EDITORIAL: Unveiling his plan to defend his country's secular values in the wake of killing of a history teacher for showing students caricatures of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), French President Emmanuel Macron only encouraged something he accused Muslims of: separatism. Vowing not to "give up cartoons" depicting the Prophet of Islam he said "Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country." In other words, there is something wrong with the religion itself. Two things are obvious to any impartial observer of the scene: first that what has caused turmoil, or 'crisis', as Macron prefers to call it, and the resultant radicalization in some Muslim countries are the wars imposed on them by Western nations, and the denial of Palestinian people's just rights; and second, the issue at hand has nothing to do with that 'crisis' and everything to do with willful mocking of the Muslim faith.
The president's Islamophobic remarks have caused widespread outrage, with several Muslim countries condemning publication of blasphemous caricatures under the pretext of freedom of expression. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan went as far as to say that Macron needed a "mental check up", prompting the latter to recall his ambassador from Ankara. Some of the Arab countries have boycotted French goods, calling on others to follow suit. A direct and substantive riposte came from Prime Minister Imran Khan. President Macron, he said, could have put a healing touch and denied space to extremists rather than creating further polarization that inevitably leads to radicalization. Instead, he had chosen to encourage Islamophobia "by attacking Islam rather than the terrorists who carry out violence, be it Muslims, White Supremacists [like the one who gunned down 51 Muslims and injured another 40 in a Christchurch mosque or Nazi ideologists BJP-RSS Hindutva zealots killing and demonizing Muslims in India]." Macron had also insisted that "no concession" would be made in a new drive to push religion out of education and the public sector in France. Indeed, that country is passionate about its secular traditions and freedom of expression, yet denial or trivializing the Holocaust -which started with a systematic Nazi propaganda against Jews being an alien threat leading to mass murder of European Jews - is a criminal offence punishable with jail sentence. By the same token, France should have no qualms about prohibiting publication or display of content that attacks the Muslim faith, portraying its followers, too, as an alien threat.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020