John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.
On October 16, a French teacher was beheaded in the street outside his school by an 18-year-old radical Islamist attacker. Ten days later, France finds itself accused by some at home and abroad of over-reaction — even of racism.
The accusations come from Muslim countries — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan led the charge over the weekend — but also from liberal voices in the United States.
The New York Times wrote of a “broad government crackdown against Muslim individuals and groups.” An American sociologist, Crystal Fleming, an expert on white supremacist groups, tweeted: “It is beyond sad to see French officials respond to violent extremism with violent extremism…”
Violent extremism? A broad crackdown on Muslims?
What has President Emmanuel Macron’s government done exactly? Invaded Iraq? Passed a Homeland Security Act to suspend some civil liberties? Set up an off-shore prison camp for Muslim detainees?
No. The government has closed a mosque. It has arrested a few dozen people. It has taken steps to investigate and maybe close 51 Muslim associations alleged to have extremist sympathies. It has announced plans to expel 231 foreigners, most of them already in prison.
Measured criticism of the French reaction is possible. Arié Alimi, a lawyer with the French League of Human Rights, said: “Morning and night we are hearing calls for new actions against Muslims. What we need [from Macron] is something … wiser, something more balanced.”
Alimi is right. Macron needs to return to the sensible, considered approach to France’s relationship with its five million Muslim citizens that he adopted in a speech two weeks before the murder of Samuel Paty.
But first consider recent French history. There have been 36 serious or very serious Islamist terror attacks in France in the eight years since Mohamed Merah murdered three children outside a Jewish school in Toulouse and killed five other people in March 2012.
It will soon be five years since a series of coordinated suicide attacks on the Bataclan music venue and nearby bars in Paris slaughtered 130 Friday evening revelers. The following year 86 people died when a 19-tonne truck was driven into crowds in Nice celebrating France’s national day.
Dishonest and dangerous
To imply that France is more culprit than victim — as Erdoğan and some Western critics do — is dishonest and dangerous. France has suffered more from Islamist terrorism than any other European country in the last decade. The great majority of the attacks have had no direct connection with Charlie Hebdo magazine’s publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
To be sure, there has been something scattergun about the Macron government’s security reaction since the Paty murder but nothing draconian. Rounding up the usual suspects — even those already in jail — is the standard response of governments who feel they must be seen to “do something.” Even the closure of the mosque at Pantin north of Paris — taken over by an extremist imam — has been welcomed by its more moderate worshippers.
What is more disturbing is the gush of unconsidered rhetoric from some members of the French government. The Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, in particular, has seized the terminology and thought patterns of the hard right.
He speaks of France fighting a “civil war”. To defend France’s secular and unitary Republic against the “separatist” teaching of extremist Islam. He suggests that ethnic food aisles in supermarkets should be closed. In other words: Let’s punish the innocent French Muslims as well as the guilty ones.
Macron, according to Elysée insiders, has asked Darmanin and other ministers to cool their language. But Macron, in private, according to the investigative newspaper Le Canard Enchainé, also uses intemperate words.
“They want our death. So we will fight them to the death,” he is reported to have said. “The French Republic is a nice girl but she won’t allow herself to be raped.”
Defeating violent extremism needs strong action. Every country has a right to defend its citizens. But Western governments must also try to break the cycle of reaction and counter-reaction which creates more extremism and more violence.
The far-right leader Marine Le Pen sees no reason for such prudence. Her reaction to Paty’s beheading is to repeat — over and over — that “massive, uncontrolled” immigration is to blame.
Yet the great majority of France’s 5 million Muslims were born in France. Something like half of them are non-practising.
Would a President Le Pen expel them?
A radical imam, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, helped to foment the mendacious online hue and cry against Paty’s use of the Muhammad cartoons in a civics lesson. He is an associate of the anti-Semitic French comedian Dieudonné, who is in turn a friend of Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie.
Perhaps, they should all be expelled.
Cartoon controversy
A minority of French Muslims — but a growing minority — embraces a radical, paranoid anti-Western version of Islam.
The Islamist strategy is to provoke France and other Western governments into actions and words that are presented as not just anti-Islamist but anti-Muslim.
The cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, first published by Charlie Hebdo magazine in 2006, have become a part of this spiral — a source of indignation for both moderate and radical Muslims but also for France.
In his oration at the nation’s homage to Samuel Paty, Macron said France would “continue to publish caricatures.” Fair enough. It would have been better if he had added words more like those included in a wise sermon circulated to mosques last Friday by the French Muslim Council.
“The law of the Republic permits these cartoons but obliges no one to like them,” the suggested sermon said. “We can even detest them. But nothing. absolutely nothing, justifies murder.”
Three weeks ago, Macron gave a thoughtful, balanced speech on Islam and France in the outer Paris suburbs, not far from Conflans Saint Honorine, where Paty was murdered. The attack was almost certainly an extremist response to Macron’s speech as much as to Paty’s lesson on tolerance and freedom of expression.
Macron promised a law on “secularity and liberty” to combat extremist Islamist “separatism” by banning the “importation” of foreign-financed and trained imams. Tax breaks and state funding will be available to mosques that sign a charter accepting French principles of secularism, democracy and the rule of law.
The French president admitted, however, that the country’s Muslim citizens had been let down by successive governments. He admitted that France had created its own “separatism” by dumping poorer people in suburban ghettoes with poor housing and few jobs. He promised new action this fall and winter to improve opportunities for the people of multi-racial inner suburbs or banlieues.
The speech was generally well received by moderate Muslim leaders in France. It is to that kind of equilibrium that Macron must now return. The draft law on Islam and freedom, expected on December 9, must be as even-handed as Macron’s speech — not skewed by the anger, however understandable, generated by the attack on Paty.
The crucial battle in the next couple of weeks could, therefore, be within the French government.
It will pit the short-term politics of anger against a longer-term policy of democratic reconquest; Macron against some of his glibber, more hot-headed ministers; Macron against Macron.