— The Quran, 2:217
The US Council of Muslim Organizations, on behalf of our member institutions and American Muslims, has studied France’s mushrooming crisis with Islam and Muslims, born out of its increasingly extremist form of secularism, laïcité , and issues the following two-part statement and call:
- We are appalled by the French government and its President Emmanuel Macron for their massive, indiscriminate, and chauvinist crackdown on the Muslims of France and its presumptuous attack on the entire religion of Islam, in general.
- We call on all Muslims, and their communities and nations, to boycott France economically and censure it politically until it rescinds its new tyrannical law of “separatism,” which nakedly justifies targeting Islam and Muslims alone in France, singled out from other French religious communities and its many increasingly dangerous secular separatist movements.
France’s draconian separatism law could bar Muslim countries from providing imams for French Muslim communities and mosques; make it illegal for Muslim women to refuse treatment from male physicians, or Muslim men from female physicians, with French officials talking of heavy prison terms for those who refuse; outlaw homeschooling for Muslims; and require all public services to report “early signs of radicalization” – behaviors as innocuous as growing a beard, wearing distinctive Muslim clothing, or praying in public.
Macron, government officials, and France’s increasingly chauvinistic political partisans and press have sought to legitimate this ever-escalating persecution of France’s 6.6 million Muslims (10% of the population) relegated to the ghettoized banlieues, the nation’s suburbs, on the pretext of the rise of jihadist terrorism, spread by Salafism, or something they call “Islamism.” Yet French political scientist Olivier Roy, who studied the popularly supposed phenomenon of radicalization’s relationship to Islam in his 2017 Jihad and death: the global appeal of the Islamic State and the outliers committing “terrorist” attacks on French soil, concludes otherwise. “Contrary to the now dominant view,” he says, in a Financial Times opinion piece :
They were not radicalized by a “Salafi incubation” in the mosques and religious schools of France’s deprived suburbs. Rather, most were radicalized among small groups of friends and relatives, often in a milieu characterized by petty crime and delinquency. They used the internet to find texts and inspiration, and made little or no reference to the tenets of Sharî‘ah law. They came from the margins of Muslim life in France, not the center.
This begs the question, and Roy asks it: “Could the measures now being proposed have prevented any of the terrorist attacks carried out in France since the bombing of the Paris Metro in 1995?” His answer – “no” is a resounding indictment of Macron and the French government’s purely politicized gambit to ram through its shamelessly fascist and racist separatism law in December.
Why, then, are Macron and France’s political elite moving so decisively to institute “legal” formulas embarrassingly clear in their intent to inform the French public that they will soon have the right to openly persecute Muslims for their religion, suppress their ability to practice Islam, nullify the French Muslims’ right to free speech, and undemocratically de-institutionalize and disenfranchise this entire vulnerable religious minority?
The immediate justification is the reprehensible murder – condemned by all Muslims – of the French grade-school teacher killed on 16 October by a lone 18-year-old Muslim for re-publishing the infamous September 2012 (and 2015) Charlie Hebdo caricatures of some figment designed to represent and mock the Prophet, God’s blessings and peace be upon him.
In reality, France began its alarmingly extreme politically rightward lurch in 2015, after the killing of Charlie Hebdo staff and others in claimed revenge for its scorning cartoon publications.
In this climate, socialist French President Francois Hollande’s popularity plummeted and the fascist far-right, led by odious Islamophobe Marine Le Pen, made significant gains, and France’s left, centrist, and moderates coalesced to elect Macron in 2017, with the clear mandate to oppose the frightening Nazi-reminiscent populism sweeping Europe and America.
Macron failed catastrophically – fiscally, socially, and internationally – and in just a year’s time the November 2018 “yellow vests” grassroots economic justice protests blitz blanketed France, tanking his approval rating to a politically futureless 29%. Macron responded, not by leading France to a socio-economic liberté, égalité, fraternité , but by racing to the furthest right of Europe’s swelling populist political parade and becoming the most populist leader on the self-imagined continent.
The wings of Macron’s demagogue metamorphosis unfurled as a relentless, strident attack on Islam itself, spread to catch the perceived hot-blowing winds of populist change while ruthlessly singeing the rights and safety of French Muslims in the firestorm he deliberately lit, despite their pleas to stop his dangerous stigmatizing of them and defaming their religion.
Almost single-handedly, Macron has sanctioned the daily blaring of “secular hate speech” toward Muslims from the pulpits of France’s politicians and the megaphone of its media, while green-lighting, if not outright bidding, the de facto discrimination against the French Muslim community the length and breadth of French society.
Before the teacher’s killing by a lone petty-criminal and sociopathic youth, Macron provocatively brought together officials and the media in Les Mureaux, a Paris suburb with a notably large Muslim population, to pronounce on Islam in an act of unprovoked aggression: “Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country.” He used the event to announce his pretension to “liberate Islam in France,” beginning with mosques and Muslim schools.
Macron declared his utter intolerance for Islam and Muslims who would practice it while simultaneously demanding that Muslims not only countenance desecration of their holies but champion “the right” of blasphemy and exalt French values that specifically incite assault on even the personal practice of Islam’s basic moral principles.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear that Muslim kids are forced to eat pork at school or draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad under the guise of “being a true French citizen, writes columnist Merve Şebnem Oruç in the Daily Sabah .
He notes more than 1,000 Islamophobic attacks happened in 2019 alone, with at least 70 bodily assaults on Muslims, as intelligence agencies throughout the West warn of a rising white supremacy menace that France simply ignores.
Oruç also astutely compares Macron’s rush to embrace malignant secular-nationalism and lethally irradiate the French Muslim body politic with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decisive stand with her country’s Muslim community after the massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers there in the horrific terrorist attack on two Christchurch mosques last year.
After the Charlie Hebdo killings, some 3.7 million people and 40 heads of state marched across France in empathy and support. Not a single rally took place in the world for New Zealand’s Muslim martyred. No public demonstrations of kinship and oneness in other countries. No denunciation from other than Muslim heads of state. No admonition from them against the lethal proliferation of racist extremism. Outside of Muslim countries, just one nation’s leader even characterized this blatant politically driven hate-massacre as an act of “terrorism.”
Yet unlike Macron, and a growing cadre of like-cut leaders in the world’s so-called “liberal” states genuflecting in white supremacist homage for votes and power, Oruç points out that while orphaned by her international peers, New Zealand’s Ardern denounced the attack as terrorism, visited victim families wearing a headscarf in humble respect, guaranteed the safety of the nation’s mosques and celebrants, opened parliament with the Muslim greeting of peace, assalamu ‘alaykum, directed at Muslims in particular, followed by a recitation of the Arabic Quran, wherein all the body’s members, black-clad in mourning, listened in a moment of silence.
The result – which Macron (and the rest of the world’s leaders pathetically pandering to racialized, religious chauvinist, nationalist extremists) would do well to note – and against all the naysayers’ forewarnings to Ardern of her political demise for refusing to kowtow to bigoted populism – was Ardern’s crushing political victory last month, her Labor Party’s greatest in 50 years.
Public derision of a vulnerable, highly visible minority, publicly disdained for decades across the world is an intentional act of hate and a deliberate exhortation of violence by the state and its majority against that already marginalized group’s women, children, and men.
If it is “separatism” Macron claims he but yearns to diminish in France, then by what craft of hypocrisy can he hope to produce unity and social cohesion out of a rhetoric of fear-mongering against France’s largest religious minority; that anathematizes this already impoverished, persecuted, and segregated population’s religion and its moral virtues as quintessentially “un-French”; and that so ignobly profanes, defiles, and scorns the holy figure who embodies and exemplifies all that they hold sacred and revere?
What black magic will enable Macron and his professional enablers to unify French society by enshrining into law the categorical discrimination against all things characteristically and qualitatively Islam in France while systematic deinstitutionalizing France’s Muslim community?
Need France be reminded that the Nazis especially deployed cartoons to devastating consequences against Jews in Germany? Does French history – which now mandates the presentation of the loathsome Charlie Hebdo Islamophobic caricatures in its public curriculum – not remember its own anti-Semitic depictions (a project Charlie Hebdo is now repeating against Islam and Muslims) that led to the persecution of French Jews and the scapegoating of Alfred Dreyfus. Has France forgotten its brutal colonizer past of genocide in Algeria and decimation in Tunisia and Morocco, followed today by its warm embrace and support for the anti-democratic dictators who, with France’s support, undid the Arab spring and now savage their people?
Others remember and are watching – including the 1.9 billion Muslims of the world.
The US Council of Muslim Organizations has patiently observed Macron and the French government in the aftermath of the crisis he has ignited with the nation’s Muslims and the hostility he has struck against the religion of Islam and Islam’s adherents across Europe and the world. But Macron and his government have shown neither remorse nor the goodwill to redress the grievances of Muslims – save for a feeble attempt by Macron to acknowledge they are capable of some feelings in condescending to an Al-Jazeera interview, a news platform previously designated by the cabal he now colludes with as an abettor of Muslim militancy and radicalism.
We, therefore, condemn Macron’s politically craven hate speech against the Muslims of France and Islam as a religion, which he imagines will serve him in his futile quest for power in the upcoming elections, paying no mind to the fathomless grief and mass harm (and possibly worse) that it will cause the Muslims of France, Europe, and the world.
Moreover, we vigorously support and call for a sustained, complete boycott of French goods and services by Muslims and the conscientious everywhere, until France ceases its racist, chauvinistic persecution of French Muslims and its egregious maligning of Islam and what it cherishes as holy.
We urge the intervention of governments of goodwill, the European Union, the United Nations, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in behalf of France’s long persecuted, vulnerable, and marginalized Muslim minority.
And we urge Muslims in America, in France, in Europe, and the world over, and their representatives to the following
- To boycott and advocate for the boycott against all French goods and services
- To peacefully protest the legitimation and everyday acceptance of hate-speech, discrimination, segregation, and deinstitutionalization of the Muslim community in France, both de facto, and in the form of France’s primitive and benighted “separatist” draft law.
- To take up the means to vigorous legal challenges to France’s intense Islamophobic persecution of Muslims, nationally in France and internationally in every available forum, including the International Court of Justice at the Hague.
May God protect the oppressed Muslims of France, give them patience in their hour of grave need, and not let them become a trial for the misled around them.
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