When Macron unveiled a plan to defend France’s secular values against “Islamist radicalism”, he said the religion was “in crisis” all over the world. Stressing the importance of schools in instilling secular values in young people, he said beginning next year, about 50,000 French children who are currently educated at home would be required to attend school with fellow students.

 

His remarks came as a trial was underway in Paris over the deadly January 2015 attacks on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The French president’s outburst also came after an 18-year-old man of Pakistani origin stabbed two people near Charlie Hebdo’s former office. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said it was “clearly an act of Islamic terrorism”.

 

As expected, it immediately sparked objections and condemnations from Muslim leaders. In Iran, President Emmanuel Macron was labelled as the “Demon of Paris”. In Bangladesh, he was condemned as the “Satan Worshipper”. Pictures of Macron were burned along with France’s flag. The Muslim world was calling for boycotts of the French products.

In Pakistan, something funny happened. Prime Minister Imran Khan apparently passed a unanimous decision in Parliament to recall the country’s ambassador from France. The problem is – Pakistan doesn’t have an ambassador in France because the country’s last ambassador to France, Moin-ul Haq, had been transferred to China three months ago.

 

The clueless and incompetent Mr Imran saw Twitter users mocking and ridiculing the Pakistani prime minister. Still, Macron’s remarks have given Muslim leaders the ammunition to divert attention from their internal domestic problems. A fortnight later, a history teacher – Samuel Paty – was beheaded for showing his class the cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

 

Apparently, Paty had shown his class a caricature from the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo during a moral and civic education class discussion about freedom of speech. Before presenting the caricature, the teacher reportedly invited Muslim students to leave the classroom if they wished. Anyway, it sparked a furious response from a number of parents who had demanded his resignation.

The teacher was stabbed and beheaded outside his secondary school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine by Abdullakh Anzorov, of Chechen origin, who was later shot dead by police. French authorities said a well-known mosque in a northern Paris suburb would be closed as part of their clampdown on Islamist groups and suspected extremists as a result of the killing.

 

Yesterday, a man armed with a knife killed three people and wounded several others at a church in the southern French city of Nice. One elderly woman who had come to pray was “beheaded”. A suspect, who repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” was shot and detained. Four years ago Nice saw another terror attack – a Tunisian drove a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on 14 July, killing 86 people.

 

Police said yesterday’s killing was considered to be a terrorist attack. Just hours after the terrorist attack, a man had been arrested in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, after attacking a security guard at the French consulate in the kingdom’s coastal city. In another separate attack in France, a man was shot dead in Montfavet near Avignon after threatening police with a handgun.

Why can’t the Muslims in France retaliated by drawing Jesus Christ in the most humiliating way possible, the same way Prophet Muhammad was mocked and ridiculed by satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo? That probably is the million-dollar question that French President Emmanuel Macron doesn’t understand. He fails to understand that secularism has always been a very controversial concept in Islam.

 

Secularism means separation of religion from civic affairs. Secular means to describe things that have no connection with religion – either positively or negatively. Amusingly, while Islam cannot accept secularism, which is perceived as a foreign ideology imposed by invaders, millions of Muslim migrants and refugees flocked to Europe, especially Germany and France, the land of Christianity.

 

In August 2015, the influx of refugees from the Middle East to the Europe saw Germany and France welcoming Muslim refugees at an alarming rate. The silence of the oil-rich Gulf countries and even their refusal to receive Muslim refugees on their land was mind-boggling. While the Europeans (naively) thought of humanitarian relief, the Persian Gulf understood the danger of “Muslim extremism”. 

But even before the mass migration, France has about 4.7 million Muslims in 2010, mostly of immigrant origin. By 2017, Pew Research report estimates the Muslim population of France to be 5,760,999 (8.8% of the total population). In essence, France has the largest number of Muslims in the Western world and Islam is the second biggest religion after Christianity in France.

 

The problem with accepting Muslim refugees or migrants was that France also has imported extremists and radicals at the same time. Homegrown Islamic extremists had set off deadly bombs in France as early as in the 1990s. As more French jihadists went to Syria and Iraq to support the Islamic State group, France started to counter radicalization with various new programs in 2018.

 

The new plan would target prisons, schools and even sports clubs. In 2018, there were more than 500 inmates convicted of or awaiting trial for terrorism, and some 1,150 under watch for radicalization. While prisons are known as potential breeding grounds for radicalization, the real problem is schools where many private schools are run by Muslim organizations that the French government has little regulation.

Since the 1980s, the French governments have tried to create a new brand or version of Islam in the country that both conforms to national values (obviously referring to secularism) and is immune to the radical interpretations of Islamist extremism. Yet, since 2013, at least 1,700 French nationals have joined the ranks of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria.

 

French’s 30 years of effort to institutionalize Islam has failed. Macron’s plan included breaking foreign funding to disentangle Muslim organizations in France from foreign influence. He had even suggested training imams at home. He thought if imams in France embrace a moderate Islam, there will be no more terrorism. So far, it’s nothing but wishful thinking.

 

Salafism, which had roots in the Wahhabism and often associated with extremist groups, have actually gained momentum and popularity in France. Others have been radicalized online. And Macron had the cheek to condemn China over its de-radicalization program – accusing the Chinese for their oppressive treatment of Muslim Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province instead.

President Macron should realise by now that his country’s growing Muslim population cannot and will not assimilate, or seems to assimilate at different rates. There is a clash of values from the beginning – secularism asks conservative Muslims to be something that they’s likely not. Worse, the minority French Muslims want to adopt Sharia law into the country’s legal system.

 

The Western countries are too blinded by their anti-China sentiments that they did not realize the Chinese do not suffer terrorist attacks like in France because appropriate actions are being taken to prevent radicalization. It’s hilarious that Macron whined, moaned and bitched about the fight against “separatism” when China has been doing precisely that – to counter Uighur separatism.

 

The Muslim Uighur separatists in China’s Xinjiang province would rather see the region plunges into violence and chaos than living a stable and prosperous life – simply to prove a point. In July 2009, a series of violent riots in Urumqi, the capital city of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, saw 197 people killed – most of whom were Han people.

In June 2012, Tianjin Airlines Flight 7554 was hijacked by six Uighur extremists, the first serious hijacking attempt in China since 1990. Passengers and crew foiled the hijack attempt when they successfully restrained the attackers. Two of the hijackers died from injuries on board, while three surviving terrorists were sentenced to death and one was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment.

 

In March 2014, there was a mass stabbing attack at Kunming Station. The terrorists, linked to Xinjiang separatists – both male and female – pulled out long-bladed knives and indiscriminately butchered 31 civilians and injured more than 140 people. The eight-person terrorist group was led by a leader named named Abdurehim Kurban.

 

The Muslim countries that had refused to accept Muslim refugees and migrants all understood that radical ideologies and separatism are threats to their national sovereignty. China understood that too. But not the Western countries like France or Germany. You can argue until the cow comes home, but the de-radicalization program of China in Xinjiang works.

If France can’t even handle its 6-million French Muslims, it should not criticize China’s re-education program to de-radicalize Uighur Muslims, a population estimated to be between 12 million to 20 million. Instead of being a hypocrite, Macron should learn from China how to contain extreme and radical Islamic groups if he seriously wanted to eliminate extremism and terrorism.

 

Foreign activists and the Western countries accused China of locking up at least a million Uighur Muslims in detention centres in Xinjiang. China, however, calls them training centres designed to halt or prevent extremism and terrorism. Call them whatever you like, but if they can stop terrorism like the one in France, they are good and effective programs.

 

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October 30th, 2020 by financetwitter

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