Islam versus Europe

Here are some grotesque examples of the attempts to use the shootings in France to delegitimise criticism of Islam or immigration. Based on pure speculation, these people insinuated that the shooter was a right-wing French nationalist who had been stirred up by anti-immigration, anti-Islam rhetoric in the French election campaign.

The shooter was a member of the group, Forsane Alizza. A previous post I made about the group shows that one of its key aims was to suppress criticism of Islam from the internet. As the extracts from articles and editorials below prove, many in the political-media establishment have exactly the same agenda.

Let's start with a nominally conservative publication, the Telegraph:

And yet, once the shock and grief starts to recede, commentators will inevitably start asking whether politics has anything to do with, if not the shootings themselves, then at least the creation of a climate that could have triggered the acts of a clearly unhinged individual.

In recent days, an unsavoury battle for far-Right votes has erupted between Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-Right incumbent, and Marine Le Pen, running for the nationalist, anti-immigrant National Front party.

Mired in woefully low approval ratings, Mr Sarkozy abruptly announced that the spread of halal food was of prime national concern and called for all kosher and halal products to be labelled.

Slammed as grotesque electioneering by some, the proposal was a knee-jerk reaction to Miss Le Pen’s brazen claims – quickly disproved – that all meat sold in Paris was halal.

Le Pen slightly misstated the case by using the word "sold". What the original documentary that gave rise to the claims said, and what Le Pen should have repeated, was "slaughtered", not said. It was later confirmed that all slaughter done in the Greater Paris region was halal. But the Telegraph correspondent, Henry Samuel, twists the facts to suit his agenda.

...Claude Guéant, Mr Sarkozy’s interior minister, further stoked controversy by claiming a Socialist proposal to allow foreigners to vote in local elections risked leading to halal being forced onto school menus.

Mr Sarkozy has already been accused by some of playing with fire, popularising his discourse to the hilt in order to secure the far-Right vote – the only way he believes he can gain sufficient momentum to finish ahead of Socialist front-runner François Hollande in round one of elections on April 22 and in a second round run-off on May 6.

Last week, he baldly claimed there were “too many foreigners” in France, vowing to cut immigration by half and limit state benefits for legal migrants.

Source: Telegraph

Campaigning has been suspended, but the shooting has already sent tremors through France's presidential election. The first to say what was on everyone's mind was not the Socialist challenger François Hollande but the centrist François Bayrou. He said the killings were the product of a sick society, with politicians who pointed the finger and inflamed passions. No prize for guessing whom he was talking about.Nicolas Sarkozy's lurch to the right has included such claims as there being too many immigrants in France, and that the French were secretly ingesting halal meat. Alain Juppé, the foreign minister, fought back by declaring that Bayrou's statement was ignoble. But it is must already be clear this part of the incumbent's re-election campaign is dead. Currying votes from the extreme right is a two-edged sword, and Sarkozy could be about to feel its blade. The minister who has been most shamelessly xenophobic, Claude Guéant, is now the man in charge of of the manhunt.

This was not the election campaign – personalised, divisive, vituperative – that France wanted or needed. France's main concern, like Britain's, is jobs. Its problem, like ours, is curbing the super-rich not immigrants. Mr Sarkozy may now try to move to the centre ground. But let us hope he does not fool too many voters.

Source: Guardian

As might have been predicted, the Guardian went overboard with this line of propaganda. Here is an extract from another piece that appeared on its Comment is Free (Komment Macht Frei) pages.

Nicolas Sarkozy has lurched his party wildly to the right in an attempt to save his skin, claiming there were "too many immigrants in France" and stoking Islamophobia with a ridiculous claim that the French were being secretly forced to eat halal; his prime minister François Fillon even said Jews and Muslims should put their dietary laws behind them and embrace modernity.

Claude Guéant, the interior minister who took personal control of the investigation, has been the most consistently xenophobic, championing the superiority of European Christian civilisation over lesser cultures who force their women to cover up – yes, observant Jews and Muslims, he meant you. The nadir came last week when Sarkozy's new immigration chief Arno Klarsfeld – the eldest son, ironically, of Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld – called for a wall to be built between Greece and Turkey to save Europe from barbarian invaders.

Today in Toulouse we have been given a horrific illustration of where such delirious cynicism can lead. All of those who have been shot or killed in and around the city in the past eight days have had one thing in common. They are from visible minorities. They had names or faces that marked them out as not being descended, as Jean-Marie Le Pen would say, from "our ancestors the Gauls". Their roots – both Jewish and Muslim – were in the Maghreb or the Caribbean. They were, in short, a snapshot of la France metissée – the mixed race, immigrant France that works hard and "gets up early" to empty bins and look after children; the people who die disproportionately for France yet who are also most often locked up in its prisons and crumbling banlieues.

As one father said this morning as he hugged his son to him outside the school, "They are attacking us because we are different."

Police are a long way yet from catching, never mind understanding, what was going through the head of someone who could catch a little girl by the hair so he wouldn't have to waste a second bullet on her. But some things are already becoming clear. He shouted no jihadist or anti-Semitic slogans, going about his grisly business in the cold, military manner oddly similar to Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian gunman who massacred 77 people at a social democrats summer camp last summer.

As with Breivik, politicians will be quick to the thesis of the lone madman. Another lone madman influenced by nothing but his own distorted mind, like the lone gang of neo-Nazis who had been quietly killing Turks and Greeks in Germany for years unbothered by the police, who preferred to put the murders down to feuds or honour killings.

Source: The Guardian

So the "lone madman" hypothesis was going to be unjustified if it turned out to be a Breivik-style right-winger. We had to take the context of political rhetoric into account, argued the Guardian author. No doubt, now that it has turned out to be a jihadist Muslim, the Guardian will go into full reversal on this. Suddenly the context of a violence-promoting religion and its creeping invasion of France will no longer matter. He was just a lone nut who read the Koran and, like so many, somehow crazily misunderstood it to the point where he felt motivated to go out and commit mass murder. Perhaps he was tipped over the edge by islamophobia? Yes, that's it, all the talk about French people being secretly forced to eat halal (and, whatever the author says, that is not a myth) must have inspired him to go on his jihad rampage.

Here's another example from the Independent:

Did campaign that played to the far right trigger actions of killer?

The horrific school killings in Toulouse fell like a bombshell on the French presidential election campaign.

Was it just a coincidence that the murders – and the probably related killings of three soldiers of North African origin last week – occurred five weeks before the first round of the election? Were they somehow aimed at the French state itself? Or driven by issues within the campaign?

Only one mainstream politician had the courage to make the connection publicly. Corinne Lepage, a former centre-right Environment Minister, suggested in a tweet that the divisive themes of immigration and national identity raised in recent weeks by President Nicolas Sarkozy might, unwittingly, have triggered the actions of a "madman".

"A madman? Maybe," she tweeted. "But the unpleasant political climate and hatred can excite people."

...The anti-racist pressure group SOS Racism is convinced that the killings were the work of an ultra- right, racist extremist. If so, Mr Sarkozy's brand of campaigning may abruptly lose its appeal.

Source: The Independent

On to Charles Bremner in the Times. Without making his point openly, he slyly insinuates a connection between the shootings and public criticism of Islam and immigration.

Two weeks ago the top topic in France’s presidential campaign was not the economy or the euro crisis, but the manner in which Muslim and Jewish tradition requires animals to be slaughtered.

The matter was raised by Marine Le Pen, the candidate for the National Front, who is running in third place. She claimed that a majority of Parisians were being sold halal and kosher meat without being told.

President Sarkozy, who has taken a swing into National Front territory in his hunt for votes, then demanded that all meat be labelled to show whether or not it had been killed via Jewish or Muslim ritual. A few days later he pronounced that the issue was over — but the damage was done.

No one is making any link between the murders in Toulouse and Montauban and the presidential campaign, but the entry of the racial theme into the election left an exceedingly bad taste. It reflected the degree to which the airing of resentment over Muslim immigration has almost gone mainstream.

Much the same has happened in the Nordic and Low Countries in recent years. Indeed, the first comparison that leapt to mind on the news from Toulouse was Norway’s Anders Behring Breivik, whose murderous rampage last July was supposed to be an action against the modern multi-ethnic state.

Police in France have indicated that they are focusing on the theory of a home-grown killer with a neo-Nazi-style grudge against “non-French” people, rather than foreign terrorists. That was also Breivik’s profile.

Source: The Times (£)