Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and host of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, sat down with Gerard Araud, France’s Ambassador to the United States, on Monday afternoon to discuss the fallout from last week’s terrorist attack on a French satirical newspaper.
While the majority of the interview focused on the intelligence risks facing France following the attack, the MSNBC host found time to fret that the country could overreact in fighting terrorism. Mitchell asked Araud “do you fear an anti-Muslim backlash? Do you fear that France could go too far? There are suggestions that this country went too far after 9/11 in some of the security procedures.”
After Mitchell bemoaned that France could overreact in much the same way that “this country went to far after 9/11" the NBC reporter asked the French Ambassador “how do you achieve a balance and not lose what is sacred in France?”
Rather than refute Mitchell’s highly charged questioning, Gerard Araud agreed that the terrorist attack helps “the extreme right” make their case against Muslims:
Well, you know, we are facing the same challenges as our American friends. There were a lot of incidents against Muslims in France today. So, and of course it's a blessing for -- in a sense, really, it's a good argument for the extreme right, which everywhere in Europe, in Germany, in the U.K.., in France, was very anti-Muslims.
Mitchell’s sentiments are nothing new for the veteran NBC journalist as she has repeatedly criticized the U.S. post-9/11 strategy of fighting Islamic extremism. Following the terrorist attack in Canada last year, Mitchell spoke to a member of the Canadian Parliament and asked her guest “do you fear, do you worry that there is going to be this reaction as, frankly, we had after 9/11?”
See relevant transcript below.
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports
January 12, 2014
ANDREA MITCHELL: And Gerard Araud is the French Ambassador to the United States and joins me now. Ambassador, thank you so much for being with us. Our condolences to you on behalf of all of us here and me personally, I can't even imagine what you and the people of France are going through right now.
GERARD ARAUD: Thank you very much. You know, actually we have been overwhelmed by the expression of solidarity, of grief, of friendship coming from all corners of the American people, from the highest level of the administration since President Obama came to the French Embassy and Secretary Kerry too, but to the ordinary Americans that, you know, I can say the Americans are compassionate people.
MITCHELL: You can understand that there is controversy here, the newspapers filled with it. We as well have been talking about it because Eric Holder, the attorney general was in Paris, he was doing network interviews, the president was in the White House , the vice president was at home in Delaware. Secretary Kerry was in Asia, in India, and on his way then to Pakistan so he was previously engaged. But there is a question as to why no cabinet level or higher presence when you had 44 world leaders, including the prime minister of Israel and others who are also under security protection.
ARAUD: To be very frank, for us the first impression that we have had is the support, expressed by President Obama. As I have said he came to the embassy, he made several declarations. Secretary Kerry made a speech, the speech in French and he will come back to Paris before the end of the week. So from the French side, there is absolutely no feeling -- no hard feelings.
MITCHELL: The tradition of free speech, it all began in France during the 1700s and the 18th century. But there are laws in France, laws that say you cannot deny the Holocaust, laws that say you cannot deny the Armenian genocide-- so why is it permissible to be as provocative as these anti-Muslim cartoons were? This is a debate we're having journalistically here in the United States as well, you know.
ARAUD: Actually, on the Armenian genocide, there is no law about the denial of the Armenian genocide. There is only one law about the denial of the Holocaust because it's not an opinion. The Holocaust took place. So, you know, you don't express an opinion when you say that the Holocaust didn’t take place, it's a fact, its an aggression against the victims against the Jewish community. So f-or us it's not an opinion. But apart the Holocaust, everything is allowed. Of course, if there is no libel, you know, against one person an individual.
MITCHELL: What about the investigation now? Was there, do you think, a failure of intelligence? These people were known to the French, they were known, in fact on a no-fly list to America. Should they have been followed after one of them got out of jail, after the Yemen trip?
ARAUD: A small correction, I think this guy was not on a no-fly list of the Americans but he couldn't get a Visa to go -- couldn't get the -- from the American administration. But there was no fly zone -- no fly -- he was not on this list. The problem that we are facing, you know, you have a few thousand young people who are radicalized. You have a few hundred of them, went to Syria or are coming back from Syria. And if you -- the fact you are radical, it's not enough to get arrested. We are a democracy.
You know, you can't arrest somebody on its opinions so we have to monitor them. But a few thousand people to monitor one person, you need ten agents. It's simply that you can't monitor all these people 24/7. So of course there will be an investigation to say what went wrong, certainly something went wrong at some moment. But at the same time the fight that we are facing is really very, very specifics.
MITCHELL: And what about Boumeddiene? What do we know about her and how she escaped the [sic] and what threat she could still pose?
ARAUD: Well, apparently she was -- but again we're really in the first hours of the investigation. She was married to Coulibalu who is the murderer of the Jewish grocery shop. We didn't know -- and she was in contact right away. She was in contact with one of the girlfriends or wives of the two other terrorists. They exchanged hundreds of phone calls in the last year. So she was part of that. She left, she's apparently in Syria. So we have to see, really what was her role. The question was whether she had an active role or whether she was only supporting her husband.
MITCHELL: One of the suggestions from that fact of that phone calls is that the men may have understood they were under watch, may have feared that, and the women may have been communicating to do the operational planning. Are there any other accomplices at large?
ARAUD: We don't know. Really it's -- for some time the French authorities have been fearing, you know, such a terrorist attack. You know, the minister of interior who is now the prime minister told me personally, sooner or later there will be something because we simply can't prevent these hundreds of people, you know, from doing it. It happened. In a sense it was worse than what we were expecting because these people were acting in a professional way as a military commando, so it’s extremely worrying. Obviously we are not over with this fight.
MITCHELL: And one other question is a political question, you’ve got the Le Pen forces, the right wing, do you fear an anti-Muslim backlash? Do you fear that France could go too far? There are suggestions that this country went too far after 9/11 in some of the security procedures. I mean, there's been a lot of criticism. How do you achieve a balance and not lose what is sacred in France?
ARAUD: Well, you know, we are facing the same challenges as our American friends. There were a lot of incidents against Muslims in France today. So, and of course it's a blessing for -- in a sense, really, it's a good argument for the extreme right, which everywhere in Europe, in Germany, in the U.K.., in France, was very anti-Muslims. So at the same time, you saw what happened in Paris and it was moving. I was moved to the tears. You know, it was really a will of the French people to affirm the national unity and it’s also the message of the president of the French Republic. So let's hope that we keep the spirit of national unity.
MITCHELL: Mr. Ambassador, thank you so very much. Thanks for being with us on this day.
ARAUD: Thank you very much.
