The European press meltdown over the Charlie Kirk memorial continued on Monday evening, with an Iranian-born French journalist comparing the Christian themes of the event to the Islamist Taliban.
Following days of various European press outlets branding Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk as a “far-right extremist” and comparing the memorial for the assassinated American activist to a Nazi rally, a novel accusation has emerged, with U.S. style evangelical Christianity being likened on French airwaves to the medieval Islam of the Taliban, which retook control of Afghanistan following the disastrous withdrawal of American troops by the Biden administration in 2021.
Appearing on the 24H Pujadas programme on LCI, journalist Abnousse Shalmani — whose family fled Islamist-controlled Tehran to France when she was a child — claimed that the Kirk memorial was “imbued with a crusader atmosphere and barely restrained violence.”
The self-described “secularist” writer expressed discomfort over the “evangelical, fanatical religious fervour” of the event, which she likened to a meeting of the “Taliban before launching a crusade”.
While Shalmani noted that Erika Kirk did embody the Christian spirit by publicly forgiving the suspected assassin of her husband, the French writer went on to suggest that Kirk’s widow’s exaltation of marriage felt like a “return to feudalism”.
“Except for Erika Kirk, who was remarkably dignified — despite her feudalistic tendencies — everything else was chilling, and what it foreshadowed was truly a religious civil war, and the fact that now Christianity is going to sweep everything before it and show no mercy to our opponents,” she said.
Although there have been large-scale memorials to Charlie Kirk across Europe in the wake of his assassination, the legacy media of the old continent has been frantic in its attempts to tarnish the 31-year-old activist’s legacy, lest his message of conservative Christian values reach the people unfiltered.
In the immediate aftermath of his murder earlier this month, German state media was quick to label Kirk’s positions as “racist” and “radical” and repeated false claims that he had advocated for stoning homosexuals to death.
Following a backlash against the taxpayer-funded media for its unabashedly biased portrayal of Kirk, prominent protestant pastor Annette Behnken took to the public airwaves of ARD on Sunday to compare those of questioning the state media’s narrative about Kirk to “the Devil”.
The portrait painted of Kirk was similarly derogatory in France, with far-left author and former Libération columnist Judith Perrignon declaring on the France 5 public broadcaster that the Kirk memorial on Sunday in Arizona reminded her of “those Nazi rallies that took out in the United States in the 1930s.”
Meanwhile, in both France and in Germany, Kirk’s assassination was described as potentially serving as a “Reichstag fire” moment for President Donald Trump, with claims that the democratically elected U.S. government will use Kirk’s death to crack down on political opponents as was done by Adolf Hitler in the wake of a communist burning down the German government building in 1933.
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