THE GUARDIAN: In his defence of freedom after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the French president outraged both radical and moderate Muslims
Maybe he knew what he was doing. Maybe he didn’t. Either way, Emmanuel Macron set France and Europe on a new collision course with the Islamic world last month – all in the name of freedom. Last week’s spate of lethal terror attacks suggests the French president may have started something he cannot finish.
Macron’s impassioned speech on 2 October, vowing to fight “radical Islamism”, eradicate “separatism” and uphold secular values at all costs, foreshadowed this latest crisis. It was seen at the time as a mainly domestic political exercise, intended to spike the guns of France’s far right before his 2022 election campaign.
But Muslim leaders were enraged by Macron’s description of Islam as a faith “in crisis all over the world” that had, in effect, been hijacked by extremists. Then, two weeks later, after the murder of a Paris schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, by a foreign-born Islamist, an undaunted Macron doubled down. His defence of the notorious, recently republished Charlie Hebdo caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which Paty had shown to pupils, and a national crackdown on mosques, imams and Islamic groups added fuel to the fire. France itself was “under attack”, Macron dramatically declared, a phrase he repeated on Thursday.
Political and religious leaders from Bangladesh to Jordan and anti-French demonstrators publicly vented their fury, accusing him of doing “Satan’s work”. Much of what he said was misunderstood or purposefully distorted. Truth was a casualty, too. » | Simon Tisdall | Sunday, Novermber 1, 2020
