On the pointless death of Arnaud Beltrame
Aldo Sterone, is an Algerian-French auto pundit, who is seen in a short video at GOV talking about the recent Islamic terror attack in Trèbes.
This is the transcript of Part 2 in which he makes two important points:
First he suggests that this horrific event, one among many of recent years, is being turned into a kind of ‘good news story’ about heroism thereby deflecting anger about the reality, and second on the concept of honor which he shows to be completely absent in Islamic thought – In other words you can’t really act with honor if your opponent doesn’t even have the concept of honor. Below is the transcript in readable form:
Good day my friends. This morning I learned with a lot of sadness about the death of the officer of the gendarmerie. Monsieur Arnaud Beltrame, who was a lieutenant colonel of the gendarmerie, and who gave his life to be exchanged for a hostage, a woman, in fact; and what makes me sad as well is to see the politicians talk about “his honorable gesture”. Since when are those politicians aware of the meaning of the word “honor”?
So today they are trying to —sorry for being the wake-up caller — but what I find out today is that they are trying to — by this heroic act, on which they are focusing all the attention— they are in fact trying to transform this story into a “happy ending”, literally. That means that they know that people have had enough of negative stories, and if from time to time there is a heroic act, or something out of the ordinary which allows for them to believe one more time in humanity, then they should be served that. And then it helps to make them forget the absolutely disturbing realities, which they don’t want to talk about.
For example, the failure of the French strategy in the fight against terrorism. As if such a thing even exists! Because I don’t call “fighting terrorism” having the police write down the [names of] the potential terrorists, put them in a file which they call an S-file, and then wait until the terrorist acts and kills people. If you call that a “strategy of the anti-terrorist fight”, sorry, you’re not there yet. That was my first point.
Secondly, I would like to remind you one thing: you know there was this guy, [in France] who was called public enemy number one. He wore glasses and he drove a large BMW. I think his name was Mesrine. Jacques Mesrine. Voilà; I remember the name now. Jacques Mesrine. And Jacques Mesrine — I saw a documentary about him, and he was at some point surrounded by cops; he was in a flat in Paris, he was surrounded by cops and he asked their chief to come, to come upstairs; so, the chief arrives. He enters the apartment in which he was surrounded. Mesrine serves him champagne. They drink, they drink a glass each, and then Mesrine decides to follow him and he surrenders to the police. If you watch even movies of that time, fictions, of the time, they presented the criminals as having a certain “honor code”. At the time there was one.
With the Islamists, I would like to tell you, I thought that the authorities understood that since the time Islamists have been attacking France, I thought it was a fact that was understood, but in fact I can see that it’s not [understood] yet. The Islamists, when they go to commit an attack, it’s with intention of killing and being killed. And they strictly don’t have any honor “code” in this story.
I invite you to watch a video, an abominable one made about three weeks ago, where for one hour I’m reading a book, (I’ll put it in the description) a book by which the bearded ones, who train the jihadists, are inspired. But not only that. It’s a book you can find in the universities of the Islamic world, in the mosques, in the courts, all that; it’s a book which is relatively known, but it’s an extremely important book for those who study the doctrine and those who are in charge of communicating the doctrine. Volume thirteen, page forty, is about I brought you, just, voilà, this is the first page, and this is page forty which I read at about 1:45 of the video I told you about. Well, what is it about?
I can tell you from the memory, I don’t need to look at the text. I’ll tell you in Arabic and then I’ll translate it. So, what is it about? At the time when two armies would meet to fight there was always at the beginning, at the beginning of the battle, it was a custom that one person would come forward from the adversary camp and said to Muslims:
“Send me one of your men! I will fight with him man to man!” So, they would meet one to one and they would fight. So sometimes there would be one duel, two duels, three duels; depending on the motivation of both sides. What does this text, this theological text of reference, tell us? What does it say? It says:
If a non-believer comes forward to ask for a duel, man to man, sword against sword, or fist against fist, or whatever, it is authorized, it is lawful —speaking in the Islamic terms — to kill him with a shot of an arrow. Because he is a non-believer, a mushrik, as he is described exactly in the text, which means he’s an associator [with Jews and Christians]. And there is no word to give him [and to keep].
So, [you see] cowardice is totally permitted. This means that if this group of gendarmes was faced for example with bandits surrounded in a bank, who demanded, I don’t know, who demanded a getaway car and the possibility of leaving with their booty and a hostage, at that point you could still negotiate. You could still try to talk to them man to man; if they held a woman hostage, you could tell them: “Listen, let the woman go. Let her go. We have all day, we will do it man to man; I’ll come, I’ll replace her, everything will be all right.” You could have had this conversation! You could!
But with the Islamist terrorists IT DOESN’T WORK. They won’t appreciate the gesture. They won’t enter in a treaty with you; they won’t give you their word and respect it. They won’t talk to you man to man. There is no notion of “honor”. You will never manage to put them into this logic of “man’s honor” even if it was a thug’s [honor]. It doesn’t exist where they come from. Explicitly, they have the explicit duty of not doing that with you; of not respecting their word given to you.
So, ignoring this —if we go and recount the story in an extremely factual way —The French state offered one of its men, a lieutenant colonel in this particular case, offered him in holocaust, offering him in sacrifice to a terrorist. That’s all. I know that there was a story, a back story. But the facts are there: the French State offered one of its men from the constabulary to a terrorist who then assassinated him.
So what I would advise you, what I would advise you today, is to go and be trained by the Algerians, to be trained by the Russians, whom you hate, because the media told you that Putin is an abominable monster who kills the terrorists, or the “moderate rebels”, my bad, sorry. I invite you to be trained by the Israelis, by the Americans. I’m citing for you nations that don’t offer their men to terrorists.
Today, today, this country, which we call France, is sending us an image such that you ask yourself if they are really like that, or if there’s someone doing this on purpose. A similar submission to the terrorists is unheard of anywhere else in the world. No country in the world is submissive like that; I’m sorry.