Macron and the Islamists The President defends French values against terrorist attackers.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/macron-and-the-islamists-11604098346?mod=opinion_lead_pos3
France has been rocked in recent weeks by three terror attacks, the latest on Thursday in Nice. That stabbing in a church, which killed three, followed the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty two weeks ago outside his school near Paris. A knife attack last month outside the former office of the Charlie Hebdo magazine injured two.
France is no stranger to Islamist terrorism, especially after the 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 and the 2016 Nice truck attack that claimed 86 lives. But the latest incidents have shocked the country, for coming so close together and being such a frontal assault on French values.
Mr. Paty was singled out for displaying caricatures of Mohammed in a lesson on free speech—cartoons such as those linked to the 2015 rampage at Charlie Hebdo’s office after the magazine published similar images. Thursday’s knife attack in Nice is not the first to target religious sites in the traditionally Catholic country; a priest was murdered in a church in Normandy in 2016.
President Emmanuel Macron appears to understand the relationship between Islamist rejection of French values and this terrorism. This month he delivered a major address promising a national strategy to combat Islamism, which he described as “Islamist separatism.” Proposals include making it harder for radical imams from overseas to relocate to France, and requiring religious organizations that run sports clubs and the like to pledge to support “republican values” in exchange for public funding.
France’s tradition of secularism, known as laïcité, “is the glue of a united France,” Mr. Macron said, and it must be defended against Islamism’s “conscious, theorized, politico-religious project” to undermine French values.
His plans face the usual opposition from the usual quarters, especially from those on the left who recoil anytime anyone defends Western Enlightenment values—even though Mr. Macron explicitly rejected the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam message of France’s far right. His words also sparked a feud with Turkey, whose Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan senses an opportunity to stir trouble.
But Mr. Macron is only saying Islam should expect to have the same formal and ideological relationship to the state and French society that Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism do. His approach is notable because he is treating terrorism not only as a policing or intelligence-gathering problem, and not only as an economic problem in low-income areas. His strategy is starting the debate in the right place.
Comments are closed.
