PARIS – France was shocked by the October knife killings by freelance terrorists but did not lead to global sympathy for France after the Islamist massacres in 2015 and 2016. European leaders expressed solidarity, but the Muslim world has been blamed for the anti-French protests. And calls for a boycott.
In addition to the intensity of the attacks, the striking difference between then and now has a lot to do with the response of President Emanuel Macron, who has alienated many French Muslims and angered the Muslim world.
His government launched a broad-based crackdown on Islamists and some Muslim organizations, in which Islam is perpetuated with “Islamism” (sometimes leading to violence).
Now, in search of comrades, Mr. Mac Kron is reaching out to Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a common cause with a European leader whose country was also the victim of a terrorist attack last week. According to Elysee Palace, the two men will meet in Paris on Tuesday to discuss the challenge of terrorism in Europe.
After the attack in Vienna, Mr. Kurz barely hit a wave with his response, using conciliatory words to deny his torture. “Our enemy is never all people of religion,” Mr Kurz said in an address to his nation last week. “Our enemies are extremists and terrorists.”
Mr Macron, by contrast, sought to make criticism of Islam and Islamism a signature issue, even before the recent assassination, before the 2022 presidential campaign. “Islam is a religion that is going through crisis everywhere in the world today.”
Since then, he has tried to calm Raphael’s feelings and emphasize that his “country is a country that has no problems with any religion,” he told Al Jazeera in an interview.
But he has also crossed the line of criticism leveled by the Western media (within which he has found solid support) outside France, and has taken pains to clarify his views.
“France fights against Islamist separatism, never against Islam,” he wrote after announcing an opinion in the Financial Times that Mr MacCrone had unjustly accused him of defaming French Muslims for political purposes. He vehemently refused to do so, and the newspaper removed the original article from his article for review.
Mr MacCrone also expressed frustration with the coverage of the US government’s response, including to the New York Times., According to the newspaper Le Monde, a recent cabinet meeting complained that “going with American multiculturalism would be a kind of ideological death,” and promised that there would be no French “alignment” with it.
But while Mr Kron has insisted he has no quarrel with the country’s Muslims, only with terrorists and “Islamism”, his government appeared to be wreaking havoc after beheading a teacher, Samuel Petty.
It said it would shut down two Muslim-backed organizations, which the authorities accused of having terrorist views; He carried out dozens of raids; And police files already demanded the deportation of hundreds of Muslims.
On Monday, Austrian police carried out several raids targeting members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Dozens of people were arrested or brought in for questioning on suspicion of creating a terrorist network, terrorist financing and money laundering, the home minister said.
Austrian officials said the operation was carried out even before last week’s terrorist attack, which was caused by a man linked to the Islamic State.
It remains to be seen whether there is more light between the positions of the two leaders. Mr. Kurz (, 34) and Mr. Mac Krone (, ૨), both ambitious and misunderstood political chameleons, give a glimpse of the political transformation in Cold Europe, especially as it considers terrorism and immigration.
Mr. Mac Krone was elected as the left savior at the center of liberal democracy, spreading in the Socialist Party of France. Now they are scrambling to the right, allowing their ministers to speak the toughest things for them, to position themselves for the next French presidential election in 2022, when they are expected to face a tougher challenge from the nationalists.
Mr. Kurz, a conservative, had already been elected once before by choosing the message of the right, after which he joined the coalition, which used some of Europe’s harsh language and sanctions against immigrants. But since Ria Stria’s last election in 2017, she has teamed up with left-leaning greens. Their new connection is very different – and so are his words.
Earlier last month Mr McCrone put up markers for what would become of his aggressive stance after the assassination, which he called “Islamist” and “Islamism”.
But there has been ambiguity in his approach from the beginning, and Mr. Moron Kroen’s subtle – sometimes very subtle – use of language to expose his syntax and places to multiple interpretations does not suit the French president at all.
In his long October speech, Mr. Moron Crown declared war on what he called “Islamist separatism” – according to him, for some Muslims in France the tendency to develop Jetisson Republican values and “alternative organization of society”.
There are sociologists who don’t see the problem as big as shown by Mr. Mac Kron. They point out that the majority of French Muslims only want to become equal citizens of France. And Mr. Mac Kron himself took care to accept the way the French Republic has given ghettos to its Muslim citizens, denied them the opportunity and oppressed them with the weight of France’s colonial past.
Those warnings were largely ignored in the Muslim world. The only thing that increased the anger after the assassination was the way Mr. Mac Krone slipped away from the dangers of “Islam”, on which he considered the root problem with Islam.
At the beginning of his 70-minute speech, he spoke of the Islamists’ “ultimate goal”, “complete control.” He then spoke of the killing of two local police officers by jihadists, “radical Islamism that rejects the law of the republic.”
About the “deep crisis” of Islam – almost immediately it led to the sentences that gave the crime. Mr Macron told the Al Jazeera interviewer that the phrases were “taken out of context.”
The “context” for his criticism of Islam was not clear – Mr. Mac Kron’s long list of “Islam” crimes.
Later in the same speech, Mr MacCrone tried to bring Islam under French rule, making it a French project – somehow e-Islamizing it, reinforcing the signs that Islam itself was alien.
The main “axis” of his strategy, Mr. Maron Coron explains in his speech, is to create “Il the M then the Ment મm of M ”m” in France – where Islam will be incorporated into signature achievements in French cultural history, such as the dominance of thinkers like Voltaire and Diodorut.
After the assassination of Mr. Pitt, the far-right leader of France, Marine Le Pen, declared that “Islamism is a militant ideology, the means of its victory is terrorism.” On the same day Mr. Mac Mac Crown’s Home Minister, Gerald Durmani, announced police action against the “enemy inside, insidious and highly organized.”
Two days later, Mr. Macron praised Mr. Patti to the national audience: “I have named the evil one. Actions are decided. We’ve made them harder. And we will take them to their conclusion. “
In this context, the display of restraint by Mr. Kurz, who had recently parroted the anti-immigrant message of far-right, did not go unnoticed.
“He resisted populist temptations,” said Peter Newman, director of the International Center for the Study Radification Declaration at King’s College London. “It would have been easier and probably more popular for his voters to give a more polarizing speech, a speech that takes a hard line on Muslims and how Islam has to change.
“He could have made a macron speech, but he didn’t,” Mr Newman added.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mac Krone continued to vehemently defend the strategy of the beloved Mohammed, first published in Charlie Hebdo in the name of “defending freedom”.
In France, left and right, among intellectuals and politicians and in the media, this position is widely accepted. Prominent moderate Muslims have also publicly expressed silent support.
“It simply came to our notice then. “It doesn’t touch me,” said Tariq al-Brew, the imam of the Bordeaux mosque. He said Muslims should “indulge in this kind of provocation with indifference.”
Within France, there have been only a few disgruntled voices in public, pointing to possible flaws in Mr Macron’s approach.
“He is the president of all French, including Muslims,” said Jean-Franકોois Byart, an expert on Islam at the Geneva Graduate Institute. “It will now identify France with a situation that is not representative of all sensibilities.”
Mr Bayart also noted that the French police discriminated against Muslims in a systematic, degrading manner – a constant search for independent review bodies in recent years.
Mr Beckart said the images were intended to “remind people that they are not here, they are somewhere else.” He added: “You are an Arab, you are an immigrant. You are stealing French bread. ”
