PARIS – The knife killings by freelance terrorists in October shocked the French but did not spark global sympathy for France following Islamist massacres in 2015 and 2016. European leaders have expressed solidarity, but the Muslim world has become Shaken by anti-French demonstrations and calls for a boycott.
Beyond the scale of the attacks, the remarkable difference between then and now has a lot to do with President Emanuel Macron’s response, which has alienated many French Muslims and created anger in the Muslim world.
His government launched extensive crackdown on Islamists and some Muslim organizations whose language appeared to link Islam (religion) to “Islamism” (an ideology that has sometimes led to violence).
Looking for allies, Mr. Macron turned to Chancellor Sebastian Kurz from Austria last week to make common cause with a European head of state whose country was also affected by a terrorist attack. The two men will meet in Paris on Tuesday to discuss the challenge of terrorism for Europe, according to the Elysée Palace.
After the attack in Vienna, Mr Kurz hardly caused a wave of his reaction by using conciliatory words deliberately aimed at relieving tension. “Our enemy is never everyone who belongs to a religion,” Kurz said last week when addressing his nation. “Our enemy are extremists and terrorists.”
In contrast, before the recent murders, Mr Macron had tried to turn a criticism of Islam and Islamism into a signature issue before the 2022 presidential campaign. “Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today,” he said.
Since then, he has tried to alleviate frizzled feelings and to emphasize that his “country is a country that has no problems with any religion,” as he told Al Jazeera in an interview.
But he has also resisted any hint of criticism from the Western media outside of France (inside he has received solid support) and tried to clarify his views.
“France fights against Islamist separatism, never against Islam,” he wrote in the Financial Times after publishing a statement Macron said wrongly accusing him of stigmatizing French Muslims for political purposes. He vigorously denied this and the newspaper removed the original article from its website for review.
Mr. Macron also expressed irritation at American coverage of the government’s response, including in the New York Times, according to Le Monde, which recently complained in a cabinet meeting: “Following American multiculturalism would be a kind of death to thinking , “And swore that there would be no French“ approximation ”of it.
But while Mr Macron has insisted that he has no quarrel with his country’s Muslims, only terrorists and “Islamism,” his government appeared to hit indiscriminately after beheading a teacher, Samuel Paty.
It said it would shut down two Muslim aid agencies that the authorities were accused of having extremist views; it carried out dozens of raids; and it attempted to deport hundreds of Muslims who were already in police files.
On Monday, the Austrian police did the same and carried out numerous raids against members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Dozens have been arrested or questioned on suspicions of terrorist network formation, terrorist financing and money laundering, the interior minister said.
Austrian authorities said the operation was already in progress prior to last week’s terrorist attack, which they attributed to a man linked to the Islamic State.
It remains to be seen whether there is much daylight between the positions of the two leaders. 34-year-old Kurz and 42-year-old Macron, both ambitious and apologetic political chameleons, provide an insight into the change in political form in a flammable Europe, particularly with regard to terrorism and immigration.
Mr Macron was chosen as the center-left savior of liberal democracy when the French Socialist Party imploded. He is now going to the right letting his ministers have the most tough talks for him in order to position himself for the next French presidential election in 2022, when he is expected to face a tough challenge from the far right nationalists.
Mr Kurz, a Conservative, has already been elected once by co-opting the far right embassy, which he then joined in a coalition that used some of Europe’s harshest languages and restrictions against immigrants. However, since the last elections in Austria in 2017, he has teamed up with the left-wing Greens. His new coalition is very different – and so are his words.
Earlier last month, Mr. Macron put in markings for his post-murders aggression against what he calls “Islamists” and “Islamism”.
But his approach was ambiguous from the start, and Mr Macron’s subtle – sometimes too subtle – use of language has left his wording and positions open to several interpretations, not all of which are favorable to the French President.
In his long October 2 speech, Mr Macron declared war on what he calls “Islamist separatism” – the tendency of some Muslims in France to reject republican values and develop an “alternative organization of society”.
There are sociologists who do not believe that the problem is as big as Mr. Macron poses. They point out that an overwhelming majority of French Muslims simply want to be citizens of France with equal rights. And Mr Macron himself was careful to recognize the way in which the French Republic ghettoized its Muslim citizens, denying them the opportunity and suppressing them with the weight of France’s colonial past.
These reservations have been largely ignored in the Muslim world. What heightened the anger after the murders was the way Mr. Macron moved seamlessly from the dangers of “Islamism” to what he saw as a fundamental problem with Islam itself.
At the beginning of the 70-minute speech, he spoke of the “ultimate goal” of the Islamists, “to take complete control”. Then he spoke of the murders of two local police officers by a jihadist, of a “radical Islamism that leads to the rejection of the laws of the republic.”
Almost immediately, he went on to the offensive phrases – about the “deep crisis” in Islam. Mr. Macron told the Al Jazeera interviewer that these sentences have been “taken out of context”.
However, the “context” for his criticism of Islam was unmistakable – Mr. Macron’s long catalog of the crimes of “Islamism”.
Later in the same speech, Mr Macron tried to bring Islam under the aegis of France, to make it a French project – to de-Islamize it in some way, which reinforces evidence that Islam itself is alien.
A main axis of his strategy, Mr. Macron explained in the speech, would be to construct an Islam of the Enlightenment in France and thereby include Islam in an outstanding achievement in French cultural history, which is dominated by thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot.
Following the murder of Mr Paty, France’s far-right leader, Marine Le Pen declared: “Islamism is a bellicose ideology whose means of conquest is terrorism.” On the same day, Mr. Macron’s Home Secretary Gerald Darmanin announced police operations against “the enemy within, insidious and extremely well organized”.
Two days later, Mr. Macron said to a national audience, praising Mr. Paty, “I called the evil. The measures were decided. We made it even harder. And we will bring it to a close. “
In this context, the reluctance of Mr. Kurz, who recently emulated the anti-immigrant message of the far right, did not go unnoticed.
“He resisted the populist temptation,” said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for Radicalization Studies at King’s College in London. “It would have been easy, and probably popular with its constituents, to give a more polarizing speech, a speech that puts Muslims in a hard line and how Islam needs to change.
“He could have given a Macron speech, but he didn’t,” added Neumann.
In the meantime, Mr. Macron continued to vigorously defend the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, first published in Charlie Hebdo in the name of “safeguarding freedom.”
This position has met with broad approval in France, left and right, among intellectuals and politicians, and in the media. Prominent moderate Muslims have also expressed subdued support in public.
“It doesn’t shock me. It doesn’t affect me, ”said Tareq Oubrou, the Imam of Bordeaux’s mosque, about the cartoons. Muslims “should receive this type of provocation indifferently,” he said.
Within France, there were few dissident voices in public pointing to possible flaws in Mr Macron’s approach.
“He is the president of all French people, including Muslims,” said Jean-François Bayart, a specialist in Islam at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. “Now he identifies France with a position that is not representative of all sensitivities.”
Mr Bayart has also pointed out that the French police systematically and abusively discriminated against Muslims – a consistent finding of independent inspection bodies in recent years.
Mr. Bayart called Mr. Macron’s position on the cartoons “childish” and said pictures are “intended to remind people that they don’t belong here, they are from elsewhere”. He added, “You are an Arab, you are an immigrant. You’re stealing French bread. “
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