“Maybe this will get me in trouble, maybe I will be a victim of a police raid, but French Muslims future lies in their capacity to stand against oppression.” Yasser Louati
“This is a war waged by the government against Islam and Muslims, maybe not a military war, but political war against Muslims and their basic human rights. Muslims are not asking for special rights. They just want to be left alone. And if there are terrorist attacks, maybe France should analyze its failed foreign policies and its failed counter terrorism, but to hold the very first victims of terrorism as potential suspects, if not culprits, thus asking the raped woman that she’s responsible for what’s happening to her.
There is this thing called Islamo-diversion, and any time you have a problem, you fail economically, politically, socially, institutionally, you create a Muslim problem to make sure that we speak about Muslims, but not the government’s failures. Emmanuel Macron is no different from a tyrant because he’s got all the tools to do whatever he wishes as a president, and now he’s asking for extra powers to shut down organizations based on a simple accusation. If you allow the government to crack down on an organization without any proof, just on the mere accusation, then literally you are accepting that we can live under the same regime as Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Muhammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia. They are shutting down NGOs without going before the court of law, which means an arbitrary decision was taken in the ministry of the Elysee Palace to shut down specific NGOs. If you think you have a case against them, take it to court.
We have white supremacy organizations that have planned the terrorist attacks against Muslims, they have not been disolved. Emmanuel Macron, what he is doing right now is, I will police Muslims wherever they are organized, even within their families. The shutting down of NGOs in France is a direct assault on the Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Freedom of Association and Assembly. What Emanuel is saying is that I will tell you the kind of Islam you practice, so not only is the French state policing Muslims physically, but now it’s about policing their ideas and their religion. What are French values? Do we have an official document we could refer to? Or is this, again a way for the French government to set up very loose rules so they can dismiss any person they disagree with?
When France sells weapons to Saudi Arabia to massacre civilians in Yemen and that the journalists who reveal the story get prosecuted, so much so that across the world people are worried for French journalists, where are the French values? So this is a farce, and Emmanuel Macron represents a class, an elite, that has no values that we share with them, but they will tell you Muslims don’t abide by French values. Emmanuel Macron, while constantly repeating that supposedly Muslims have a problem with the secular law, he’s the first one to violate the law on Laïcité and he’s the first one to apply double standards when it comes to the relationship between the state and religion, we do not see, for example, the French state interfering in the Catholic faith despite the influence of the Catholic faith on so many state representatives.
Emmanuel Macron does not want that for Muslims. He’s basically saying, the only thing you can do is work, eat, sleep, go on vacation. That’s it. And if you were to be organized, I decide who will be your representatives, I will decide which organization is legal and you cannot, as a Muslim, say, I will stand against injustice because I’m Muslim and that’s why France is in no position whatsoever to lecture any other country on the rights of minorities when we see what’s happening to Muslims, unfortunately, today in France.When it comes to labeling imams, labeled by what standards, based on what?
You give 15 days to people who only speak for themselves and that the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t even know. The French Council of the Muslim Faith was set up by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2003 in violation of the Laïcité. If you say we are going to give a condition to imams, what are they going to do? They’re going to censor themselves. So what you’re doing right now as a president is you’re openly violating their freedom of thought, freedom of expression and even freedom of assembly, all mosques in France are under surveillance. You shouldn’t lie ourselves. Every single mosque in France is under tight surveillance. Oftentimes, the heads of Muslim organizations, they report directly to the state. Many of them are already informants. The French state knows that so-called radicalization does not take place inside mosques or communities, it takes place outside the community, on the Internet, in jail and in assemblies that do not adhere to the mainstream Muslim community, so that’s not a Muslim problem, that’s a French state problem.
When Emmanuel Macron spoke about Islam being in crisis, he forgot that his government itself is in crisis. He forgets that he was elected with a minority because a majority of French people did not go to vote. So he got the majority of the votes counted, not the majority of the French people. He failed economically, a million people have crossed the poverty line in France within 9 months. 45000 thousand people have died in his mismanagement of the pandemic of covid-19. His foreign policy is a complete disaster, be the wars in the Sahel region in central Africa, what he is doing in Libya, supporting a despot like Haftar and what he’s trying to do in the eastern Mediterranean. All of his foreign policies have failed. France has stood with every single dictator in the Muslim world and any time Muslims have rose for their rights and democracy, France was against them. So please, Macron, stop embarrassing us.
Make no mistake about it, this has to do with Muslim kids. We do not hear the French state cracking down on Catholic private schools despite the dozens of cases of pedophilia. We do not see the French president interfering with the Jewish faith when synagogues are used for the recruitment of Jewish boys to join the occupation army in Palestine. But now they are creating a problem when it comes to Muslims, coming up with these conspiracy theories. This is, again, an extreme version of how there is an obsession of policing Muslims.
Emmanuel Macron, unfortunately, is again increasing the institutional crisis France has been facing for decades, that we have an authoritarian drift from the president, we have extremely weak institutions, we don’t have a strong parliament, we don’t have strong checks and balances and the president being the accountability is doing exactly what he wants and there is nobody to stop him. And on top of it, we don’t have a strong left that stands against oppression. Maybe this will get me in trouble, maybe I will be a victim of a police raid, but French Muslims future lies in their capacity to stand against oppression. As for saving our children first, they are not yours. They have their parents, and second, white men need to stop with this white savior complex. Muslims are not asking you to save them, nor to save their kids, nor to save Muslim women.
This is, again, the same discourse we heard when they passed all these laws against Muslim women, banning them from public schools, attending school field trips, making sure they get discriminated against while saying, we are doing this to save you. When they say freedom of speech, how many people got prosecuted for saying what they think? How many journalists lost their jobs? Who forgot the day Emmanuel Macron shouted at a French journalist for revealing he met with Hezbollah officials?
How many times have Muslims been allowed to speak up against Islamophobia? Take a look at our media right now. You take a look at all of our debates dealing with Islam and Muslims, you don’t see a single Muslim. So it’s not about freedom of speech, it’s about the privilege of speech of the dominant ideology. Otherwise, we would have more plurality in our own media. We would have more people of color in the positions of a journalist and more people of color in ethnic backgrounds in positions of power within the state. When Emanuel Macron went to a news outlet to give an interview, he gave the interview almost whining about how he was misunderstood, how he was misquoted and how he has nothing against Islam, etc..
Right after he left that interview, he tweeted in French “Laïcité never killed anyone” in French only, usually he tweets in French, English and Arabic. This time he sent a message to the French audience that, look at me, big shot, I did not back down. But what happened in the meantime is that the economic interests of France called him and must have told him, you need to stop acting like a baby. Now our economic interests is at stake, so that’s why he gave that interview, trying to calm things down. Emmanuel Macron is extremely arrogant, very limited on the knowledge of how French society works and how international relations work. He sends even the minister of Foreign Affairs to Egypt to give a speech to calm down Muslims. You cannot insult people in what they hold dear and expect them to be OK with it. In France, you can get a 7500 euro fine if you show disrespect to the French flag, you can get sued for disrespecting state officials but Jean-Yves Le Drian says “you don’t fully understand our values, but we respect Islam nevertheless.
“Boycott is a basic human right. If Emmanuel Macron thinks that the French economic interests is at stake, then stop behaving towards Muslims as if they have no rights.”
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