Thread by @luminatus1

In France, it is only cultural majoritarianism with its arrogant secularism, combined with the reminiscence of a colonial imaginary that dictates the limits of freedom of expression.

After the horrible terrorist act of killing Samuel Paty, a history teacher who showed his students cartoons that ridiculed the prophet Mohamad, Macron defended this as freedom of expression, saying: "We will not give up caricatures and drawings, even if others back away".

Macron defended this as freedom of expression, saying: "We will not give up caricatures and drawings, even if others back away". This indeed marks an entry into State Islamophobia, the phrase coined by Jean-François Bayard.

The strategy to fight separatism in these Islamophobic, populist, and arrogant secularist tones is indeed first and foremost an election strategy. In this article, I want to focus on how the populism of Macron conceptualizes freedom of expression and “political Islam” to this end

Freedom of expression, which is a basic human right, becomes unethical when intellectual rigor and social responsibility are lacking. 

Charlie Hebdo through its cartoon has incited Europe against Syrian migrants, even mocked the three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi

Charlie Hebdo through its cartoon has incited Europe against Syrian migrants, even mocked the three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi whose body was washed up on a Turkish shore.

To present the Prophet Mohammad as a symbol of terrorism or sexual perversion, as is done in many published cartoons, is no different from presenting Prophet Moses as the symbol of right-wing Israelis' actions against Palestinians,

no different from presenting Prophet Moses as the symbol of right-wing Israelis' actions against Palestinians, an association that would be rightly condemned as antisemitic prohibited by the laws of many European countries.

No Muslim leader has ever blamed Jesus Christ for the many atrocities that have been committed around the world in the name of Christianity, nor Buddha for the genocide of Rohingya people.

The populist reductionism that lies behind these cartoons is embedded in the tradition of European antisemitism that began with the demonization of the Jews, their faith, and their culture and ended in the attempt at their extermination.

Some argue that Charlie Hebdo statistically does not target only Islam as a religion. This is true, but the perversity and the systematic simplistic analyses portraying Muslims (because of their prophet and their Quran) as terrorists is nothing but populist.

Is blasphemy, introduced by the French revolution in 1789, a right in France? A universal value tout court? Shouldn’t we first see whether it entails incitement against a minority that has its own fragile status as citizens/migrants? Bl

Blasphemy is now hailed not just as a right but a kind of duty, as was clear from a TV interview in 2015 with Jamel Debbouze, a Moroccan-French comedian, who was pushed to blaspheme in order to show his assimilation to French cultural majoritarianism.

In the words of Emmanuel Todd: “Yes, of course, there’s a right to blaspheme, but one must also have the right to say that blasphemy is not a priority and that it’s idiotic…

In France, it is only cultural majoritarianism with its arrogant secularism, combined with the reminiscence of a colonial imaginary that dictates the limits of freedom of expression. There, you go to prison if you question the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust or if you call

or if you call for boycotting Israeli products. Macron repeated in many speeches that he equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, i.e. calling for its criminalization.
While I fully understand, by all the standards of social responsibility and intellectual

While I fully understand, by all the standards of social responsibility and intellectual integrity, the requirement to ban from the public sphere those who deny the Holocaust as a clear historical event, one should not criminalize historical discussion about historical details.

At the same time, President Macron, the ally of most of the Arab dictators (chiefly for economic reasons including selling them arms), joins the authoritarian choir which “juridically” seeks to ban what they lump in one category as “political Islam”.

Currently, France is deploying its security apparatus to dissolve some of the Islamic NGOs and political entities deemed to fit this description.

While many politicians and journalists, even some social scientists, insist on using the term "political Islam", it haemorrhages meaning by not clearly demarcating the foundational differences between classical Islamism and neo-Islamism.

It is a stereotyping generalization that does not account for the heterogeneity of Islamic political thought, from the moderate to the extremist, from that carried out by individuals to Islamic movements and to official Islam.

The term political Islam is often used to deride a movement and to suggest that all of their trajectories are the same, composed of readers of Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood and the proponents of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

It is worth noting that in the Arab world among those who employ such categorizations are those ‘guardians’ of official-Islam who consider that the Islam to which they adhere is essentially apolitical.

As such, the delegitimation by those guardians of the Islamic opposition in the religious sphere is a way of denying that they too are political.

Macron’s call for "Islam des Lumières" cannot be set in motion by some anti-clericalist intellectuals, nor with some puppet Imams close to the French or North African intelligence services.

opendemocracy.net/en/openmovemen…

This so important top-down call needs a broad religious socio-political movement to carry it (bottom-up) while operating in a democratic and pluralistic political and social space.

The most flagrant case is the attempt to ban The Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) which has won many court cases during the last decade. This is despite the fact that many social scientists in France have been using the word Islamophobia between quotation marks

This is despite the fact that many social scientists in France have been using the word Islamophobia between quotation marks (i.e. “Islamophobia”) over the last decade, as if they did not believe that it constitutes a social phenomenon sufficiently dangerous even to merit a label