France: Macron battles Islamist separatism
French President Emmanuel Macron has launched an ambitious plan to create an Islam that is truly French, said Bernard Gorce in La Croix (France). In an hourlong speech last week, Macron outlined new legislation that will crack down on the “Islamist separatism” that has allowed a “counter society” to emerge in some French Muslim communities. The president drew a careful distinction between the private practice of religion and the political project of Islamism, and he admitted that France itself was to blame for the “ghettoization” of immigrant Muslims in poor suburbs where they can fall prey to radical preachers. Education is at the heart of Macron’s “offensive” against Islamist separatism. To stop French youth from being indoctrinated at madrasas, his new bill will require all children to attend school from age 3. Homeschooling— popular among conservative Muslims—will be allowed only for students with health problems. More funding will be directed to poor neighborhoods, and the religious neutrality of public services will be reaffirmed, so state-run swimming pools will no longer be allowed to appease Muslims who want alternate time slots for men and women. Importantly, Macron wants to end the training and financing of imams by Saudi Arabia and Turkey and instead create a French institute for that purpose.
The president’s proposal will “violate the neutrality of the state in religious matters”—a founding principle of secular France, said Jean-Paul Scot in L’Humanité (France). Why is Macron singling out our nation’s 6 million Muslims for behaving in a way that he deems insufficiently French? Why not “criticize the separatism of all religious fundamentalisms and the social separatism of private schools and the ghettos of the rich?” It’s outrageous to force Islam into some sort of Protestant reformation, said Ergun Yildirim in Yeni Safak (Turkey). Macron wants to exert “French state power over the bodies, food and drink, clothing, language, and value system of Muslims.” If he succeeds, Islam in France will be left “with broken wings and a castrated soul.”
If anything, Macron is being too naïve, said Éric Zemmour in
Le Figaro (France). He claims Islamist radicals are a minority, yet jihadist terrorists have killed 250 people on French soil in the past five years and France was a major recruiting ground for ISIS. “Islamism is not a perversion of Islam but its implementation.” And Macron doesn’t address the main reason that France is experiencing a crisis of “radical Islamism”: It’s because we have allowed “massive immigration from Arab Muslim countries for 50 years.” This French debate over Islam should be “a wakeup call” for Germany, said Ulrich Reitz in Focus (Germany). Macron sees the future of Islam as fundamental to the cohesion of his society—as he should, given that France has Europe’s largest Muslim community, making up 9 percent of the population. But Germany has the second-largest such group, at 5 percent. We, too, need to halt foreign influence over our Muslims. Yet the chance of any reform here is slim. Discussion of these matters is seen as inherently far-right, and so utterly “taboo in Germany.”