French President Emmanuel Macron seems a worried man. He first proposed to reform Islam along French lines. Then after the vicious killing of a schoolteacher by a Muslim teenager, he extended France’s support to caricatures of the Prophet that most Muslims see as blasphemous.
Many Muslim countries erupted in protest. Criticism also appeared in the British and American press. Macron now claims he was misinterpreted, clarifying in an interview to Al Jazeera that he was defending “the freedom to speak, to write, to think, to draw.” He wrote to the Financial Times this week to denounce “media articles that divide us.” The newspaper removed an article to which Macron objected from its website.
Nevertheless, the damage has been done — and not just to the principle of free expression. Two of the loudest voices against Macron — Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan — have exploited Macron’s missteps to deflect attention from their domestic excesses and failures. There has been more terrorist violence, in France, Austria and now Saudi Arabia.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel struck the right note at a video conference of European leaders this week; she cautioned against talk of civilizational clash between Islam and the West, and chose to focus on how “our democratic social model” could deal with terrorism.
Certainly, it is one thing to defend freedom of expression — an obligation of all democratic leaders. It is quite another to deploy a whole nation behind a particular expression of that freedom.
In one striking instance of rising majoritarian sentiment against an already alienated minority, high schools across France plan to circulate booklets with degrading images of the Prophet in order to affirm “the values of the Republic.”
Part of the blame for this unfolding disaster must lie on Macron’s increasingly desperate wish to beat his explicitly anti-Islam rival Marine le Pen at her own game in presidential elections due in 2022.
But Macron and many of his supporters are also misled by ideological dogma. Much has happened in recent decades, from the rise of Islamophobic troll factories in India to recrudescent anti-Semitism in Europe and Facebook-created “bubbles” in the U.S., to complicate the quasi-religious faith that free expression is an absolute value, an unambiguous sign of moral and political progress.
France’s close neighbor Germany has been criminalizing defamatory “fake news” and cracking down on social media companies. France itself has declared the denial of the Holocaust to be a crime — a contradiction that bedevils its advocacy of free speech.
A perplexed Muslim today may well wonder why calumnies against the Prophet and Islam should become the true test of a heavily and frequently compromised principle.
Determined to resolve once and for all the “crisis” of Islam, Macron and many of his supporters assume that the right to offend the devout is an essential step in mankind’s passage from religious superstition to secular enlightenment.
The historical evidence for this belief may seem strong in the case of France, which in the late 18th century began to define its modern identity against a powerful and oppressive church.
But the country now has a substantial non-Christian minority, largely from the Muslim countries it once brutally colonized, and it seems highly unlikely that Macron or anyone else can manage to offend this historically humiliated population into an Enlightenment.
As Le Monde reported, Macron sneered during a cabinet meeting at American “multiculturalism,” calling it a “form of defeatist thought.” In fact, there is much he can learn from the United States, the impregnable bastion of free speech.
The “N” word, indissolubly linked to centuries of slavery, was once freely deployed across the U.S. Only the most bigoted white supremacist today will claim that the banishing of such free speech from public life is a blow to freedom.
The First Amendment didn’t have to be cancelled in order to stigmatize such offensive discourse. Rather, anti-racist activists created broad social acceptance for their moral conviction — that the dignity of a once systematically degraded people be respected.
Contemptuous of America’s experience, Macron could at least look to Simone Weil, the rare French thinker to take into account the presence of her country’s colonial subjects and to understand that 18th-century articles of faith cannot remain the sole guide to human co-existence.
Examining France’s catastrophic political and moral collapse in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Weil came to see duties and obligations rather than rights as the basis of an irrevocably mixed society. For her, words like “I have the right” evoke a “latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.”
As Weil saw it, “to place the notion of rights at the center of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides.”
The spirit of contention, grown nasty, even lethal, is ravaging societies around the world today while the impulse to charity grows ever more feeble. Macron can do a lot more to squash the impression that insulting the core beliefs of nearly 2 billion Muslims is what will sustain the core beliefs of French people. – Bloomberg
Also read: French President, shampoo, cosmetics are all haram in Pakistan. Just not French defence toys
A lousy argument. Macron never humiliated Islam. If Islam, a thriving religion over centuries, can suddenly become so fragile in the last 4-5 decades, so as to feel that a cartoon, harmless as it is, will humiliate the faith, and on that basis its followers start killing innocent peoole in a barbaric way (killing for faith itself by any which way, is reprehensible), then we should be doubting about its strength. Same thing happened when MF Hussain drew nudes of Hindu Godesses. A few fringe groups started raising a fire, but most Hindus did not support the cause and there were multitudes of very loud Hindu voices, many of them now against Macron (how two-faced), who opposed the movement saying tolerance is the mainstay of a strong religion and we should ignore them as the freedom of expression of Indians. Fair enough. Though Hussain left the country to stay exiled in fear of those fringe groups, he was not banned in India, nor did the indian govt gave out any official statement against him rather advised calm and tolerance (that virtue that only non- Muslims are supposed to practice).
No one hounded him down and be-headed him, let alone grab his beard and ask him about his not painting anything remotely related to the founder of the Islamic faith.
Holocaust was real and dealt with the attempted extermination of a faith based race from the face of the earth.
Banning the word ‘Negro’ in US or the western world was in relation to the direct humiliation of a whole people on the basis of their colour and which was associated with the inhuman practice of slavery.
Expressing one’s freedom of just having the right to draw a cartoon depicting a real life person who existed, does not preclude portraying him in any which way, fearing that a silly regressive strain of the faith he founded and started propagating through documented violence, will result in a so called outrage amongst his followers that will lead to barbarism spread out over the world.
So Print, if you want to put up the facade that you are secular, then show it by being logical, tolerant, rational and unbiased. Else, just shut up.
You’re completely missing the point. Macron didn’t publish the cartoons. It wasn’t his idea. But as a president, he has the duty to protect the free speech rights of those who did. It’s subtle for Indian taste but profound.
The French government doesn’t control news papers.
Do you have the guts to write an article with the title-Terrorists do not need to defend Mohammad
Why do not you convert to the damned cult mr mishra?
Print i respect your usual analytical rigor in questioning the govt ( while others are not).
But we are talking of beheadings which are being supported by muslim countries ( nothing more than a lip services) . While cartoons are being condemned by heads of state ..
I say we should all publish these cartoons daily so that the message is clear – WE ARE NOT AFRAID
“France itself has declared the denial of the Holocaust to be a crime — a contradiction that bedevils its advocacy of free speech.”
It is verifiable historic fact. So people denying it are scoundrels. Same is case in India . Hundreds, if not thousands, of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain temples, and learning Institutes were destroyed by Muslims and millions of Hindus were killed by Muslim invaders. . India should have similar law regarding denial of this holocaust and secularists Hindus & Islamist should be punished for denying that fact.
While Holocaust are verified facts poking fun at prophet or faith does not deny a verified fact. Only concern should be motive. If people who mock Islam do not mock their own faith, if they are of born in or practicing other faith, then one can see a motivation and abuse of freedom. such people should be punished, but not ono-religious people.
“Only concern should be motive. If people who mock Islam do not mock their own faith, if they are of born in or practicing other faith, then one can see a motivation and abuse of freedom. such people should be punished, but not ono-religious people.”
should read:
Only concern should be the motive. If people who mock Islam, but do not mock their own faith if they are of born in or practicing other faith, then one can see a motivation and abuse of freedom to undermine other faiths. Such people should be punished, but not non-religious people.
Enabler of terrorism. Sick!
Print don’t need to attack Macron to defend Islam.
Biggest joke of the article, already terrorist attack have increased. So, if they will not like something, secular need to go to courts, protest and they will have terrorist attack. And you will justify it.
Know this, this hypocrisy date is past its use date.