The headline in the UK Independent reads, “When did ‘Islamophobic’ attacks become the norm for the French media? The right wing media have hijacked France’s proud secularist tradition and turned it into an attack on Muslims.
Readers have seen and been encouraged by the growing anti-Muslim resistance in France during the past few years. From the rising popularity of Marine Le Pen’s anti-Islamization Front National Party to the newly emerged Gereation Identitaire, a movement of patriotic young people dedicated to stopping creeping Islamization and preserving French culture, traditions, rule of law, and its Christian identity.
Independent When last week’s cover of normally stern French magazine Le Point appeared online, the consensus on social networks said it was a hoax. Le Point is no tabloid. It is a serious and well respected conservative magazine. Running the headline: “Brazen Islam…in school cafeterias, hospitals, and swimming pools” the cover featured a niqab-clad woman arguing with a French policewoman. It had to be a joke, but sadly gladly it wasn’t.
Le Point’s cover was widely condemned on social networks, and parodies of it quickly appeared. When Socialist Interior Minister Manuel Valls was asked during a popular TV talk-show whether he found the cover shocking, he brushed it off, saying “It expresses a reality.” He went on to say: “What I find shocking, and what I will always find shocking, is a fully-veiled woman.”
That was it. The second religion in France gets insulted on the front cover of one of the country’s most popular magazines – something that could never have happened with any other religion or community, as pointed out by the numerous parodies – and the Interior Minister, supposedly in charge of security of all French citizens, claims on a widely-watched TV show that it’s fine, and no one contradicts him. (It couldn’t have happened with any other religion because no other religion is as bigoted, hateful, misogynistic, and violent as Islam) Stigmatising Islam has become extremely common in France.
It is actually not the first time Le Point has delighted us with anti-Islam covers. A French blogger compiled a list of all the religious covers of the magazine since 2005, and came up with five “Islam-related covers” in the past two years, including “The Islamists and us: their strategy to infiltrate the West,” “Hunting the Christians – Islamic crusade”, and in February 2011, to welcome the beginning of Arab revolutions, “The Islamic spectre.”
Unfortunately, this montage made in September shows that Le Point is no exception.
Two weeks ago, Le Figaro also published a survey under the headline “the image of Islam in France is seriously deteriorating.” The survey showed that 68 per cent of French people think the main reason for Muslims’ lack of integration is… “their refusal to integrate in French society,” and 43 per cent think the presence of a Muslim community in France is “a substantial threat to the country’s identity.”
To Marwan Muhammad, a spokesperson for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, these results are “worrying, but for the wrong reasons.” He says that linking “Islam” to “fear” in a survey’s question will automatically impact the answer, and affect the results. “When we see the impact these kind of studies can have on the perceptions citizens have of one another… we can wonder about the responsibility of survey institutes, and mainly of those who ask for these surveys,” he says.
Sometime, a long time ago, I remember Islamophobia Islamoreality being a far-right Front National’s prerogative. Things have changed. In the middle of the Euro-crisis and in the last presidential campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy made halal meat a campaign theme. It was, he said, “the main concern of French people.”
Hundreds of Muslims defy the French ban on street prayer and lift their asses to Allah so that cars and pedestrian traffic is totally blocked
Former government spokesperson Jean-François Copé (now running for leadership of Sarkozy’s UMP party) claimed that children were prevented from eating their pain au chocolat outside their school gates during Ramadan.
When Sarkozy’s Interior minister Brice Hortefeux said, referring to Arabs, that “We always need one. It’s when there are lots of them that there are problems,”the Socialist opposition referred to his statement as “shameful and unspeakable” and called for his resignation. The same could be said about the current French Interior Minister’s indifference to Le Point’s cover.
Russian journalist reporting from one of the many NO-GO ZONES in Paris where non-Muslims enter at their own risk
Indeed, things have changed. Apparently it’s now fine for the whole political class to stigmatise Muslims and Islam. (And not a moment too soon)
The Collective Against Islamophobia in France, who distributed free pains au chocolat in the streets after Jean-François Copé’s comment, is now launching a national campaign called “We are the nation too” with the aim of “portraying our fellow Muslim citizens in a different way… and breaking some cliches.” The best of luck to them. They’re going to need it.
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