Editorialist On The Run From Jihadists--In Paris

Via Gates of Vienna, and thence to Fausta's blog. The latter has done a good job of citizen journalism collecting & translating an affair involving a French philosophy professor who blasted Islam in Le Figaro. His article was quickly yanked, and now he's under police protection, in hiding in his own city. Fausta also excerpts an email from Robert Redeker, the professor, to his friend the philosopher Andre Glucksmann:

"I am now in a catastrophic personal situation. Several death threats have been sent to me, and I have been sentenced to death by organizations of the al-Qaeda movement. [...] On the websites condemning me to death there is a map showing how to get to my house to kill me, they have my photo, the places where I work, the telephone numbers, and the death fatwa. [...] There is no safe place for me, I have to beg, two evenings here, two evenings there. [...] I am under the constant protection of the police. I must cancel all scheduled conferences. And the authorities urge me to keep moving. [...] All costs are at my own expense, including those of rents a month or two ahead, the costs of moving twice, legal expenses, etc.

It's quite sad. I exercised my constitutional rights, and I am punished for it, even in the territory of the Republic. This affair is also an attack against national sovereignty - foreign rules, decided by criminally minded fanatics, punish me for having exercised a constitutional right, and I am subjected, even in France, to great injury."

At this point in my reading, a mental strobelight started flashing. Glucksmann? Where had I seen that name before? [Click, clickety] Why, on my own blog, last year, via Sign and Sight. Glucksmann had posited at the time of the rioting Parisian "youths" that this was simply their way of integrating into French society, by rioting, as overwrought françaises are wont to do. When in Rome, do as the Vandals do.

Wonder if he's starting to feel a foreign vibe now?