The Islamophobia Thread

Erdogan threw a hissy fit as well. Fuck that guy.

x2 There's a difference between condemning a murderer, and leveraging their actions to paint every member of the group they belong to with the same brush.

Not unlike smirking and saying "lol religion of peace" every time a Muslim does something bad.

It's not the whole Arab world pulling a boycott. Egypt, UAE and Khalifa Haftar's LNA in Libya are still buying up French weapons in return for keeping those nasty, nasty refugees away from the EU's shores, for one.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Oct 26th 2020 at 8:10:28 AM

@ Medinoc

Ok, I did not comment this on the French Politics thread when that speech came out, but I think this is the proper place to address it.

You shouldn't be surprised that a boycott happened over it, if anything a backlash is the expected result from it.

The thing is, Macron's "freedom of blasphemy" speech, which definitely appeals to the secularists in the West, is also a pretty big middle finger to the entire Islamic community since it can be taken as Victim-Blaming if they find a caricature of the Prophet offensive.

And, I can't stress this enough, Religion is a part of Culture like it or not, for some it is greater and for others it's lesser but it is still a part of it. The backlash is a heavy case of Values Dissonance for sure but someone that works in statecraft should be aware that something like that would have happened.

Can anyone provide a link to a summary of Macron's speech?

Here.

What part of that speech does Erdogan object to?

I have many things I disagree with Macron on, but Freedom of Blasphemy is definitely not one of them.

People need to start respecting that religious rules only apply to the people who follow said Religion.

And as it relates to Victim-Blaming, I find the opposite much more true, people who blame Charlie Hebdo or the teacher who was just murdered.

Edited by Forenperser on Oct 27th 2020 at 8:02:40 PM

This, all of this.

Indeed, wanting blasphemy punished by men is a huge red flag.

Edited by Medinoc on Oct 26th 2020 at 12:23:26 PM

While nobody should expect other people to follow their religious beliefs, that isn't the same thing as saying or doing something you know is offensive to someone and acting smug when they're offended.

In fact, I'd say wanting blasphemy to be punished by men is, itself, blasphemous, since it implies God is too weak (edit: or too impatient) to punish it Himself.

Edited by Medinoc on Oct 26th 2020 at 12:49:29 PM

Is anyone advocating for that?

One, that's pretty much false as blasphemy is a pretty heavy offense in the Abrahamic religions and in the old days would have net you a stoning since that is what God himself commanded.

Two, there's nothing that prevents both sides of suffering from Victim-Blaming here. Yes, the Charlie Hebdo artists did not deserve to die from what they did and their deaths shouldn't be cheered upon, but at the same time what they did was grade-A asshole behaviour against a religious minority in France.

If anything, I find it a bit colonialistic to demand that other societies or peoples embrace the North-Western style of secularism in an unilateral manner.

My personal opinion is pretty moderate. While I consider the people drawing caricatures of the prophet to be a-holes, that doesn't make it a justification for murder.

Updates on the French situation:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54692485

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54692802

I never liked Charlie Hebdo because they are way too vulgar and mean-spirited for my taste, but they are at least consistent with their approach by making fun of all religions. Charlie Hebdo had been drawing many carricatures that were arguably more offensive regarding Catholicism.

It is hardly colonialistic to expect people to adhere to the values of the country they live in. One doesn't have to like what they do, but anyone who seriously thinks that any form of reprisal would be justified has something seriously wrong with himself. So, no chance of victim-blaming in this case.

Edited by Zarastro on Oct 26th 2020 at 5:13:03 PM

It's kind of the opposite of colonialism, really.

It’s notable that Turkey and other countries aren’t angry about the Islamaphobic/Arabphobic stabbing attack on two women in Paris, no it’s the blasphemy that has them upset.

There’s probably some legitimate criticism there about how the stabbing isn’t being treated as an outrageous terrorist attack when it certainly seems to have been a politically motivated attack on French ideals of freedom of religion the same way the killing of the teacher was a politically motivated attack on French ideals of freedom of speech.

But none of that criticism is being made by Turkey or its allies, because they don’t give a dam about the lives of the two women who were attacked.

Turkey used to be rather aggressively secularist as well. I'd guess Erdogan's remark was partly a move to rile up the composite religious-nationalist base he's built up over the past couple of decades, and partly a shot in the country's ongoing conflicts with France over Libya and the East Mediterranean.

That secularist past was the reason that his move to revert the Hagia Sophia into a mosque was so domestically popular: a lot of Turks saw the erasure of its religious functions as a symbol for the (relative) repression of religious practices under Kemalism. It's become somewhat of a meme to describe Erdogan's politics as "Neo-Ottomanism" (whatever that means), but his greatest success domestically has been welding together the historically-conflicted sentiments of nationalism and religiosity within the populace. Especially after the 2016 coup attempt and his ensuing crackdown.

Anyhow, re: Macron's speech: Here's The Washington Post's coverage from a few weeks back.

And here's a more recent op-ed by the same journalist, discussing just what it means for him to call for Islam to be "reformed". I don't think it offers the full picture; you kind of need an honest look at what the spread of radical sentiments look like from the inside in order to address the problem holistically, though the author might not have been familiar enough with the French Muslim community to feel comfortable addressing that.

Otherwise, I mostly concur with his points. From an outside perspective, it feels a bit like France's relationship with its Muslim community right now is where the US was with its minorities during the '90s crime epidemic and the "superpredator" theory. And while Macron's acknowledgement of the colonial baggage is a step forward, I feel that it would've been more substantial if his government hadn't been backing dictators and warlords across MENA who'd been driving the displacement and radicalisation of their own peoples.

When a terrorist in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine beheaded Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher who’d shown his students caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, he was transformed from an educator into a national symbol. Paty is the latest of more than 260 French killed in similar attacks since 2012. As with Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old priest whose throat was slashed by Muslim fundamentalists in 2016 in a small stone church in the village of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Paty’s killing was portrayed as an attack on the soul of France. He “has become the face of the republic,” President Emmanuel Macron said at a memorial service Wednesday.

After years of brutal attacks by Muslims who’d been radicalized at the margins of French society, the government has finally had enough. Early this month, Macron unveiled his long-awaited plan: reforming the practice of Islam in France. The proposals would restrict the funds that Muslim communities receive from abroad, supposedly limiting foreign influence, and create a certificate program for French-trained imams, among other things. Paty’s killing made this matter much more urgent. The French Interior Ministry added this past week that officials will target for potential dissolution more than 50 French Muslim associations if they’re found to be promoting hatred, including a mainstream group devoted to combating Islamophobia. Macron wants to build “an Islam in France that can be an Islam of the Enlightenment,” as he put it, and to halt “repeated deviations from the values of the republic and which often result in the creation of a counter-society.”

The objective, backed by popular sentiment, appears sensible: to protect the French from further attacks. “What we need to fight is Islamist separatism,” Macron said. But the method seems designed to solve a different problem than terrorist violence. Instead of addressing the alienation of French Muslims, especially in France’s exurban ghettos, or banlieues — which experts broadly agree is the root cause that leaves some susceptible to radicalization and violence — the government aims to influence the practice of a 1,400-year-old faith, one with almost 2 billion peaceful followers around the world, including tens of millions in the West. It’s an odd answer to the problem (although one that echoes the way Napoleon regulated the practice of Judaism). But it’s perhaps the only one France can contemplate in a universe where it will not commit to measuring the systemic discrimination that fuels so much of the “separatism” it seeks to combat.

The French republic is avowedly laïque, or secular. Enshrined by a 1905 law, this notion forces the state to remain neutral — to neither support nor stigmatize any religion. In the United States, a religiously pluralistic society, the separation of church and state is seen as the freedom to choose one’s religious belief. In France, historically dominated by Catholicism, it is largely understood as the freedom from oppressive religious authority. But this clear and seemingly uncontroversial vision of secularism is a product of a vastly different time, when the country was far more culturally and ethnically homogenous than it is today. At the turn of the century, it was predominantly Catholic, with a small Protestant minority and an even smaller Jewish population. The collapse of the French empire after World War II meant that metropolitan France soon became home to many former colonial subjects and their descendants from North Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. Islam had officially arrived.

With these changes gradually came a new interpretation of laïcité, one that often positions the country against public displays of Islam and that has no basis in the law. After France’s humiliating defeat in Algeria in 1962 — a trauma that remains largely unprocessed — French citizens began to see public traces of Islam as aggressions against the country’s secular essence, even if the state still closes for business on every major Catholic holiday.

The veil, and where it can be worn, has become one of the most fraught questions in public life. The French often see criticizing its use as a means of liberating their fellow citizens from religious oppression. A law enacted in 2004 prohibits the veil from being worn in high schools, and a 2010 law banned the face-covering burqa on national security grounds. When Muslim women wear the headscarf in public, they often come under fire, even when they do so legally, and even when they attempt to be part of French society. Last year, for instance, then-health minister Agnès Buzyn decried a runner’s hijab marketed by the French sportswear brand Decathlon, because of the “communitarian” threat it apparently posed to France’s secular universalism. “I would have preferred a French brand not to promote the veil,” she said. Likewise, Jean-Michel Blanquer, France’s education minister, conceded that although it was technically legal for mothers to wear headscarves, he wanted to avoid having them chaperone school trips “as much as possible.” These were examples of Muslim women attempting to participate in public life rather than withdraw from it; still, they were censured.

The result of this vitriol, and of prejudice among some White French, particularly on the right, is that many French Muslims do live in the sort of “counter-society” Macron fears, withdrawn from the mainstream — a position not all have chosen. Conservative commentators are not wrong when they call some of the banlieues that surround Paris, Lyon and Marseille “territories lost to the Republic,” in the words of the historian Georges Bensoussan. These communities are often rife with radical interpretations of Islam, anti-Semitism and gang activity that, together, can incubate terrorist violence.

But the question is why these territories have been lost. One explanation is structural. The descendants of immigrants who live in the crowded housing projects often struggle to achieve the social mobility promised by the officially color-blind republic. Applications for jobs and certain housing options can still require pictures, and people of color are often overlooked because of unconscious (or even intentional) bias. When minorities, and especially Muslims, voice opinions critical of establishment dogma, the French press often accuses them of terrorist complicity. In a television debate Wednesday, for instance, the author Pascal Bruckner said the well-known journalist Rokhaya Diallo — whom he identified as a “Muslim and black woman” — abetted the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo because she had once signed an open letter against the paper.

Yet despite the public scrutiny Muslims face here, it can also be extremely difficult to prove that discrimination exists. Since 1978, French law has largely prohibited the collection (even by private or academic social scientists) of statistics on race, religion or ethnicity, primarily in response to World War II, when the country’s classification of Jewish citizens made it easier to round them up and deport them. But banning race has not banned racism, and without an empirical basis, it can be difficult to prove where disparities exist and to what extent — let alone to know how to undo them.

All of this contributes to the phenomenon of “separatism” in France’s Muslim community, says the Franco-Tunisian scholar Hakim El Karoui, the author of “L’islam une religion française,” a popular 2018 book that influenced Macron’s Islam reform project. Especially among third-generation immigrants, “there is an important minority who have this problem of identity, who don’t feel French — either because they’ve been rejected or because they don’t have the desire,” he said. “Islam fills that void.” The radical and violent version practiced by attackers over the past eight years represents only a fringe of what is thought to be just under 10 percent of France’s population. But it is enough to threaten public safety.

The problem, then, isn’t Macron’s understandable desire to address an actual threat. And his proposed law may block the most toxic strains of foreign preaching from reaching French worshipers, and it may limit the diffusion of hatred on social media, two factors that were thought to have animated Paty’s killer. But these issues are only adjacent to the problem of isolation and anomie that the country has helped to foster — deliberately in some cases, inadvertently in others. The truth is that the counter-society has as much to do with France as with Islam.

The raw anger that Paty’s killing elicited allows little room for reflection. Most French politicians have doubled down on a hard-line interpretation of France’s secularism. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin went on national television and identified ethnic food in supermarkets as “communitarian cuisine” that fosters the sort of separatist sentiments that led to the attack. Days after Paty’s killing, two female attackers stabbed two Muslim women in headscarves and called them “dirty Arabs” as they walked near the Eiffel Tower. “There is a hysterical climate,” says Rachid Benzine, a French political scientist.

One person who did not share the exclusive vision of secularism was Samuel Paty, who was sensitive to the potential concerns of his Muslim students and who offered anyone in his class who might be offended by the Muhammad cartoons the option to look away. He was clearly fascinated by Muslim culture, signing up for training courses at Paris’s Arab World Institute and organizing an Arab music concert for his students’ benefit. But those aspects of Paty as the “face of the republic” appear already to have been forgotten. He was the victim of an unspeakable barbarity, but he may end up a martyr to someone else’s cause.

As for the boycott: that's part and parcel of free speech and free association, no? Europe itself is no stranger to boycotts. I still remember Mesut Özil being hounded off social media and then progressively cancelled by Big Soccer over his growing personal ties with Erdogan; and while I disapproved hard of his course of action, I really don't think the responses helped engage with the issue in any real way.

Here in OTC, we've repeatedly discussed the limits of free speech and when, exactly, it becomes okay to suppress dangerous and hateful speech. The social media posts that led to Samuel Paty's murder were unquestionably hate speech, of the kind that I think Facebook and co. need to censor. I don't think anyone could ever justify them on the grounds of free speech. But what about Charlie Hebdo's cartoons? Can we put a real-world footprint on them? I don't believe we can draw a direct link between them and the Eiffel Tower stabbings, but I wouldn't be surprised either if the cultural current they belong to is driving at least some of the polarisation and prejudice.

Freedom of speech should probably include the freedom to blaspheme; I can respect Macron saying that, in principle. But we should't pretend that blasphemy or satire couldn't become dangerous, hateful speech in its own right. That's probably not something that's going to affect the authoritarian Muslim states joining the boycott, but that's something that's absolutely going to affect Muslim minorities in Europe - and I think European leaders should probably keep that in mind when they pick which speech to stand with and which needs "reforming".

Also, Paul Pogba just denied that he'd planned to quit international soccer in protest of Macron's remarks, a rumour that was apparently first published by... The Sun. Go figure.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Oct 27th 2020 at 1:14:56 AM

Ok... So...

About the whole 'cartoons' thing. It's really hard for non-Muslims, especially non-Muslims outside of Europe, to get just why those Danish cartoons and the Charlie Hebdo reprint struck such a negative chord with Western European Muslims. I know it was for me, until someone sat me down and explained it in no uncertain terms.

Let's be clear here: The issue there was not the blasphemy. Yeah, the blasphemy was bad, but it's not the core of the issue.

Let's look at some history: Since the 60s Western Europe has experienced a significant influx of immigrants, specifically and particularly from Turkey and Morocco. Now, unlike the recent large influx of immigrants from traditionally Muslim countries, these weren't refugees. They were coming to Europe to seek employment...

But they also weren't simply economic migrants looking for a better life abroad...

You see, the 50s had come and gone and Western Europe was largely done rebuilding after World War 2 and because the Marshall Plan included investments way beyond what would've been needed to rebuild only what was there before the war, loads of new factories and the like opened up and soon Western Europeans realized there were waaaaaay more new jobs available than there were people to do them.

And so people from Turkey and Morocco were invited to come and work in Western Europe. The idea at the time, both for the guest workers and their employers, was that they were only going to be there temporarily for maybe ten or so years. Long enough for the Baby Boomers to grow to adulthood and take up the work. Then the guest workers would go home and retire off of their fat pay checks and provide their children with a better life and more opportunities than they had in their own country. No need to learn the local language. No need to have your family come over, you'll be back living with them soon enough.

That was the plan... But when the Boomers grew up, with their educations partly paid for by that same Marshall Plan and the promise of a bright prosperous future ahead of them, they mostly decided that, 'No, working a menial job on a factory assembly line is not for me, thanks, I'd rather start my own company or at least be in middle management, if you don't mind.'

So the very first wave of guest workers were asked to stay on for another ten years and also 'Hey, if you have any cousins or brothers or sons looking for work back home, we're always hiring. Oh, you've been away from your spouse for a long time? Well just bring them over, don't worry, we'll pay for all of it. No, no, still no need to learn the language, you'll still be going back. No need to send any kids you have while you're here to the local schools, we'll build special schools for them to prepare them for life when you and your family return home.'

See... Turkey and Morocco were specifically favored for this guest workership because they both had hereditary citizenship. Meaning that any children born to Turkish and Moroccan citizens in Europe would automatically be Turkish and Moroccan citizens and they could therefore move 'back' to Turkey and Morocco without any administrative hassle.

Of course... The actual move back home never came. Western European children kept growing up and kept turning up their noses at menial work. All the higher up positions were steadily getting filled with Europeans, so there was no career advancement or job opportunities beyond menial labour for the guest workers and their children, but there was still work to be done.

And so Muslim 'guest workers' became a sort of underclass in Western Europe, barely even in the public awareness. Until, that is, the advent of the third generation. The first generation, by and large, never learned the local language, never 'assimilated' into the local culture, because they were always under the impression that they were going home and indeed most of them did.

The second generation were born and grew up in Western Europe. They picked up the local language just from living here, even if their special schools never taught it. They didn't have the education for jobs beyond the menial provided to them by the government. And they ran head first into the realization that despite being citizens of the country where they were born and raised, the white people they shared the country with saw them as nothing more than foreigners just there temporarily to do a job and get the fuck back to their own country. But there was no country for them to 'go back' to, they never lived anywhere else.

The third generation weren't just born in Western Europe, they went to the local schools, because their parents wanted them fully integrated into Western European society. Except, of course, that they were still treated as foreigners for most of their youth. (They are still often treated as foreigners today.)

And many of them, seeking some connection with what white Europeans told them is their 'real' home, fell into a far more conservative version of Turkish and Moroccan culture and Islam than what was actually practiced in Turkey and Morocco.

So when a Danish newspaper decides to publicize a bunch of cartoon of the Prophet for no other reason than 'Muslims say you can't portray their Prophet? Freeze Peach, lol!'...

That's not just blasphemy. That was a bunch of Western Europeans once again denigrating and disrespecting the heritage and faith of the people who have been keeping Western Europe economically viable for forty years previous by doing all the jobs that whitey believed himself too good to do.

And particularly when it comes to France... Well... The last time the people doing all the work that keeps society going were disrespected and ridiculed by the privileged to that extent, they got together, stormed the Bastille and set about making the people who were doing that to them roughly a foot shorter. White people in France should honestly thank their lucky stars that compared to their own forebears, all but a few French people of colour have more restraint.

Edited by Robrecht on Oct 27th 2020 at 3:46:30 PM

So, if I understand correctly, the "right to blasphemy" is great and all. But if you are using said right specifically to mock a minority group who is and underclass due to the politics of the state. Then, yeah, you are being racist and, yes, colonialist.

Muhammad caricatures can basically be considered "punching down". The reason why mocking, say, Catholicism usually elicits a different response is due to the Church's long-standing position of power throughout history.

Meanwhile, Muslims in Europe often have a difficult stand, not to mention all the times Europe came over to their homeland to screw things up.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 27th 2020 at 5:59:17 PM

The problem with that is that Mohammed was and is a political leader. I'm very wary of the idea that attacking the second most powerful political leader ever is "punching down."