CRS and the “Gray Wolves” supporters, some of whom were armed with knives and crowbars, as evidenced by videos posted on the event. Two of these extremists were arrested and released.
But the organizer of this raid, which draws inspiration from both the Gray Wolves’ methods and the old anti-Armenian tradition of Panturgeon jihadism, is still not worried.
We are in France, in 2020, 6 tram stations from the Gare de Lyon Part-Dieu … Thus, a hundred years after the genocide of 1915, thousands of kilometers from Turkey, nothing has visibly changed. At least for those young people who are particularly conditioned by anti-Armenian and Ankara denial propaganda. Result: In their eyes, the Armenians are the hated entity. As in the days of the Ottoman Empire.
And it doesn’t matter if they live in France today. Their claimed racism, which unfortunately feeds back on social media primary reactions of exasperated Armenians, is now an integral part of their identity panoply. From then on, all the ingredients for an explosion are there.
It is enough to be convinced of it to hear the leader of the troublemakers proclaim bluntly in a video: “That the government give me 2000 euros and a weapon, and I will do what there is to do, wherever it is.” or in France ”.
This unprecedented sequence of anti-Armenian violence is reminiscent of the demonstrations linked to the events in Gaza in 2014, which ended in attacks on the synagogue on rue de la Roquette and attacks on Jews who were chased in the middle of Paris.
It obviously calls for an appropriate repressive response from the public authorities who must more than ever assume their sovereign functions, otherwise at the risk of opening the door to tribal wars, of which the events in Dijon in mid-June presented us with a sad example.
But this type of situation also calls into question the responsibility of politicians, and raises the question of their unnatural alliances which ultimately result in trivializing the unacceptable. So we saw in the Lyon region Gérard Colomb, who nevertheless has an armenophile image, making a pact during the last municipal elections with Izzet Doganel, openly pro-Erdogan candidate for Saint-Priest.
The same goes for Yves Blein, a former socialist, now a member of LaREM, who hosted on his list in Vénissieux a well-known activist of the PEJ, the Equality and Justice Party, a branch in France of the AKP. It goes without saying that the deposits granted by representatives of major parties to candidates who participate in separatism (as defined by E. Macron in his speech in Mulhouse), have the repercussion of giving wings to extremes, of promoting their arrogance. , as we saw at Décines.
These are just two examples, among others. But there is no doubt that these Republican setbacks are contributing to the lowering of human rights standards, and that their consequences have already been felt, well beyond municipal issues, as illustrated by the events of Décines where one could happily have gone from penknife blows to ethics of responsibility to stabbing in the street.
This worrying affair also revives, because of the hatred that it has revealed in broad daylight, the question of the criminalization of denial of the Armenian genocide, which some had seen fit to fight on the grounds that this denialism was not there. not intrinsically the bearer of feelings of this hatred, unlike that of the Shoah with anti-Semitism.
This tended to reduce the discussion to the sole issue of “Freedom of expression”, in the name of which, moreover, the Boyer law was invalidated by the Constitutional Council. Yet this negationism, which affects to present itself as an innocent contribution to the historical debate, of course has a malicious and political dimension which constitutes the “supreme stage of the genocide”, to use the expression of Bernard-Henri Lévy. And that this dimension was clearly the visible and permanent basis of the Décines violence.
You just need to go to social media to be convinced. The nauseating literature that performs there leaves no doubt on the subject. And if by chance there remained the slightest hesitation, the collusion displayed between the organizer of the Décines events and one of the most virulent deniers of the Armenian genocide would eventually dispel it.
It so happens that this member or sympathizer of the Gray Wolves, so readily insulting and threatening, organized a few days before raging in the street a video-conference on “the events of 1915” with a French employee of AVIM ( the main Turkish negationist think tank), the same one who had unsuccessfully brought a libel suit against the author of these lines.
Thus, on the same medium and in a formidable division of tasks, we can hear the so-called historian in a suit and tie strive to dispute the existence of a genocide while the other will a few days later threaten the descendants of the victims on national soil. The circle is complete.
As we can see, the situation is in fact very worrying, because it is no longer a question of knowing whether or not the truth about a genocide should be dependent on a shock between communities, or if the protection of the dignity of the victims must be ensured. ‘to assess the nuisance capacity of a criminal state, as the deficiencies in French legislation on the subject would suggest.
We’re not there anymore. We have crossed a threshold. It’s about security now. Of democratic society. Republican order. Of human lives. And the answers, on the legislative level as on the sovereign level, should arrive very quickly and be up to the task. If possible, before the irreparable …
laregledujeu.org/2020/08/03/36430/agressions-et-menaces-contre-les-armeniens-de-france/
English translation – LOUSAVOR AVEDIS:
