“May Allah curse France!” headlined the Islamic State's French-language magazine, Dar al-Islam, a few weeks after the Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Casher shooting. These words, always the same, saturate the atmosphere in the manifestations of anti-French hatred that are regularly unleashed, on any grounds, in the Islamic world. The jihadists massacred in France because France embodies the major resistance to their barbarism.

On his way to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the dark hours following the assassination of Samuel Paty, Emmanuel Macron was well inspired to chant: they shall not pass, inspired by no pasarán!, the famous slogan of the partisans of the Second Spanish Republic (1936-1939), which has since become the rallying cry of all anti-fascist struggles throughout the world...

On 9 March, a Brazilian plane landed on the tarmac at Algiers airport. Its holds were reportedly full of doses of vaccine delivered by Israel. Algeria is already supplied with Russian Sputnik and Chinese Sinopharm vaccines, which is not surprising. Health logic follows diplomatic logic. But Israel! The country most vilified by the Algerian media, the target of all the conspiracy theories! Is the information, broadcast by the I24 news channel, which broadcasts from Tel Aviv in French, English and Arabic, serious? Even if it is only a rumour, it has the advantage of making people think.

The Ottoman Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to reweave the nationalist fibre, through external provocation, because he is weakened on the inside by a sluggish economy and growing unpopularity. It is a dangerous game because he wants to project himself beyond his borders and is once again seeking to settle scores with his historical Armenian enemies, whose genocide in 1915 was caused by Turkey. Which Erdogan denies. And that is a shame.

The Covid crisis has highlighted the need to relocate what is essential, such as food and drug production. In the Middle East, it is clear that the supply of basic foodstuffs depends heavily, and increasingly so, on international markets, as arable land and water resources are becoming increasingly scarce.

“What is a fanatic,” Churchill said, “one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” The massacres taking place in the Caucasus remind us of that fanaticism that is more than a century old: the Armenian genocide in 1915.

At a time when we are wondering about the consequences that the pandemic will have on our lives and children's lives. At a time when the challenge of getting our economy back on its feet is obsessing our fellow citizens and our leaders, in the Zaatari camp in the Jordanian desert, 80,000 Syrian refugees try to survive in appalling conditions.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan wants to show the great powers that he has his say in the redistribution of the cards in the Middle East and in the resolution of conflicts in the region, at a time, moreover, when the world order that emerged from 1945, the end of the Second World War, has become obsolete.

After 4 years of Trumpism, with their succession of repetitive tweets, fads, unpredictabilities, inconsistencies, the new American president should be called Hercules Biden, as the files that Donald Trump left him, in foreign policy, are so many colossal challenges to be taken up. These files are named: Iran, Russia, Turkey, China, North Korea, Afghanistan & Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When I discovered, in early summer 2019, the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors collected by my friend Jean-Marie Montali, for the purposes of his book Nous sommes la voix des morts (« We are the voice of the dead », Le Cherche-midi, October 2020), I was reading an unpublished text by Hannah Arendt, which had just been published in the excellent collection About & Around, published by Allia editions.