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Sorry I've been on conference calls all morning and didn't read your post all the way through.
International ‘Founding principles HAVE BEEN LOST’: Macron blasts US media for legitimizing Islamist violence
- Thread starter phoenixikki
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Sorry I've been on conference calls all morning and didn't read your post all the way through.
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What do you mean by "clumsy response"? Can you link to a piece that was critical of the French response? Thanks.
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Fair enough, I was day drinking yesterday and had that happen lol.
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Very good points I agree in the most part, particularly with regard to failure to tackle the major issues within their society. I mean if it wasn’t for covid we’d still be seeing riots every weekend. Dozens of journalists blinded by the police each month. However I’m not really seeing what he has done in his response to this particular incident that has warranted such a huge backlash.
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This is just one opinion, I think the Financial Times and a few other outlets had a similar take. Basically part of the problem is Macron basically threw the entire Muslim community under the bus and took no onus for the French government. That isn't exactly stellar leadership, and also only worsens the problem. Macron is just such a shitty leader, very poor instincts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/opinion/france-terrorism-muslims.html
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Financial Times:
“Macron’s war on Islamic separatism only divides France further,”
Washington Post:
“instead of fighting systemic racism, France wants to reform Islam.”
The New York Times :
“Is France fueling Muslim terrorism by trying to prevent it?”
The Times’ first headline about the beheading of Paty also raised eyebrows in Paris: “French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street.”
Not a Macron fan at all, but when you see headlines like this after a Islamic terrorist decapitated a teacher in broad daylight for simply showing a cartoon it's pretty clear to which side they belong. No, Macron isn't over-sensitive or reacted bad. He was too soft if anything.
“Macron’s war on Islamic separatism only divides France further,”
Washington Post:
“instead of fighting systemic racism, France wants to reform Islam.”
The New York Times :
“Is France fueling Muslim terrorism by trying to prevent it?”
The Times’ first headline about the beheading of Paty also raised eyebrows in Paris: “French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street.”
Not a Macron fan at all, but when you see headlines like this after a Islamic terrorist decapitated a teacher in broad daylight for simply showing a cartoon it's pretty clear to which side they belong. No, Macron isn't over-sensitive or reacted bad. He was too soft if anything.
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The NY Times headline looks bad till you realize it's an opinion piece. When you realize that you can go ahead and wipe your ass with it.
The other two aren't as bad.
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Where the hell has us media said anything covering murder and saying it was justified? This guys trying to pull a Trump card. Must be up to something bad.
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Thanks for the attempt but this article is behind a paywall.
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Just tried to search for that FT piece and found this instead:
https://www.dailysabah.com/world/is...icle-criticizing-macrons-crackdown-on-muslims
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Put a . After .com and you call get past a lot of paywalls
https://www.nytimes.com./2020/10/31/opinion/france-terrorism-muslims.html
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The backlash is mostly in the Muslim world, and thats because he basically said Islam has to change. Although i know what he was trying to say, this is also a very clumsy way to phrase things. The key thing many westerners don't understand is that "Islam" as a concept is considered perfect by Muslims, but Muslims are not considered perfect. Saying Islam *has* to change is pretty much like telling Muslims to give up their religion. So if Macron just re-phrased and said "Muslims have to change" i don't think he would've gotten the backlash he got. A lot of whats going on here is a very fundamental miscommunication from 2 cultures.
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Is France Fueling Muslim Terrorism by Trying to Prevent It?
Emmanuel Macron’s government may unwittingly be breeding the kind of communalism it wants to ward off.
By Vincent Geisser
Mr. Geisser is a political scientist.
MARSEILLE, France — Once again, terrorism strikes France — and once again, terrorism is exposing the country’s dangerous contradictions.
First there was the murder of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who was decapitated near Paris on Oct. 16 by a young Chechen man after Mr. Paty showed students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression. Then, on Thursday, three churchgoers were knifed and killed in the southern city of Nice. The prime suspect in that attack is a Tunisian man who later yelled “Allahu akbar” at police officers.
Within days of Mr. Paty’s murder, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, announced a crackdown against people “who spread hate online.” BarakaCity, a humanitarian NGO that the government says “took pleasure in justifying terrorist acts,” has been dissolved. The government has threatened to ban Le Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France, a nonprofit organization that says it combats anti-Muslim racism: According to Mr. Darmanin, the C.C.I.F. is at work “against the Republic.”
In addition to security and counterterrorism measures, the French government responded to Mr. Paty’s killing by vigorously reaffirming the right of free speech — including the right to satirize and blaspheme — as well as the central role of France’s version of secularism, known as laïcité, in all state institutions, especially public schools.
Continue reading the main story
In his homage to the teacher, President Emmanuel Macron said Mr. Paty had been killed for “embodying the French republic” and in his name vowed to “hold laïcité up high.”
But the French government’s conception of radical Islamism also rests on a problematic assumption: namely that the principal cause of terrorism in France is the failure of French Muslims to fully endorse the country’s secular culture.
- The election. And its impact on you.
In early October, before the recent killings, Mr. Macron had announced a new government plan, including an upcoming comprehensive bill, “to strengthen laïcité and consolidate republican principles” in order to combat what he calls “separatism.”
The president’s notion of “separatism” seems to assume that a significant minority of Muslims are tempted to set themselves apart somehow from the rest of French society, perhaps by creating enclaves in disaffected suburbs or building Muslim ecosystems of sorts around Islamic schools, halal stores or mosques.
But this diagnostic is questionable, and it risks being self-defeating: It, itself, may endanger social cohesion.
Continue reading the main story
One problem with this idea is that it implicitly treats Muslims as though they were a separate category of French people, and immature citizens who lag in their comprehension of secular republicanism.
In Her Words: Where women rule the headlines.
In fact, numerous studies and much statistical research, including by the Institut national des études démographiques (the National Institute of Demographic Studies), have long revealed that a majority of Muslims in France are well integrated culturally and socially (less so economically, partly because of job discrimination). The political scientist Bruno Etienne once called French Muslims “abnormally normal.”
It may be that in the 1980s and 1990s some, perhaps even many, Muslims in France looked upon laïcité as a synonym for antireligiosity or institutionalized atheism. But that thinking has long since changed.
Back in 2004, l’Union des organisations islamiques de France (the Union of Islamic Organizations in France), a major conservative Muslim group, stated, about a controversial new law banning “ostentatious” expressions of religion at school, “We would have liked for this law not to exist, but the law on laïcité is here and we will apply it.”
Two-thirds of the Muslim respondents in a 2016 study by the right-leaning think tank Institut Montaigne said they believed that a secular state allowed for freedom of religious expression.
In a study released last year, 70 percent of Muslim respondents said they felt that they could freely practice Islam in France. Some 41 percent also said they thought Islam should adapt in some respects to conform to laïcité — but 37 percent said they wished that laïcité were more flexible.
When Muslims in France criticize laïcité today it isn’t the republican version of laïcité set out in a seminal 1905 law about the separation of church and state. That law aims to protect freedom of belief by requiring the French state and its institutions to remain absolutely neutral when it comes to religion: “The Republic neither recognizes nor employs nor subsidizes cults.”
Continue reading the main story
Muslims who take issue with laïcité typically do so against a more recent and more ideological interpretation of it that is sometimes brandished to blame Muslims for their failure to integrate, as well as other social ills. They feel and fear that this inherently liberal principle is increasingly becoming a cover for anti-Muslim racism, a concept distorted and deployed to make racism respectable.
Jean Baubérot, a historian and expert in the sociology of religions, once warned: “Let us not use laïcité against Islam.”
It is telling, for instance, that the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, le Rassemblement national, now casts itself as the last bastion of France’s republican values, including laïcité — even though some of the conservative Catholics among the party’s core members don’t much care for the notion. A universalist principle that once stood for progress has become a defensive partisan slogan.
Mainstream political discourse in France also tends to chide French Muslims for failing to denounce Islamist radicalism vocally enough. But that accusation, too, only reflects a blind spot on the part of the political elite.
In the course of my own research, I have found numerous examples of Muslim groups condemning terrorism. After attacks in early 2015, a leading federation of Muslim groups called on mosques to say a weekly prayer asking God “to preserve France.” Muslims routinely hold services to grieve for non-Muslim victims of Islamist terrorism — and, of course, Muslims, too, sometimes are among the victims. The imam of the city of Bordeaux has become a leading figure in efforts to prevent radicalization in France.
The government’s concern about Muslim “separatism” also is problematic for conflating two distinct phenomena: Islamist terrorism, on the one hand, which does attack the symbols of the French nation and, on the other hand, Muslim communalism, which essentially is an expression of some Muslims’ identity as both French citizens and believers in Islam.
Warning against the purported risk of separatism will not help mobilize French Muslims against radicalism or encourage their sense of belonging to the nation — just the opposite.
If anything, it is the French government’s rhetoric that could end up convincing some Muslims that they are indeed different from other French people. The country’s leaders may well be accelerating the creation of precisely that which they fear: a distinct Muslim identity and community within France.
Vincent Geisser is a political scientist with the French National Center for Scientific Research at Aix-Marseille University. This essay was translated from the French by The New York Times.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Correction: Nov. 1, 2020
An earlier version of this article misstated which law l’Union des organisations islamiques de France said in 2004 it would follow even though it had reservations about it. It was a new law banning "ostentatious" signs of religion at school; not the 1905 law on the separation of church and state.
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It didn't work.
assuming it doesn't break the rules maybe you can copy and paste the article here in spoiler tags.
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MARSEILLE, France — Once again, terrorism strikes France — and once again, terrorism is exposing the country’s dangerous contradictions.
First there was the murder of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who was decapitated near Paris on Oct. 16 by a young Chechen man after Mr. Paty showed students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression. Then, on Thursday, three churchgoers were knifed and killed in the southern city of Nice. The prime suspect in that attack is a Tunisian man who later yelled “Allahu akbar” at police officers.
Within days of Mr. Paty’s murder, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, announced a crackdown against people “who spread hate online.” BarakaCity, a humanitarian NGO that the government says “took pleasure in justifying terrorist acts,” has been dissolved. The government has threatened to ban Le Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France, a nonprofit organization that says it combats anti-Muslim racism: According to Mr. Darmanin, the C.C.I.F. is at work “against the Republic.”
In addition to security and counterterrorism measures, the French government responded to Mr. Paty’s killing by vigorously reaffirming the right of free speech — including the right to satirize and blaspheme — as well as the central role of France’s version of secularism, known as laïcité, in all state institutions, especially public schools.
In his homage to the teacher, President Emmanuel Macron said Mr. Paty had been killed for “embodying the French republic” and in his name vowed to “hold laïcité up high.”
But the French government’s conception of radical Islamism also rests on a problematic assumption: namely that the principal cause of terrorism in France is the failure of French Muslims to fully endorse the country’s secular culture.
In early October, before the recent killings, Mr. Macron had announced a new government plan, including an upcoming comprehensive bill, “to strengthen laïcité and consolidate republican principles” in order to combat what he calls “separatism.”
The president’s notion of “separatism” seems to assume that a significant minority of Muslims are tempted to set themselves apart somehow from the rest of French society, perhaps by creating enclaves in disaffected suburbs or building Muslim ecosystems of sorts around Islamic schools, halal stores or mosques.
But this diagnostic is questionable, and it risks being self-defeating: It, itself, may endanger social cohesion.
One problem with this idea is that it implicitly treats Muslims as though they were a separate category of French people, and immature citizens who lag in their comprehension of secular republicanism.
In fact, numerous studies and much statistical research, including by the Institut national des études démographiques (the National Institute of Demographic Studies), have long revealed that a majority of Muslims in France are well integrated culturally and socially (less so economically, partly because of job discrimination). The political scientist Bruno Etienne once called French Muslims “abnormally normal.”
It may be that in the 1980s and 1990s some, perhaps even many, Muslims in France looked upon laïcité as a synonym for antireligiosity or institutionalized atheism. But that thinking has long since changed.
Back in 2004, l’Union des organisations islamiques de France (the Union of Islamic Organizations in France), a major conservative Muslim group, stated, about a controversial new law banning “ostentatious” expressions of religion at school, “We would have liked for this law not to exist, but the law on laïcité is here and we will apply it.”
Two-thirds of the Muslim respondents in a 2016 study by the right-leaning think tank Institut Montaigne said they believed that a secular state allowed for freedom of religious expression.
In a study released last year, 70 percent of Muslim respondents said they felt that they could freely practice Islam in France. Some 41 percent also said they thought Islam should adapt in some respects to conform to laïcité — but 37 percent said they wished that laïcité were more flexible.
When Muslims in France criticize laïcité today it isn’t the republican version of laïcité set out in a seminal 1905 law about the separation of church and state. That law aims to protect freedom of belief by requiring the French state and its institutions to remain absolutely neutral when it comes to religion: “The Republic neither recognizes nor employs nor subsidizes cults.”
Muslims who take issue with laïcité typically do so against a more recent and more ideological interpretation of it that is sometimes brandished to blame Muslims for their failure to integrate, as well as other social ills. They feel and fear that this inherently liberal principle is increasingly becoming a cover for anti-Muslim racism, a concept distorted and deployed to make racism respectable.
Jean Baubérot, a historian and expert in the sociology of religions, once warned: “Let us not use laïcité against Islam.”
It is telling, for instance, that the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, le Rassemblement national, now casts itself as the last bastion of France’s republican values, including laïcité — even though some of the conservative Catholics among the party’s core members don’t much care for the notion. A universalist principle that once stood for progress has become a defensive partisan slogan.
Mainstream political discourse in France also tends to chide French Muslims for failing to denounce Islamist radicalism vocally enough. But that accusation, too, only reflects a blind spot on the part of the political elite.
In the course of my own research, I have found numerous examples of Muslim groups condemning terrorism. After attacks in early 2015, a leading federation of Muslim groups called on mosques to say a weekly prayer asking God “to preserve France.” Muslims routinely hold services to grieve for non-Muslim victims of Islamist terrorism — and, of course, Muslims, too, sometimes are among the victims. The imam of the city of Bordeauxhas become a leading figure in efforts to prevent radicalization in France.
The government’s concern about Muslim “separatism” also is problematic for conflating two distinct phenomena: Islamist terrorism, on the one hand, which does attack the symbols of the French nation and, on the other hand, Muslim communalism, which essentially is an expression of some Muslims’ identity as both French citizens and believers in Islam.
Warning against the purported risk of separatism will not help mobilize French Muslims against radicalism or encourage their sense of belonging to the nation — just the opposite.
If anything, it is the French government’s rhetoric that could end up convincing some Muslims that they are indeed different from other French people. The country’s leaders may well be accelerating the creation of precisely that which they fear: a distinct Muslim identity and community within France.
First there was the murder of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who was decapitated near Paris on Oct. 16 by a young Chechen man after Mr. Paty showed students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression. Then, on Thursday, three churchgoers were knifed and killed in the southern city of Nice. The prime suspect in that attack is a Tunisian man who later yelled “Allahu akbar” at police officers.
Within days of Mr. Paty’s murder, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, announced a crackdown against people “who spread hate online.” BarakaCity, a humanitarian NGO that the government says “took pleasure in justifying terrorist acts,” has been dissolved. The government has threatened to ban Le Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France, a nonprofit organization that says it combats anti-Muslim racism: According to Mr. Darmanin, the C.C.I.F. is at work “against the Republic.”
In addition to security and counterterrorism measures, the French government responded to Mr. Paty’s killing by vigorously reaffirming the right of free speech — including the right to satirize and blaspheme — as well as the central role of France’s version of secularism, known as laïcité, in all state institutions, especially public schools.
In his homage to the teacher, President Emmanuel Macron said Mr. Paty had been killed for “embodying the French republic” and in his name vowed to “hold laïcité up high.”
But the French government’s conception of radical Islamism also rests on a problematic assumption: namely that the principal cause of terrorism in France is the failure of French Muslims to fully endorse the country’s secular culture.
In early October, before the recent killings, Mr. Macron had announced a new government plan, including an upcoming comprehensive bill, “to strengthen laïcité and consolidate republican principles” in order to combat what he calls “separatism.”
The president’s notion of “separatism” seems to assume that a significant minority of Muslims are tempted to set themselves apart somehow from the rest of French society, perhaps by creating enclaves in disaffected suburbs or building Muslim ecosystems of sorts around Islamic schools, halal stores or mosques.
But this diagnostic is questionable, and it risks being self-defeating: It, itself, may endanger social cohesion.
One problem with this idea is that it implicitly treats Muslims as though they were a separate category of French people, and immature citizens who lag in their comprehension of secular republicanism.
In fact, numerous studies and much statistical research, including by the Institut national des études démographiques (the National Institute of Demographic Studies), have long revealed that a majority of Muslims in France are well integrated culturally and socially (less so economically, partly because of job discrimination). The political scientist Bruno Etienne once called French Muslims “abnormally normal.”
It may be that in the 1980s and 1990s some, perhaps even many, Muslims in France looked upon laïcité as a synonym for antireligiosity or institutionalized atheism. But that thinking has long since changed.
Back in 2004, l’Union des organisations islamiques de France (the Union of Islamic Organizations in France), a major conservative Muslim group, stated, about a controversial new law banning “ostentatious” expressions of religion at school, “We would have liked for this law not to exist, but the law on laïcité is here and we will apply it.”
Two-thirds of the Muslim respondents in a 2016 study by the right-leaning think tank Institut Montaigne said they believed that a secular state allowed for freedom of religious expression.
In a study released last year, 70 percent of Muslim respondents said they felt that they could freely practice Islam in France. Some 41 percent also said they thought Islam should adapt in some respects to conform to laïcité — but 37 percent said they wished that laïcité were more flexible.
When Muslims in France criticize laïcité today it isn’t the republican version of laïcité set out in a seminal 1905 law about the separation of church and state. That law aims to protect freedom of belief by requiring the French state and its institutions to remain absolutely neutral when it comes to religion: “The Republic neither recognizes nor employs nor subsidizes cults.”
Muslims who take issue with laïcité typically do so against a more recent and more ideological interpretation of it that is sometimes brandished to blame Muslims for their failure to integrate, as well as other social ills. They feel and fear that this inherently liberal principle is increasingly becoming a cover for anti-Muslim racism, a concept distorted and deployed to make racism respectable.
Jean Baubérot, a historian and expert in the sociology of religions, once warned: “Let us not use laïcité against Islam.”
It is telling, for instance, that the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, le Rassemblement national, now casts itself as the last bastion of France’s republican values, including laïcité — even though some of the conservative Catholics among the party’s core members don’t much care for the notion. A universalist principle that once stood for progress has become a defensive partisan slogan.
Mainstream political discourse in France also tends to chide French Muslims for failing to denounce Islamist radicalism vocally enough. But that accusation, too, only reflects a blind spot on the part of the political elite.
In the course of my own research, I have found numerous examples of Muslim groups condemning terrorism. After attacks in early 2015, a leading federation of Muslim groups called on mosques to say a weekly prayer asking God “to preserve France.” Muslims routinely hold services to grieve for non-Muslim victims of Islamist terrorism — and, of course, Muslims, too, sometimes are among the victims. The imam of the city of Bordeauxhas become a leading figure in efforts to prevent radicalization in France.
The government’s concern about Muslim “separatism” also is problematic for conflating two distinct phenomena: Islamist terrorism, on the one hand, which does attack the symbols of the French nation and, on the other hand, Muslim communalism, which essentially is an expression of some Muslims’ identity as both French citizens and believers in Islam.
Warning against the purported risk of separatism will not help mobilize French Muslims against radicalism or encourage their sense of belonging to the nation — just the opposite.
If anything, it is the French government’s rhetoric that could end up convincing some Muslims that they are indeed different from other French people. The country’s leaders may well be accelerating the creation of precisely that which they fear: a distinct Muslim identity and community within France.
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Wtf 250 killed since 2015 because of a ~5 million minority?!
But the american leftists are very quick to blame the other side, the native french and not the muslims
But in america they are very quick to blame white people if a white person of 200 million white americans commits a mass shooting.
But the american leftists are very quick to blame the other side, the native french and not the muslims
But in america they are very quick to blame white people if a white person of 200 million white americans commits a mass shooting.
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Thanks.
Do you personally have a problem with Macron saying citizens/residents of a nation must respect the protections afforded free speech by that nation, regardless of their religious beliefs?
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Thank you.
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No. But i have a problem with him reducing the entire crisis to just a lazy platitude. The vast majority of French Muslims are highly secularized, so he's preaching to the choir. The only thing he's done is to further stigmatize French Muslims and make the possibility of finding sustainable solutions more remote. There is absolutely no nuance to what the French government's approach is, which is why they're getting criticized.
