Last week a Tunisian Muslim migrant, Brahim Issaoui, stabbed three Nice churchgoers to death, the third terrorist attack in France in a month.
This week it was a mass shooting in Vienna, Austria.
And while the importance of not jumping to conclusions should be stressed, we cannot be blamed for immediately thinking it had something to do with the followers of a certain faith. Suffice to say Lutherans were not the first consideration.
READ MORE: We must strike back or soon we’ll all be Samuel Paty | ‘Muslims have a right to be angry’ | Migrant arrived with murder on his mind | Knifeman kills three at church | ‘He hid in garage, fired at passers-by’ |
Until now, the official response to these atrocities followed a familiar script. It does not matter if the terrorist regularly worshipped at a mosque, or if there is footage of him Koran-in-hand declaring his murderous intentions, or even if he yells “Allahu Akba” as he self-detonates. Islam is a religion of peace; therefore, he could not have been a true Muslim.
Only the ignorant, the bigoted and perhaps the semi-conscious and dazed survivors of these attacks would fail to recognise this obvious distinction.
Macron tears up the script
But French President Emmanuel Macron wants to tear up the script. Last week he denounced “Islamist separatism,” saying it would lead to “the creation of a counter-society”. To counter this he proposes legislation that will stop home-schooling of children aged three and over, as well as outlaw the training of imams overseas, saying there is a need to “free Islam in France from foreign influences”.
When history and civics teacher Samuel Paty was decapitated last month by Chechen refugee Abdullakh Anzorov for showing his students caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad, Macron did not just condemn the murder. He did not temper his repugnance for the killer by distancing himself from Paty’s actions. Instead he posthumously bestowed on the teacher France’s highest civilian award, the Légion d’Honneur, saying Paty was the “face” of freedom. “He was killed precisely because he incarnated the Republic”, Macron said. “He was killed because the Islamists want our future. They know that with quiet heroes like him, they will never have it.”
Macron was right not to get distracted with irrelevancies such as the appropriateness of showing the cartoon in question; rather he was emphasising that freedom of expression was fundamental to what it meant to be French. In describing Islam as “a religion that is in crisis all over the world today,” Macron dispensed with the fiction that violence is an aberration of Islam.
Contrast his reaction with that of British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2017 when her Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, referred to the Westminster Bridge attacks in which Khalid Masood deliberately ran over scores of pedestrians, killing four and fatally stabbing a police officer, as “Islamic terrorism”.
No, no, said a hapless May, publicly reprimanding her minister, this description was “wrong”. It was “Islamist terrorism,” she stated, a “perversion of a great religion”.
Placatory semantics
Macron has no time for these placatory semantics. When the President said he wanted “to build an Islam in France that can be compatible with the Enlightenment,” he was effectively saying this religion cannot be great until it casts out its mediaevalists and theocrats – and they are legion.
Predictably, Muslim-dominated countries have led the backlash. “The rising Islamophobia in the West has turned into a wholesale attack on our book, our prophet, and everything we consider holy,” declared Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, calling Macron a “fascist”. Rich indeed, given the number of human rights abuses under the former’s administration.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has played the tut-tutting peacemaker and criticised Macron for not putting “the healing touch & [denying] space to extremists rather than creating further polarisation & marginalisation that inevitably leads to radicalisation”. Just last week Khan wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg protesting “Islamophobia” and the depictions of the prophet, adding the outrageous claim that “the culmination of the Nazi pogrom of the Jews in Germany” was “similar” to the “pogrom against Muslims in different parts of the world”.
Unfortunately, Khan’s “healing touch” has done little to minimise radicalisation or religious discrimination at home. In September, a Pakistan court sentenced Asif Pervaiz, a Christian, to death for sending “blasphemous” text messages to his former supervisor. Comprising just 1.6 per cent of the population, Christians are in effect Pakistan’s untouchables, largely relegated to menial and dangerous jobs. The closest the country has got to introducing affirmative action for minorities was in July when the Pakistani military placed newspaper advertisements for the job of sewer sweepers, specifying that only Christians should apply.
If former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad is representative of a “moderate” Muslim country, then God help us. Following the triple murder in Nice, he criticised Macron, tweeting that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”. Last week he was still standing by his claim, alleging that his comments were taken “out of context”. Of course. Just like he was taken out of context in 2003 when he urged a 57-nation Islamic summit to unite against the Jews, saying they “rule the world by proxy”.
Not surprisingly, Macron’s plans have met opposition from Western intelligentsia. “The president’s notion of ‘separatism’ seems to assume that a significant minority of Muslims are tempted to set themselves apart somehow from the rest of French society,” wrote political scientist Vincent Geisser last week in the New York Times, adding that Macron’s assumption was “questionable” and could “endanger social cohesion”. Questionable? An IFOP survey in 2016 found 30 per cent of French Muslims rejected the country’s secular laws. A survey just last year by the same institution revealed 41 per cent of that same demographic believe that “Islam must be practised and integrated into French customs”.
When asked last week about the right to show a caricature of the prophet, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a response typical of a social justice dandy. While professing to defend freedom of expression, he said it was “not without limits”.
“In a pluralist, diverse and respectful society like ours, we owe it to ourselves to be aware of the impact of our words, of our actions on others, particularly these communities and populations who still experience a great deal of discrimination,” he waffled. As Quebec journalist Benoit Dutrizac observed, this pathetic response placed Trudeau “on the side of the worst Islamists”.
The more obvious the threat from a minority group, the more Western authorities will try to suppress any discussion of it. Currently the Scottish Parliament is considering the draft Hate Crime and Public Order bill, which creates an offence of “stirring up hatred” against protected groups. Its introduction could lead to the prosecution of libraries and bookshops for possessing “inflammatory material”, and the Scottish Police Federation has warned the bill would “devastate the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public” if its members had to enforce it.
But according to Scottish Justice Minister Humza Yousaf, his own bill is too lenient. He is unhappy with the “dwelling exception” in the legislation, saying that so-called hate speech over the dinner table must be prosecuted. Not only does he want journalists to be pursued in the courts for fostering what he calls prejudice; he also wants theatre directors to be accountable for their productions.
Last week, Muslim protesters in Canberra assembled outside the French embassy, accusing Macron of “dog whistle politics”. Referring to the murder of Paty, the organisers released a letter, which read in part “We condemn this perpetrator and his evil acts, and other ideological and political extremists such as those from [satirical magazine] Charlie Hebdo who are fanning the fire of hate by insulting our Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)”. In other words, the two acts are morally equivalent, a ridiculous assertion.
Event organiser Emad Soliman had a message for Macron. “Respect us and respect our icons, that’s all we need. Is that too much?” One might retort by asking Soliman whether it is too much for Muslims to respect the traditions of the secular state.
It is misleading to claim religion demands respect; rather, it is one’s freedom to choose that must be respected. To maintain otherwise creates a foreboding precedent. “The prohibition on picturing the prophet … is apparently absolute,” wrote the late intellectual and author Christopher Hitchens. “Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously.”
“But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of his aggressive intent,” Hitchens warned. That was written nearly 15 years ago. The secular world too has its icons — or should I say prophets.
Speaking up is no cause for sack
In a democratic society, free speech matters.
PM must prioritise US alliance
Albanese’s docile China response and his refusal to meet Trump’s defence spending demands threaten to push the nation down the queue for scarce weapons in an increasingly dangerous world.
Apologies for my ignorance, but how many more terrorist attacks will it take before we finally acknowledge that a certain magnificent, wonderful, serene and peaceful religion is perhaps not as quite as magnificent, wonderful, serene and peaceful as the commentariat would have us believe?