President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday warned against a stigmatisation of the Muslim population in France and the shortcut of associating the Islamic religion with terrorism, as was illustrated in a string of recent events that have caused outrage and heated debate across the country. It was a tardy reaction by Macron who, Mediapart co-editor Carine Fouteau writes in this op-ed, has left the door open to precisely the problem he now identifies. It is his responsibility to strengthen the barriers against hatred, alongside the fight against terrorism.
An openly Islamophobic polemicist, previously convicted for provoking racial hatred, has now been recruited by a French television channel to pour out more of his venom against Muslims; a woman wearing a headscarf was humiliated by a member of the far-right Rassemblement National party in front of her son and his schoolmates at a meeting of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté regional council; an education minister calls for the reporting of little boys who refuse, in the playground, to take the hand of little girls, which he sees as the sign of future jihadists; France's interior minister designates “the regular and ostentatious practice of prayers” and the “intensified practice of religion during the Ramadan” as problematic behaviour; a university detailed a list of instructions, before finally withdrawing them, aimed at identifying supposed forms of “radicalisation”, such as the “apparition of the headscarf”, a change in appearance with “the wearing of a beard without a moustache”, “change in clothing” like the “wearing of the djellaba”, “recurrent absenteeism during the hours of prayer”, the refusal to “recognise the authority of women”, and a “halt in the consumption of alcoholic drinks”.
