Thu 22 October 2020:
France will not give up cartoons, President Emmanuel Macron vowed Wednesday in a homage to teacher Samuel Paty, beheaded for having shown caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed to pupils in a lesson on free speech.
Paty was killed after he showed caricature of the Prophet Muhammad to pupils.
Macron and Islam
In a divisive speech on Friday 2 October, French President Emmanuel Macron outlined proposals on how to challenge what he called “Islamist separatism”.
“Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country,” Macron said during a nearly two hour speech in the northwest Paris suburb of Les Mureaux.
Muslims across the world responded with anger, with many viewing the speech, which was centred around protecting the ideal of French secularism, as an attempt to pander to the far right.
Many experts believe In more recent times, across the US and Europe, anti-Muslim rhetoric has been a powerful tool to win over the electorate and distract from more day-to-day issues, such as unemployment and rising poverty.
In a 2019 report, the Brookings Institute scholar Shadi Hamid wrote: “Demographic fears- even if they don’t correspond to reality- are difficult to ignore in democracies, where the changing ethnic or religious composition of the population can shape and even determine whether a party can win on the local or national level.”
As things stand, both Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen are polling at 25 percent for the presidential election set for 2022.
As Le Pen’s platform is almost entirely defined by her anti-Islam platform, observers believe Macron is trying to boost his credentials among those who hold anti-Muslim views.
On his Twitter account, the journalist CJ Werleman summarised: “Macron’s political future is in crisis today and he’s turning to the never fail election campaign strategy of inflaming anti-Muslim animus.”
Macron’s definition of radical Islam stops at French Muslims speaking in Arabic or other languages or wearing headscarves and other religious clothing. It does not extend to regimes in the Middle East who commit massacres, murder journalists or imprison dissidents for tweets.
