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During the 1930s, gangs of far-right antisemites in France who engaged in street fighting with their political enemies were known as “cagoulards,” after “La Cagoule,” which was the name given to a rightist, even fascist, political group, whose members in their street brawls wore “cagoules” — the face mask also known, depending on the language, as ski-masks, balaclavas, and passamontagnas. Now today’s leftist and Muslim activists — as antisemitic as the rightwing fascist “cagoulards” of the 1930s — have also taken to wearing ski-masks to hide their identity. And they are determined to shout down, disrupt, hound out of the lecture hall and the classroom those professors who are neither anti-Israel nor pro-Hamas.
Fabrice Balanche is a French professor of geography at the Lyon-2 university, specializing in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Syria. He is not a supporter, as he says, of “Hamas or Hezbollah,” and this failure to side with terrorists maddened Muslim students and their leftist allies, who stormed an amphitheater where he was giving a lecture, loudly chanting their slogans to silence him. But Balanche won’t be silenced. He has told his story to the magazine Le Point. He will continue to give his lectures, but now with a security presence. Christine Douglass-Williams wrote about this here, and more on his ordeal at the hands of these student stormtroopers, all of them masked and hooded, who attempted to shut down his lecture, can be found here: “‘Zionist, terrorist’: Masked pro-Palestinian mob forces French geographer out of lecture,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, April
A French geographer was forced to leave his lecture by 20 masked and hooded pro-Palestinian students who called him a “Zionist” and a “terrorist” last Tuesday….
Apparently, the French professor’s unwillingness to praise Hamas and Hezbollah makes one a “terrorist.” And if you are not on the side of the real terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah — who describe themselves as the “Resistance” to Israeli “aggression” — then you must be a “Zionist” and that, leftist and Muslim propaganda has been trying to convince the world, is a terrible thing to be.
Like the Nazi brownshirts of yore, these modern avatars are deep-dyed antisemites.
The Instagram account for Lyon-2 Autonome claimed the group’s actions were in protest of “Balanche’s unacceptable positions on Palestine and Syria” and to demand he stop teaching at the university….
Because Professor Balanche will not toe the Islamic line and openly support the Muslim terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah, and refuses to endorse the jihadists who now rule in Syria, today’s cagoulards want him to stop teaching at the university. They are no different from the Nazis who forced the dismissal of all Jewish and anti-Nazi faculty members after Hitler came to power in 1933.
The comments on Syria appear to refer to Balanche’s 2016 meeting with former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, when he accompanied French parliamentarians on a trip to Syria. They wanted to discuss how best to end the civil war that had begun in 2011, now that the fighting had reached its peak. But Balanche himself did not exchange a word with Assad; he was there as an expert on Syria to help those parliamentarians make sense of what they were seeing and hearing, and to remind them that Syria was a police state, and their seemingly “spontaneous” exchanges with “ordinary Syrians” would have been carefully arranged by the security services.
He added that 10 years after the Bataclan attack, he was asked to speak about Islamist attacks and chose to cover the topic of suicide attacks in Islam.
“I mentioned the case of women who commit suicide attacks,” he said. “This didn’t please a few students, who reported it to the university, accusing me of being Islamophobic and sexist.”…
The Bataclan attack by Muslim suicide bombers resulted in the deaths of 130 and 416 wounded, many of them severely. Apparently, to the leftists and Muslims who tried to silence Balanche , mentioning terror attacks by Muslims is both “Islamophobic” and “sexist.” “Islamophobia” is a word that was coined to convince the world that any anti-Islam views based on a well-founded fear of Muslim terrorism — let’s keep in mind the 47,000 terror attacks committed by Muslims since September 11, 2001 — is, in fact, “an irrational fear.” Do you think such fear of Muslims, given what has been happening around the world this last quarter-century, should be called “irrational”?
As for the fashionable charge of “sexism” flung at Balanche, how is it “sexist” to point out that some of the terrorists involved in what are called the “Bataclan attack” (which include attacks at four different venues in Paris, with the deadliest one taking place at the Bataclan nightclub) were women? Isn’t it, in a ghastly way, demonstrating the “empowering” of Muslim women who take part in such attacks? Aren’t the terrorists Leila Khaled and Dahlia Mughrabi and Ahlam Al-Tamimi held up as exemplars of Muslim womanhood? Or is the charge of “sexism” simply another baseless way to condemn the quiet scholar Fabrice Balanche?
The incident came just one day after Balanche went on CNews to denounce a campus blockade on March 28.
Activists held the blockade in protest against the university’s ban on holding an iftar (the break of the Ramadan fast) in a university hall.
According to Balanche, this marked the “first Islamist blockade of a French university.”
The group Lyon-2 Autonome, however, denied a connection between the blockade and the protest against Balanche….
The demand by Muslims that they be allowed to hold their Iftar dinner in a campus building is outrageous. If that demand were granted, it would turn the premises of a publicly-funded university into a site for what is part of a religious observance — the breaking of the Ramadan fast. The Muslims simply do not accept the French principle of laicité, the divide between Church and State, or for that matter, between Mosque and State, and Synagogue and State. The university Lyon-2 had a perfect right to continue to prohibit such observances tied to a particular religion on public land.
This attempt to terrorize Fabrice Balanche into silence has only made this intrepid figure more determined than ever to deliver his lectures unfazed by their threats, though of course he will now require guards, and not only on the campus. He has the firm support both of Phillipe Baptiste, the Minister responsible for Higher Education and Research, and Élisabeth Borne, the Minister of National Education. And now the judiciary, responding to complaints from Balanche and Lyon-2 University, will open an investigation to discover exactly who those 20 people were — both students and non-students — who tried to shout down his lecture and scare him out of the lecture hall. Let those malefactors, once identified, to be both fined, and given prison sentences, for their storm-trooping effort. And if they are non-citizens, make sure that after they have served their sentences, they are deported — sent back to whatever Muslim hellholes they came from, where they will have plenty of time to ponder the misery they have brought upon themselves.
Meanwhile, Professor Balanche should put his lectures on YouTube, so that they can be followed not by 50 people in a lecture hall, but by thousands or hundreds of thousands of people a a time. Against the leftist and Muslim cagoulards, that will be the best revenge.
