[Editorial to be found in the autumn magazine, at your newsstand or by subscription.] The attack on Berlin Pride has not only mourned the LGBT community. It revealed another danger, that of handing over to the far right the facts on which it thrives.
In the wake of the Islamist attack on Saturday, July 25 against Berlin Pride, the German singer Nyya speaks at a vigil in front of the Brandenburg Gate. She expresses the first thought that came to her upon learning that a car had driven into the crowd, killing one person and injuring 29: “Please, let it not be a Kanake, please let it be a white and Christian person.” Kanake, in Germany, is a racist insult reclaimed by people of Turkish or Arab origin.
“But that was not the case”, she notes. Before speaking as if it were an incantation: “This is where intersectionality comes in. Our struggles are not all the same, but, in moments like these, we support one another.” Circulating widely, the video was presented to the right and to the far right as proof of the left’s “woke” blindness: faced with an attack targeting LGBT people, the activist would worry more about her political instrumentalization than about the victims. That misses what she says. Because by exposing the reasoning that, from the moment the attack was announced, mingled with her fear, she anticipates the trap that lies ahead…
The flag burns…
In the hours and days that followed, LGBT organizations abandon the task of labeling the facts. On Sunday evening, SOS homophobie condemns an “LGBTIphobic attack” and describes “an act of hatred against the freedom and existence of each one”. The ideological motivation is not mentioned. Inter-LGBT expresses its solidarity with the victims of the “attack” and asks that justice shed “full light on this tragedy”. It is no longer a matter of an attack. In a statement published by Acceptess-T “in solidarity with the victims and against racist appropriations”, the LGBT reference has disappeared from the title.
In Paris, on Monday evening, a first gathering “in solidarity with Berlin Pride” is called by the collective Revolutionary Feminists, at Place de la République, with the slogan “Against racist appropriations.” In a report, Libération takes up the baton: “When asked what threatens them today, many also tell us about the rise of the far right…” On the other hand, the front page of the daily will mention none of the events that shook the German capital. A queericide attack against one of Europe’s great Prides will not find its place there.
On August 3, the AJL intervenes. The LGBTQIA+ Journalists Association notes first: “We see that certain reflexes have a long life in France; many newsrooms have picked up the term ‘gay pride’ used in several AFP dispatches.” The statement continues: “Above all, some media have seized with ease on the label of Islamist terrorist attack”, points to the AJL. “The presumed allegiance of the author to the Islamic State thus seems to take precedence over the people he targeted during this attack and over the context in which it occurred. This choice says a lot”, declares the militant observer. Six days earlier, the German federal prosecutor’s office revealed the existence of a video in which the attacker’s pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
Good pupil, Mediapart follows the same path. To contextualize the event, the editorial staff publishes an analysis devoted to “the sharp rise in violence targeting the LGBTQI+ community in Germany. Angle chosen: “Beyond the attack and the mere fact of religious extremism, many authors are tied to the far right.” In the body of the article, a member of the inter-associative organizing group of the Berlin Pride testifies: “We all first thought it was a far-right attack.” Recovered from the surprise, Kai Bölle adds: “Islamism, like all religious extremism, is a threat to queer people. But that is not at all what has concerned us concretely in recent months and years.” And the journalist illustrates the point: “In Bautzen, in Leipzig or in Magdeburg, Pride participants had to face parades of far-right demonstrators who came to protest against this march.”
The Grand Amalgamation
The German far right did indeed seize the attack. As early as July 26, Kristin Brinker, president of the Berlin AfD, demanded the “end of uncontrolled mass immigration” and the “systematic expulsion of foreign criminals and Islamists, regardless of their possible protection status”. Islamism = Muslims = migrants = “great replacement”… “Joan, help”: in Germany as in France, we know the right’s anti-immigration refrain. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy had already entrusted Brice Hortefeux with a ministry linking immigration and national identity, a promise of his presidential campaign.
In France, the feared instrumentalization of the Berlin attack takes on an almost embarrassing turn. “Islamism is a totalitarian ideology that wages war against our freedoms, against our democracies”, Marine Le Pen simply tweets before sending her “full and complete solidarity with the victims, their families and the German people.” Jordan Bardella’s thoughts push open the same doors: “The Islamist threat remains salient in Europe”, notes the president of the National Rally (RN), against “what they hate above all in our civilization and that we love so much: freedom”. No need for amalgams anymore; simply saying “Islamism” suffices to seem above the fray. From the Two Sicilies to La Trinité-sur-Mer, one can hear the sound of ice clinking as people toast.
To harvest the fruits of the sequence, the propagandist Damien Rieu only has to bend down. “Abdul Ballout, Islamist, rolled over Berlin’s gay pride yesterday but you will hear from no LGBT association about it”, rejoices in advance the former spokesperson for Génération identitaire. Then, mockingly: “The more the Islamists roll over LGBT militants in a truck, the more LGBT militants defend the Islamists.” And there you have the far right who can position itself as the true camp, the only one to say what everyone saw.
The year 2027 will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s advancement to the second round of the presidential election. Two more qualifications of the family brand later, we should have learned the lesson. The RN flourishes on the silences of its opponents, as many public admissions of powerlessness. In other words, tell voters to move along, we have nothing to offer. Yet fighting amalgamation does not mean invisibilizing realities but, on the contrary, distinguishing those we refuse to amalgamate: Islam and Islamism, Muslims and Islamists, a population and a political-religious project.
POV Journalism
The Berlin attack poses a crucial question for us: what do we do with information that unsettles us? The war of narratives intensifies during electoral periods. By 2027, each camp will have its facts to brandish and those it will prefer to keep silent. Every word will be suspected of serving a cause, every article urged to prove who it benefits. The temptation will be great to judge information not by its truth but by the political consequences of its dissemination.
The ethics of journalism are at stake here. We do not have the leisure to sort the facts according to their anticipated use. In the face of propaganda, our role is not to oppose competing propaganda. It is not about claiming the absence of a point of view (“POV”). Choosing an angle, choosing whom to give a voice to, is already looking at reality from somewhere.
For Têtu, the compass is clear. We observe the world from LGBT lives and queer experience. A point of view, however, does not authorize moving the facts to fit them into a frame. This profession imposes a code of ethics, but also procedures to implement it: information is verified, texts are reviewed, sources confronted.
Journalism is a collective endeavor. Its fundamental requirement has a name: the humility of facts. It obliges us to give up a formula that overstates them, to revise a judgment contradicted by reality, to hear colleagues’ objections. It will necessarily lead us to publish information that a portion of our readership would prefer not to read. At other times, it will be another portion. The essential is that it is not always the same.
The reality does not need our agreement to exist. Life in democracy, it, requires that we can at least agree on the facts. This is the mission of journalism: to establish a common language to describe our present.
