October 30, 2020 - 5:12pm
With the help of a gutless (but confused) Anglo press and clever rhetorical sleight of hand, Muslim leaders like Turkey’s President Erdogan and Pakistan’s Imran Khan took no time in turning France into the villain.
Almost immediately after the killings, #NeverTheProphet was trending alongside #Islamophobia. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, made up of 57-member states formalised the boycott of French goods that was already spreading across the Islamic world.
The former Malaysian PM tweeted that “Muslims have the right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”.
In the UK, Roshan Salih, editor of the website 5Pillars, tweeted: “The Muslim world is rising up in outrage at the actions of the barbaric, racist, Islamophobic French state. Alhamdulilah”. The same publication’s deputy editor tweeted: “Western states, namely France in this case, should consider themselves very fortunate that in the absence of a Muslim ruler who yields enough global collective clout and backbone hasn’t declared war on them”.
A little before the attack on the church, the Turkish Minister for Culture and Tourism tweeted at Charlie Hebdo “Vous êtes des bâtards.. Vous êtes des fils des chiennes..” (‘you are bastards, you are sons of bitches’). The Turkish Ministry of Defence accused the country of Islamophobia, while Khan spoke of Macron ‘provoking’ Muslims.
Yet these leaders are wrapping up their aggression in a language of hurt feelings. France is the intolerant one, and they are the victims.
‘Islamophobia’, as is so often the case, is being used as a byword for blasphemy, as — on principle — Macron refused to disavow the cartoons or drawings “even if others recoil”.
In reality, these Muslim leaders are trying to bully and blackmail France into relinquishing the sacred values of the Republic — laïcité, freedom of thought, conscience, freedom to think and decide for yourself. Values without which France would cease to be France.
Macron stands defiant, but if he were to respond in a similarly infantile way, he might ask ‘I know you are but what am I?’
Turkey locks up political opponents and journalists and has sought to prosecute Europeans (including its own citizens) for insulting the president. Erdogan has said that Jerusalem is a Turkish city, but claims it is Macron who needs a “mental check”. He recently turned one of the the most symbolic former churches in Christendom — the Hagia Sofia — into a mosque.
Pakistan executes people for blasphemy, like the Christian sentenced to death last month for making derogatory remarks about Muhammed in a text message. On issues like censorship, Khan is keen to extend beyond his borders under the guise of ‘islamophobia’.
The hypocrisy is glaring. If anything, the insistence by these cynical leaders that France must give up the sacred values of the Republic or else is intolerant and, even we might say, Francophobic.
Emma Webb is Director of the Forum on Integration, Democracy and Extremism at the Civitas think tank.
Emma_A_Webb
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SubscribeThanks for writing this. I have been very disturbed by the lack of response to these horrific murders elsewhere. The Spectator has been very left wing these last few days and the Telegraph almost as bad.
The Guardian has successfully buried it too. We’re all supposed to move on and be tolerant – this is how the state responds to the beheading of a teacher and women praying in church. The problem isn’t Islam – the problem is liberalism. It is a failed ideology which can no longer protect its own citizens and in many ways seeks to destroy them. It is evil and needs to be replaced.
These atrocities in France were barely mentioned in the Telegraph.
However, we (the plebs) can try as we might to protest at the ballot box (to the extent that we can) against the importation into our country of peoples who are hostile to us and our way of life, but it is making no difference – we are being ignored and worse, told we are “rascist”.
It will not end well.
And when Leo McKinstry published an article clearly blaming the excesses of mass immigration for the current impasse, comments were abruptly closed and all comments already submitted shoved down the memory hole. The Wokestapo are strong in Telegraph administration, thanks to the Barclay Bros. If Connie Black had stayed in charge, things would have been better. Perhaps that’s why the Deep State got rid of him – just as it campaigns against Trump and stitched up Francois Fillon.
I don’t think it’s liberalism. This silence exists across the political spectrum, but yes I concede, more so on the liberal left. It’s seems to me to be more about virtue signalling amongst those in positions of authority to ensure the audience keeps supporting you. They are all trying to maximise the thumbs up on facebook/twitter. That way they can keep their cushy job be it political or CEO. It explains an awful lot of headshaking WTF moments when you dismiss the opinions of people you used to look up.
Is there a political spectrum in Western Europe? The West has an ideology which it’s happy to inflict on every other culture in the world, and if they don’t like it we try to bomb them into accepting it.
Liberalism is the primary ideology of all the main political parties in the UK: compulsory mass immigration, compulsory LGBT propaganda, compulsory anti-white “anti-racism”.
The “Conservative” Party is driven by money and only money – its backers in construction and the alcohol industry aren’t conservative in any sense. HS2 would not be promoted by conservatives. It never questions the fundamental framework of the “society” we have or asks how we got here – it’s merely GDP, perpetual economic growth and making things easier for international capital. It’s insane.
When I see armed police on the streets and in shopping malls (and Macron has ordered more armed police to protect schools after the recent murders) I don’t see this as a show of strength – it is weakness. They never, ever, address the fundamental causes of the endless attacks – that would mean actually doing something effective to resolve this insupportable situation, where fear is never far away from the minds of Europeans.
It’s a lot more serious than getting likes on Twitter.
I do not understand why our government does not issue a clear statement supporting the French . We should say that no religion is worth killing for.
Another point worth making here is that this confected outrage from leaders across the Muslim world stands in marked contrast to their shattering silence when it comes to the real plight of their Uyghur co-religionists in China, who are suffering a rather worse fate than having their religious sensibilities offended by cartoons. At least a million in concentration camps for ‘re-education’ where they are forced to eat pork, renounce their religion and imbibe the works of Xi Jinping, and from which they are then being moved to forced labour in factories. A programme of forced sterilisation of Uyghur women, of children separated from their parents and forcibly Sinicised, and a state of permanent surveillance, terror and oppression in Xinjiang as a whole. And do we hear a peep out of Erdogan or Imran Khan about that? Erdogan is in fact deporting Uyghurs from Turkey back to China at the request of the CCP. There is a special place in hell for that kind of hypocrisy.
True but calling Erdogan hypocrite still does not make the life of the French in France more safe. You better talk to the French leaders.
I wonder why?-possibly-just possibly!-that as the CCP brook no argument and are more than capable of reacting to Muslim criticism with yet more extreme brutalism and economic leverage that the leaders of the “religion of peace” choose to target their ire at a softer underbelly!
A spot-on comment. The hypocracy of the likes of Erdogan who sucks up to the Chinese conveniently ignoring their treatment of their own ethnic Muslims. You can see all the despotic and controlling Governments sticking together. It’s increasingly becoming an Us vs Them world.
No point. They know that China does not give a flying xxxx about what they might say and do, while the West is weak, decadent, morally bankrupt.
The usual candlelit vigils are ineffective and forgettable. Far more telling would be a protest where the Mohammed cartoons were carried and conspicuously displayed in poster form. This would be a defiant assertion of the Western value of freedom of expression. Do western liberals value that freedom sufficiently to engage in such an act? I doubt it.
I agree some stronger action is needed but if such as gathering took place it would only make headlines of a ‘far right’ group or other negative headlines by the lines of the MSM. That’s the problem ordinary people expressing concern labelled as far right extremists, it happened with the statues protecting them from BLM. There hasn’t been any discussion on Islam’s problem to cartoons and criticism in general and what kind of religion goes around beheading those question the ideology.
It could be dismissed as the action of a far right group if the numbers were not significant and far right activists were major participants. We actually need a much broader consensus that standing up for our ideals of free thought and free expression is vitally important and worth fighting for.
Currently, we are simply indulging in grand displays of sentimental sadness at intolerance and violence. Are we supposed to believe that when our enemies see how compassionate and caring we are they will lay down their arms and embrace us? Or perhaps (more pathetically) we think we have shown them that they can never beat us because however many people they kill and mame we can always put together another candle-lit vigil!
By the way, you must have seen the news about Vienna. That’s another candle-lit vigil in the offing.
There is nothing in the article that many of us have not been saying for many years. The issue at hand is not the nature of the evil we face, but whether or not anything will be done about it.
Meanwhile in Britain, the jihadi child rape gangs prowl our towns and cities unchecked.
What’s the evidence they are still doing that? The long period of police inaction was disgraceful, but one’s impression was that, like the gay pederasts, the Muslim ones are being actively pursued.
The UK has a large influential and volatile Muslim community which is outpacing the indigenous population. The Press and Authorities are running scared. They do not want a Charlie Hebdo. Hence the lack of support. Things will only get worst until immigration is controlled and illegals deported.
According to the ONS 700,000 immigrants arrived in the UK in the year to March 20
Great article. My thoughts, only much more eloquently put.
Just as in 1940, France needs our help. Our Special Forces, such as they are, should put at her disposal immediately
Concurrently, the English Channel should declared an ‘exclusion zone’ for Sinbad & Co. and placed under immediate, joint, Martial Law.
A similar policy should implemented forthwith, by the EU, to prohibit immigrant crossing of “Mare Nostrum”.
There’s only one way to stop this and that’s special forces rounding every single one of them up and shipping them out of the country, but that ain’t ever going to happen is it….
Do you mean the anglo-saxon press to be dealt by the Special Forces? Will this save France and the EU?
Yes we could offer our help….. yet again. Problem is it is never appreciated afterwards. In regard to English channel problems France has never been a help apart from when we pay for it.
French Christians are butchered by Islamofascists not only outside France but on the streets and in the churches of France as well. Sometimes because of cartoons, sometimes for whatever else. True, France is increasingly under occupation of forces loyal to ISIS, Erdogan, Khamenei, etc., who are rather confused by the fact that the country’ leadership lacks…a head. 70 years ago there was deGaulle supported by the US and the UK. Today it is an open question.
Unherd continues to lead the way in showing our cucked press how to cover this issue. For that they should be applauded. At leas there’s one paper left in this country with balls.
Not sure why so many commentators are so keen to muddy the waters about the horrors that happened in France by trying to shift some of the blame onto the “Anglo” press. Stop trying to make everything about us and more importantly stop trying to barge into someone else’s tragedy, it’s unseemly. We know who the guilty men are let’s not try and lessen their guilt by taking some of that guilt on ourselves.
I can’t see why you think anyone is ‘trying to shift some of the blame onto the “Anglo” press.’
The English language press has behaved badly on badly on this and that is entirely separate and pointing this out does not shift any blame at all.
The only hypocrisy you miss is that freedom of expression is curtailed by the French State regarding the wearing of religious symbols.
Therefore whilst freedom of expression is seen as sacrosanct for the French Republic, it is simultaneously curtailed in the name of laïcité.
It is this contradiction that underlies the tension between French secularism (which is Christian at its roots) and the free expression of Islam within the country. With this contradiction in mind, it could be argued that French laïcité is secular fundamentalism.
That said, as someone on the Right, I think it is morally unacceptable to be teaching school kids that it is perfectly ok to grossly insult other people’s religions and beliefs. If it is OK, then surely it is acceptable for Muslims to grossly insult the ideological belief of laïcité.
Similarly, what if Muslims started propogating through France images of Jesus being buggered by a donkey and conducting f******o on Mohammed or Jesus being portrayed as a paedophile. Clearly this would be grossly insulting to Catholic communities which would cause violent tensions.
As such, a compromise is needed.
Either remove the restrictions on freedom of expression regarding the wearing of religious symbols or restrict freedom of expression regarding grossly insulting cartoons.
What I can’t understand is that these people publish all these bad
things about us and all the bad things they wish to do to us, the infidels, in their cult’s texts.
This they do all the time and these people are “offended” by simple cartoons made by us of the person who wrote all these bad things about us.
Who do these people think that they are?
Who has sovereignty in France?
Whose law rules over France?
Whose freedom of speech is allowed in France?
All Muslims in the Western World enjoy far better treatment than any Christians or other religions in predominantly Muslim countries. Muslims in the West do not choose to go to countries which are closer to them geographically and culturally. Erdogan and Khan should ask themselves why.
During my career I’ve come across several English francophobes and never really accepted their explanations for their emotion. One was the fisheries, another the support for the wrong side in the Falklands War. Is there something deeper that I’m missing?
Because they’re French?
I may be going against the grain here, but I am an Australian, and this country has 109 different nationalities, which came to this continent and have become Australian citizens, and many come from Islamic countries. The difference is this is not a result of colonialism, because even the previously British citizens know that this continent belonged and actually still does to the Indigenous Australians. So, perhaps we are lucky, this is not a country which used to be the coloniser elsewhere of other nations or continents. Because I cannot imagine that there would be cartoons about Mohammed in the newspapers here, such as Charly Hebdo publicised and which are shown in French schools to discuss the hallowed idea of ‘free speech’. I hasten to add that I am not in any way supporting the horrible murder, killing of the Hebdo staff, others and recently the school teacher Paty, or any French citizen, of any side. But………the Holy Grail of French free speech looks very one-sided. As a predominantly white and Catholic country I do not think as an atheist (or if I was an angry Muslim French citizen) that cartoons of Jesus as a pederast would go well in French schools and newspapers. I happen to have lived for 7 years in Denmark where there too were caricatures of Mohammed, in fact this practice started there if I am not mistaken. They were just racist there and in France. So, why is it necessary to make fun of the founder of a religion, which mostly non-white French adhere too? The Hebdo massacre should have led not only to utter disgust and grief, but also to reflection. Instead the cartoons were used again to ishow children ‘free speech’ (I cannot believe that it is necessary to discuss this with deliberately again to show the cartoons), and the President repeats the slogan of the basis of French culture as being “free expression of thought and speech”. Really?
There has been far more trashing of Christianity than Islam in Charlie Hebdo. But the response by Christians was confined to legal action, not beheadings.
https://qz.com/322550/charl…
The difference, the issue, the problem *is* with Islamism, not the more distasteful outworkings of free speech, and we must stop dancing around it.
You describe the principle of free speech (in France) as ‘hallowed’, ‘the Holy Grail’ and use quotes ‘free speech’. , your sarcasm speaks volumes for your position. The issue is not that it is ‘necessary’ to make fun of the founder of a religion, but wether we are able to do so, if we want, without fear of being beheaded. The founder of Christianity is ridiculed everyday in every way in the western world and its tolerated. And on the specific issue of the teacher – are you suggesting he was a racist and deliberately used the cartoon to provoke? Any image of the prophet is not allowed by Islam so your point is egregious. Do you suggest it should be unlawful in France to use any such image? or would you be happy for the population to be sensible and never offend any religion, just in case. Where would you draw the line? Never cause offence in any religion? What post Hebdo reflection would satisfy you?