YOU THINK LIFE is bad for
Muslims in Trump’s America? Spare a thought for the Muslims of France.
Over the past few
years, they have been collectively blamed,
and punished,
for a series of
horrific terror attacks carried out in France by so-called
“jihadists.” The latest, a knife attack in Paris by a man shouting “Allahu
Akbar,” killed one person and injured four others last weekend.
While anti-Muslim
bigotry has become a hallmark of the Republican right in America, in France it
is a truly bipartisan affair. Islamophobia is peddled by left and right alike,
with both socialists and conservatives falling over one another to defend
French secularism, or laïcité,
by demonizing French Muslims.
Consider: Successive
French governments have criminalized the face veiland
banned the headscarf in
schools. French mayors have targeted Muslim women who want to cover up at the
beach and Muslim schoolkids who try to have a pork-free lunch.
The French president — and new liberal
hearthrob — Emmanuel Macron has introduced draconian
counter-terror legislation that United Nations human rights experts have warnedcould
have a discriminatory
impact on Muslims in particular.
And the latest big
idea? To go after the Quran. On April 21, the Le Parisien newspaper published
a manifesto “against
the new anti-Semitism” signed by 300 public figures — ranging from former
President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls to actor
Gérard Depardieu and singer Charles Aznavour. According to the Atlantic,
the manifesto states that “11 Jews have been assassinated — and some tortured —
by radical Islamists” in France, and demands that “the verses of the Quran
calling for murder and punishment of Jews, Christians, and nonbelievers be
struck to obsolescence by religious authorities,” so that “no believer can
refer to a sacred text to commit a crime.”
Such rhetoric is a
reflection both of Gallic bigotry and sheer stupidity; a toxic combination of
ignorance and privilege.
First, where are these
Muslim “religious authorities” who would be willing to do to the Quran what
Thomas Jefferson did to the Bible?
Establishment-friendly French imams such as Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the
Grand Mosque of Paris, and Tareq Oubrou, imam of Bordeaux’s Grand Mosque, have
denounced the manifesto as “unbelievable
and unfair” and “nearly
blasphemous.” And were such mainstream figures to even agree to
edit the Quran — believed by Muslims to be the literal word of God! — does
anyone really believe that the fanatics of ISIS or Al Qaeda would give a damn?
Second, violent
extremism isn’t a product of scripture. Contrary to conventional wisdom, and as
I have argued in the past while
citing a raft of studies and experts, religious faith “isn’t a crucial factor”
in terror attacks – or in the process of so-called “radicalization.” Why, then,
obsess over Quranic verses? As the French journalist Didier Francois, who was
held hostage by ISIS in Syria, told CNN in
2015: “There was never really discussion about texts or — it was not a
religious discussion. It was a political discussion… Because it has nothing to
do with the Quran.” Or as his fellow former French hostage, Nicolas Henin,
has said,
“I noticed that these jihadists have little to do with… Arab or Muslim culture
– they are children of our societies… They are products of our culture, our
world.”
Who do you take more
seriously? Two former ISIS hostages? Or the guy from Green Card?
Third, how can the
manifesto signatories be so sure that it is French Muslims who are behind the
rise of this so-called “new anti-Semitism”? As a 2016 study of
anti-Semitic hate crimes in France by Human Rights First noted, “Perpetrators
of most anti-Semitic violence are perceived to be of ‘Muslim culture or
origin’… although there is no data to substantiate this conclusion — in part
because of the prohibition in France on collecting ‘ethnic’ statistics.” Yet in
next-door Germany, where such statistics arecollected by the
police, nine out of 10 anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2017 were carried out not by
radicalized Muslims but by “members of
far-right or neo-Nazi groups.”
Fourth, what evidence
is there that the Quran itself is anti-Semitic? Or that Islam has a particular
problem with Jews? Critics often point to verses of the Muslim holy book that
express hostility towards Jews, while ignoring the specific historical and
theological context for such verses and also ignoring those
many other Quranic verses which heap praise on the Jewish
people.
As the Princeton
University historian Mark Cohen, an expert on Jewish-Muslim relations, points out:
“Islam contains a nucleus of pluralism that gave the Jews in Muslim lands
greater security than Jews had in Christian Europe” and therefore “Jews in the
Islamic orbit were spared the damaging stigma of ‘otherness’ and anti-Semitism
suffered by Jews in Europe.” Modern-day Muslim and Arab anti-Semitism is a
consequence of colonialism, conflicting nationalisms and the clash with
Zionism, argues Cohen, and is neither “indigenous” to
the Middle East, nor “inherent” in
Islam.
Fifth, why single out
Islamic scripture in this way? Why not Jewish or Christian scripture, too? Are
we supposed to pretend that the Old Testament of the Bible doesn’t
contain scores of verses that
incite violence and hatred against nonbelievers? Or that those verses haven’t
been used to justify heinous crimes in recent years? Against Palestinians, Iraqis, Ugandans, Norwegian kids,
and American
abortion clinics, among others?
To avoid the charge of
hypocrisy, therefore, will the signatories to this manifesto, who include
France’s chief rabbi Haim Korsia, also call for verses of the Bible to be
“struck to obsolescence by religious authorities”?
Sixth, whatever
happened to the “liberté” part of “liiberté,
égalité, fraternité”? How is the insistence on removing verses from
the Quran compatible with religious freedom (a crucial,
if less-discussed, part of the French secular tradition)? How is it compatible
with freedom of speech or expression? Whatever happened to the land of ‘Je Suis Charlie’? Well,
guess what? The manifesto was drafted by,
of all people, Phillipe Val, the former managing editor of Charlie Hebdo.
Irony, it seems, may have died a quiet death in France.
“The manifesto is a
farce written by imposters,” Yasser Louati, a French civil liberties
campaigner, tells me. He argues that if the signatories were serious about
addressing rising anti-Jewish bigotry in their country they would have also
stood “against traditional French anti-Semitism.”
He has a point. France
has a long and shameful history of anti-Semitism, from the Dreyfus Affair in the
late 19th century to the collaborationist Vichy government’s complicity in
the Nazi Holocaust. According to a recent survey of
French public opinion, reported Karina
Piser in the Atlantic, “35 percent of French people believe Jews
‘have a particular rapport with money;’ 40 percent think that ‘for French Jews,
Israel counts more than France;’ and 22 percent think that ‘Jews have too much
power.’”
Nevertheless, 300
French public figures want to only highlight the issue of
“Muslim anti-Semitism” in order to only denounce the message of the
Quran. Muslims, after all, make for useful scapegoats.
Top photo: A man reads
the Quran at the migrant camp known as the “Jungle” in Calais, France, on
December 7, 2015.
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