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President Emmanuel Macron has said that his country is fighting “Islamist separatism, never Islam”, responding to a Financial Times article that he claimed misquoted him and has since been removed from the newspaper’s website.
In a letter to the editor published on Wednesday, Macron said the British newspaper had accused him of “stigmatizing French Muslims for electoral purposes and fostering a climate of fear and suspicion towards them.”
“I will not allow anyone to claim that France, or its government, is promoting racism against Muslims,” he said.
An opinion piece by a Financial Times correspondent published on Tuesday alleged that Macron’s condemnation of “Islamic separatism” risked fostering a “hostile environment” for French Muslims.
The article was later removed from the newspaper’s website and replaced with a notice saying that it had “contained errors of fact.”
The French president sparked protests across the Muslim world after the assassination last month of teacher Samuel Paty, who had shown his class a cartoon of Muhammad, by saying that France would never give up its laws allowing blasphemous cartoons.
Islam prohibits representations of the Prophet Muhammad.
Following protests and boycotts of French products around the world, Macron told the Al-Jazeera network over the weekend that he understood the cartoons could be shocking to some.
But recounting a wave of Islamist attacks in France since 2015, Macron warned in his letter this week that there was still a “breeding ground” for extremism in France.
“In certain districts and on the Internet, groups linked to radical Islam are teaching our children hatred of the republic, asking them to ignore its laws,” he wrote.
“This is what France is fighting against … hatred and death that threaten its children, never against Islam. We oppose deception, fanaticism, violent extremism. Not a religion.”
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