Emmanuel Macron

Subterms

    More stories

    • 38 Shares129 Views

      in World Politics

      France’s Electoral Abyss

      by

      Across the globe, democracy appears to be in a curious state. One of the main indicators of the health or pathology of democracy is the turnout in elections. Some might claim that the high turnout for the Biden-Trump face-off last year was a sign of health for US democracy.

      But the aftermath — marked by the “stop the steal” movement, a riotous occupation of the Capitol building and a continued spirit of revolt by a significant proportion of the citizenry as well as some prominent politicians — reveals that the spectacular numbers achieved by both candidates in the presidential election were a sign of high fever in the body politic rather than healthy democratic engagement. Many commentators noticed that voting against a particular candidate — Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump in 2020 — rather than voting for a preferred candidate may have been the determining factor in those two elections.

      The Sad Reality of US Dealmaking

      READ MORE

      Iran’s presidential election on June 18 was notable for its low turnout. But that is what everyone expected. Iran’s centrally controlled electoral system, emanating from a strictly hierarchical governmental structure in which the power of the president is extremely restricted, produces elections that are more accurately referred to as “selections.”

      Though the two-party system in the US, sometimes referred to as a “duopoly,” leaves itself open to a similar critique, Western democracies still hold onto the idea that elections are expressions of vox populi, reflecting the will of the people. The general trend noted in recent years and in many democratic nations toward levels of abstention that often dip below 50% indicates that belief in democracy as a viable representative form of government may be far less solid than politicians and educators like to affirm.

      France set a record on June 20 for its combined departmental and regional elections, two distinct opportunities to vote on the same day in the same place. With nearly 33.3% showing up to vote, two-thirds of the electorate simply didn’t bother. The only worse showing was in a referendum in 2000, where only 30% of the electorate bothered to vote on shortening the length of a presidential term. On Sunday, the abstention figure was dramatic enough, in any case, for President Emmanuel Macron’s press secretary to term it “abyssale” (abysmal).

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Abyssale:

      A French adjective, usually translated in English as “abysmal,” but with a more literal meaning that serves to compare what is being described to a literal abyss, something most French people also consider to be an appropriate characterization of the level of competence and efficacy of the current French government and more generally of the political class

      Contextual Note

      Macron’s government has every reason to deem the result of this first round abysmal. Occurring less than a year before the 2022 presidential election in which Macron hopes to break the recent trend of one-term presidents (Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande), the media and the pollsters regarded these local elections primarily as an indicator of what to expect in next May’s contest. The majority party — itself a “bricolage,” an assemblage cobbled together after Macron’s freak parting of the Red Sea in 2017 — performed particularly badly, not even attaining the 10% required to remain in the running for the second round in five of the 13 regions. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      For most of his term, Macron has had low approval ratings. He has never earned the admiration of the masses that presidents of the Fifth Republic once managed to achieve, though there have been moments when the French were willing to respect his apparent competence. This was especially true after his initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are other moments, far more frequent, in which his popularity has not only faded, but Macron himself has become an object of public scorn. The yellow vest movement that raged in 2018 and 2019 is the closest thing in modern times to the kind of popular revolt immortalized during the French Revolution that more than two centuries ago, at least provisionally, abolished the monarchy.

      The commentators were even more surprised by the unexpectedly low score of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing populist party, the National Rally, formerly the National Front. The media have been building up the idea that the second round of next year’s presidential election will inevitably be a remake of 2017, with a rising Le Pen challenging a fading Macron, a recipe for anguished suspense among those less tempted by fascism. Over the next week, and immediately following the second-round results, the pundits will begin drawing conclusions about what this tells us about who will actually be present in the second round next year and how they may fare. 

      The same pundits may even decide that it means nothing at all, given the rate of abstention. Prognostication has suddenly become a more difficult exercise. The manifest indifference of the electorate to everything that politicians believe is important does, however, tell us something about the state of democracy in France in what may be the waning years of the Fifth Republic. L’Obs, a left-center weekly, cites what it calls “fatigue démocratique,” a weariness with the very rituals of democracy.

      Historical Note

      The one dramatic indicator early commentators have highlighted is the apparent victory of the traditional right that had formerly been humiliated, finding itself in a no-man’s-land between Emmanuel Macron’s increasingly right-wing neoliberal center and Marine Le Pen’s xenophobic right-wing nationalism. Some see it as a sign of rejuvenation for the Gaullist tradition. The leader of Les Républicains, Xavier Bertrand, has been trying to resist Macron’s sedulous attempt to laminate the traditional right by adopting not only its policy themes, but also the demagogic Islamophobia of Le Pen’s party.

      President Macron, the self-declared centrist, was counting on using his status as incumbent to position himself in a way that would make him attractive to a full range of voters on the right, while assuming that in his contest with Le Pen in the second round, he would also pick up most of the voters on the left who would be afraid to abstain. This could be compared on some points with Joe Biden’s successful strategy in the 2020 US presidential election.

      Les Républicains appear as the real winners for the moment, if only because they have thrown a wrench into Macron’s 2022 strategy. There now may be a stronger likelihood that Bertrand will reach the second round opposite Macron, or possibly even opposite Le Pen. This is a cause of deep embarrassment, if not consternation. The combination of Le Pen’s low score and the Républicains’ success means that the traditional right — whose continuity dates back to Jacques Chirac and, ultimately, Charles De Gaulle, the founder of the Fifth Republic — may have recovered its mojo that so suddenly faded in 2017 following the scandals of its leading candidate, Francois Fillon, and its most recent president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The latter was recently convicted for electoral fraud and has been sentenced to six months in prison.

      .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      The media hasn’t begun asking the real historical question that underlies this curious drama. The parties are one thing, but what about the French people? What do they think, and what do they want at this historical “inflection point,” to quote Biden? The yellow vest spirit is still floating in the air, maybe even permeating the atmosphere.

      The only candidate to have dared to talk about the eventuality of a Sixth Republic is Jean-Luc Melenchon, the left-wing populist candidate who fared honorably in the first round of the 2017 election at a moment when the once conquering Socialist Party imploded. The French media refuse to take Melenchon seriously, except as a foil to the legitimate pretenders. He has been cast in the role of the French Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, with a stronger intelligence, a more marked strain of rebelliousness against the establishment, but less charisma. Though he could never win a presidential election, he is still the strongest political personality on the left.

      With other crises brewing — a pandemic still dragging on, hints of a possible new global financial crisis, a deepening climate crisis, exacerbated European instability, complemented by shaky leadership in the US — the French may simply be wondering how voting for anyone promises to accomplish anything worthwhile.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in World Politics

      Macron’s Campaign to Reveal France’s Historical Sins

      by

      One of the worst humanitarian disasters of the past 30 years took place in 1994 in Rwanda. Approximately 800,000 people died in a genocidal campaign led by the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority. The rampage began after Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. The Hutus immediately blamed the Tutsis and initiated a “well-organized campaign of slaughter” that lasted several months. A new French report on the Rwandan genocide has revealed some uglier truths about the role played by Western powers — particularly France.

      Since his election, French President Emmanuel Macron has demonstrated what some French patriots feel is a morbid curiosity about the history of France’s relations with the African continent. In the first three months of 2021, two reports by French historians tasked by Macron to tell the truth have been released. The first concerns France’s role in the Algerian War of Independence between 1954 and 1962, and the second, the Rwandan genocide.

      The Other Side of the Indian Farmers’ Protests

      READ MORE

      Le Monde describes the 1,200-page Rwandan report as “solid, established by independent researchers and founded on newly opened archives.” Shortly after taking office in 2017, Macron asked historian Vincent Duclert to elucidate France’s role in the Rwandan genocide. Al Jazeera describes the report as criticizing “the French authorities under [Francois] Mitterrand for adopting a ‘binary view’ that set Habyarimana as a ‘Hutu ally’ against an ‘enemy’ of Tutsi forces backed by Uganda, and then offering military intervention only ‘belatedly’ when it was too late to halt the genocide.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Binary view:

      A prevalent mindset among leaders responsible for foreign policy in powerful nations, whose tendency to reduce every problem to a contest between two diametrically opposed points of view permits them to justify the most cynical and cruelly destructive policies

      Contextual Note

      In the aftermath of the genocide, analysts speculated about whom to blame, not only concerning the genocide itself but also the failure to prevent it from spinning out of control. As the leader of the nation whose role as “policeman of the world” became consolidated after the fall of the Soviet Union, US President Bill Clinton exhibited an apparent “indifference” to tribal slaughter in Africa. It included deliberate “efforts to constrain U.N. peacekeeping.” Canadian General Romeo Dallaire accused Clinton of establishing “a policy that he did not want to know,” even though since 1992, US intelligence had been aware of a serious Hutu plan to carry out genocide.

      French President Francois Mitterand’s guilt, it now turns out, was far more patent and direct than Clinton’s. The historians who authored the French report call it “a defeat of thinking” on the part of an administration never held accountable for its “continual blindness of its support for a racist, corrupt and violent regime.” Astonishingly, the report reveals that “French intelligence knew it was Hutu extremists that shot President Habyarimana’s plane down, which was seen as the trigger for the genocide.” Le Monde attributes Mitterand’s blindness to his “personal relationship” with the slain Hutu president.

      Historical Note

      By sneaking through the gaping cracks in the traditional parties on the right and left to be elected president, Emmanuel Macron became the leader of a new party created for the purpose of providing him with a majority in the 2017 parliamentary election that followed his historic victory. As a political maverick, Macron felt himself liberated from at least some of the shackles of history.

      He first dared to do what Fifth Republic presidents of the past had carefully avoided when, as a candidate, he attacked the very idea of colonization, which not only played an essential role in France’s past, but continued to produce its effects through the concept of Francafrique. In an interview in Algiers, the Algerian capital, early in the 2017 presidential campaign, Macron described colonization as a “genuinely barbaric” practice, adding that it “constitutes a part of our past that we have to confront by also apologising to those against whom we committed these acts.”

      Politicians on the right predictably denounced what they qualified as Macron’s “hatred of our history, this perpetual repentance that is unworthy of a candidate for the presidency of the republic.” This is the usual complaint of the nationalist right in every Western nation. Recently, columnist Ben Weingarten complained that Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project for The New York Times Magazine was motivated by “hatred for America.” Patriots in every country tend to believe that exposing any embarrassing historical truth is tantamount to hate and intolerance of their own noble traditions. Telling the truth is treasonous.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In January 2021, the historian Benjamin Stora presented the report Macron commissioned him to produce on France’s historical relationship with Algeria. Stora proposed the “creation of a joint ‘Memory and Truth’ commission.” The report also recommended “restitution, recognition of certain crimes, publication of lists of the disappeared, access to archives” and “creation of places of memory.” Suddenly, Macron realized that he had received more than he bargained for. As the website JusticeInfo.net reported, “The French presidency said there was ‘no question of showing repentance’ or of ‘presenting an apology’ for the occupation of Algeria or the bloody eight-year war that ended 132 years of French rule.”

      These two examples demonstrate France’s curious relationship with history. They also tell us about how powerful nations elaborate and execute their foreign policy. France is not alone. Every nation’s policy starts from a sense of national interest. The ensuing analysis begins by assessing threats to it. These may be military, economic or even cultural. In the case of military threat, the nation in question will be branded either an enemy or, if diplomatic politeness prevails, an adversary. When the discord is purely economic, the other nation will most likely be called a competitor or a rival. When the threat is cultural — as when Lebanon and Israel square off against each other about who makes the most authentic hummus — foreign policy experts will simply shut up and enjoy the show.

      On the other hand, three forms of cultural competition — linguistic, tribal and religious rivalries — have real implications for the exercise of power and may seriously influence the perception of whether what is at stake is enmity, rivalry or friendly competition. The danger in such cases lies in confusing cultural frictions with political ambitions.

      The two French reports reveal that the very idea of “national interest” may not be as innocent as it sounds. It can also mean “extranational indifference,” or worse. Indifference turns out to be not just a harmless alternative to the aggressive pursuit of national interest. In some cases, it translates as a convenient pretext for the toleration or even encouragement of brutally inhuman practices. That is why Rwanda may be a stain on both Francois Mitterand’s and Bill Clinton’s legacies.

      Another feature of modern policy may appear less extreme than the tolerance of genocide while being just as deadly. As Noam Chomsky, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies and others have repeatedly asserted, the imposition of drastic sanctions has become a major weapon in the US foreign policy arsenal. Sanctions essentially and often sadistically target civilian populations with little effect on the targeted leaders. Sanctions have become an automatic reflex mobilized not just against enemies or rivals, but also against the economically disobedient, nations that purchase goods from the wrong designated supplier.

      In 2012, Saeed Kamali Dehghan, writing for The Guardian, noted that the Obama administration’s sanctions on Iran were “pushing ordinary Iranians to the edge of poverty, destroying the quality of their lives, isolating them from the outside world and most importantly, blocking their path to democracy.” Nine years later, those sanctions were made more extreme under Donald Trump and continue unabated under President Joe Biden. All the consequences Dehghan listed have continued, with no effect on the hard-line Iranian regime’s hold on power. Can anyone pretend that such policies are consistent with a commitment to human rights? Do they reveal the existence of even an ounce of empathy for human beings other than one’s own voters?

      The French at least have solicited truthful historical research about their past. But politicians like Macron, who have encouraged the research, inevitably turn out to be too embarrassed by the truth to seek any form of reparation. After commissioning it, they prefer to deny the need for it.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in World Politics

      Macron Enriches French Vocabulary and Impoverishes Political Thought

      by

      France appears to be living through a strange transitional period that could be described as the waning of the Fifth Republic. It contains no sense of what a sixth republic might look like or why it might even be necessary. But today’s republic, with its unique electoral system, has achieved a summit of incoherence. The current president, Emmanuel Macron, has only one thing in mind: getting reelected in 2022 and maintaining the shaky status quo. 

      The Fifth Republic had a few moments of glory marked by at least three somewhat illustrious personalities who became president. The actions of these three men left a mark on the memory of the French. Their names? Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac. The only recent president to make a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to achieve their stature, Nicolas Sarkozy, was just this week convicted of corruption and sentenced to three years in prison.

      Serious Politics Is Not About Recalibration

      READ MORE

      Macron hoped to surpass them all but has clearly failed. Instead of playing by the consecrated rules of the Fifth Republic dominated by powerful parties, he profited from a sudden and unexpected vacuum within both the traditional right and the traditional left to sneak through the cracks and create the illusion that a system permanently dominated by the “alternance” of right and left could be run from the center. 

      It was quite an achievement, but Macron failed to understand that modern French political thinking is not about vague ideas or even attractive personalities. It remains based on the notion of “engagement” (commitment) in favor of one or another strong position. The center Macron so proudly claimed to represent has always been seen as spineless and fundamentally unexciting. At best it reflects a commitment to bureaucracy, which the French have no respect for but cannot live without.

      In 2017, it looked like a free ride for Macron that would last five years thanks to a guaranteed majority in parliament, no viable opposition and a public initially willing to entertain the centrist experiment. But it has become a living hell. Macron never managed to build his own party into something that could represent a political force, despite his massive majority elected to parliament on the coattails of his 2017 electoral victory.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Now, Macron finds himself embroiled in a controversy of his own creation. Its focus has been defining Islam as the enemy and intellectuals sympathizing with Muslims as the enemy within. In November 2020, The Atlantic reported that “Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer has bemoaned the influence of American critical race theory on the French social sciences, blaming them for undermining France’s race- and ethnicity-blind universalism, and for giving comfort to ‘islamo-gauchisme,’ or ‘Islamo-leftism.’” Then, just two weeks ago, France’s higher education minister, Frederique Vidal, set off an uproar in the media and in academe itself when she demanded an “investigation” be carried out into “Islamo-leftist” influence within the universities and research community.

      This spectacular initiative has ended up having a closer resemblance to QAnon than to traditional French intellectual creativity and freedom. Vidal now wants the French to believe that universities and research institutes are harboring a cabal that englobes the French left (irresponsible intellectuals with ideas no sane Frenchmen would endorse) and Islamist extremists (murderous jihadist activists) in an unholy alliance that is threatening the security of the Republic.

      Why? Because a number of serious thinkers have dared to detect a link between the history of European colonialism, including the extension of some its practices into the present, and the rise of violent revolt by Islamic extremists against a system they believe to be oppressive of their people and their people’s well-being. Detecting historical links — or at least certain specific links — has become a crime that can no longer be tolerated.

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Islamo-gauchiste:

      A faux portmanteau word invented by Emmanuel Macron’s government to create the belief that two segments of French society, each with its own tradition of respectability — leftist thinkers and the Muslims who were part of the booty of the former French empire — are plotting to overthrow the modern mainstream, neoliberal, corporatist and implicitly racist consensus that Macron’s party believes to be the main voting bloc in French society today

      Contextual Note

      Macron’s desire to profit from the fear of Muslims that has attracted voters to his main rival, Marine Le Pen, is understandable, though risky since its anti-intellectual belligerence alienates many to the left of center. More surprising is one of its oddest features, that its promoters have coupled it with an appeal to a long-standing trend among the French of anti-Americanism. It claims to be anti-Islamic, anti-intellectual and anti-American, all at the same time.

      It isn’t enough to attack French researchers who propose readings of history that make French colonial incursions into Muslim lands look inglorious. The Macronists are now affirming that this acknowledgment of France’s historical injustice toward its minorities is an example of slavish emulation of American “critical race theory” that has now infected the minds of a generation of French academics. It’s all the fault of American “wokism,” which has no place in French culture.

      Le Monde has long been the serious newspaper of the intellectual rather than the activist left. Since the end of the Second World War, it has stood as the alternative to the other “serious” newspaper, Le Figaro, which reflected the positions of the establishment right and more specifically the Gaullists. De Gaulle, after all, was the founder of the Fifth Republic.

      Macron claims to be neither right nor left, but his electoral strategy has clearly pushed him to commit to policies agreeable to the right. Responding to the proposal of an investigation into academic Islamo-gauchisme, Le Monde immediately published the appeal launched by 600 academics condemning Vidal’s obscurantist effort. The signatories included the immensely successful Thomas Piketty, highly respected on the left. No one would think of branding Piketty as an Islamo-gauchiste.

      Historical Note

      For nearly a century, the French have complained about the attack on the noble purity of the language of Racine and Voltaire by the importation of English words. In the past, governments have legislated to prevent modern French vocabulary from being overwhelmed by trendy American coinages. That hasn’t prevented French people, and especially professionals, from using the very “anglicisms” they are expected to patriotically deplore. “Low-cost” could simply be called “pas cher” but not by people in business, who prefer the English term. Buzz, open space, leader, flop, play-list, best-of and the verb “booster” (to boost) are commonly spoken. Many deem these words illegal occupiers, on a par with the postcolonial invasion of North African immigrants. Neither of them has any business being here and sapping French culture.

      .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      Interviewed by the magazine L’Obs, political analyst Olivier Roy provides an acute analysis of the French president’s absurd and futile attempt to strategize his reelection: “Emmanuel Macron believes he is playing a grand strategic game by aiming to reach the second round of the next presidential elections in a face-off against Marine Le Pen.” Macron’s ministers are no longer working for the French republic. They are working for Macron’s reelection in 2022. 

      Recent polls show Le Pen within two points of Macron. For Jean-Michel Blanquer and Frederique Vidal, to steal votes from Le Pen’s white working-class constituency, intellectuals on the left must be branded as traitors to the white European republic. They may be unhappy, but just as US President Joe Biden did with progressive Democrats, the Macronists count on the vast majority on the left to vote against Le Pen.

      What Macron fails to realize is that his quandary is closer to the Democratic Party’s failure in the 2016 US presidential election than its success in 2020. Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, people now see him as a shabby, ineffective pillar of a discredited establishment. Nobody likes Macron enough to want to see him hanging around for another five years. As Roy points out, the strategy he has devised is absurd. He cannot win over Le Pen voters. His commitment to Europe has made him their enemy. And now polls show that many on the left will no longer be intimidated to vote for someone so committed to betraying them and their intellectual culture.

      After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2022 promises to be the year of political pandemonium.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in World Politics

      Unchanged or Unchained: What’s in Store for the JCPOA?

      by

      When any new US president is inaugurated, especially when there is a change of party, the world expects some kind of serious change. Despite the fact that since 1992 every change of president has seen a change of the party in power, continuity has been the most consistent feature of those moments of transition. Every president has to embody change without betraying a system that insists on remaining permanent. 

      Over the next few months, observers will be wondering how President Joe Biden intends to play the game of balancing change and continuity, especially after Donald Trump’s radical attempt to rewrite the rules of the game. One of the key issues on which Trump carried out his fanatical zeal was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran deal.

      Is Wall Street a Wave or a Particle?

      READ MORE

      Biden’s team has affirmed its intention to rejoin the nuclear deal, breaking with Trump and returning to Barack Obama’s status quo. But voices in the Biden administration have indicated that it will only happen if there is a significant change in the terms, which was also Trump’s position. As speculation mounts concerning Biden’s intentions, Al Jazeera offers the following subtitle to an article on the JCPOA: “Iranian foreign ministry says deal ‘unchangeable’ after French President Macron calls for talks to include Saudi Arabia.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Unchangeable:

      Not subject to the normal practice of politicians, which consists of exploiting every absurd pretext available to them in a political game to move the goalposts before restarting a game that they have themselves interrupted

      Contextual Note

      Trump, the former US president, promised change and to a certain extent delivered it. The most significant change in US foreign policy he managed to accomplish was sowing confusion across the globe by practicing an incomprehensible policy labeled “America First.” When applied to the Middle East and led by his viceroy and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, it could have been called “Israel first.” This included some serious initiatives such as moving the US Embassy to Tel Aviv, endorsing the colonization of the Golan Heights, consolidating a kind of triumvirate of interests between the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and positioning Israel as an indefectible ally and trading partner of the Sunni oil states in the Gulf, thereby undermining the traditional obligation of Arab states to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Withdrawing from the JCPOA in 2018 was an important component of Trump’s Israel first policy. For Trump, withdrawing from the deal was the ultimate symbol of his break with the politics of the Obama administration. Many assume that it will be the emblematic symbol of the Biden administration’s rupture with the Trump era. But it turns out to be far more complicated than just returning to the status quo ante Trump. Whether it’s the consequence of President Biden’s timidity or the success of Trump’s nationalistic propaganda, the Biden team appears to feel bound to imposing new conditions, perhaps to prove that Biden is not just a duplicate of Obama. Israeli interests play a role in that repositioning.

      The easiest route for a Democratic president would be to apologize for Trump’s hubris, call the whole thing a mistake and proclaim the USA’s good faith by quietly returning to the deal on the same terms after that inadvertent interruption. But to be credible, American presidents must show they are tough. True tough guys don’t bend to the other party’s terms even when they are the one that betrayed all the other partners’ trust. Tough guys require compensation for their willingness to make a friendly gesture.

      Curiously, French President Emmanuel Macron has stepped in to play a secondary tough guy role by casually insisting that Saudi Arabia should now be associated with the deal, a proposition that makes no sense at all. Macron has several good reasons to appear as a tough guy. He has an election coming up next year where he is pitted against the xenophobic Marine Le Pen. Part of his strategy in recent months has been to demonstrate that with Arabs and Muslims he’s capable of being a tough guy. He helpfully instructed the Muslim world in November 2020 that Islam was in crisis, just in case Muslims themselves hadn’t noticed. 

      Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh, struck back with this cutting response: “If the French authorities are worried about selling their huge cargoes of arms to the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, it is better to reconsider their policies.” The Iranians cannot have missed the fact that Macron offered his remarks not to the signatories of the agreement or even to his own French media, but to the Saudi TV channel, Al Arabiya. Khatibzadeh was spot on about Macron’s real motive.

      Historical Note

      Since 1992, the departure of every sitting US president has always been followed by the arrival of a president from the opposing party. In 2001, Republican George W. Bush promised to reign as a “compassionate conservative,” a strategy designed to reassure the nation and create a sense of continuity with the Democrat, Bill Clinton. Bush subsequently demonstrated the full extent of his compassion by offering massive tax breaks to the rich and then going to war with a major portion of humanity.

      Democrat Barack Obama owed his election to the enthusiasm of voters who rallied behind his theme of “hope and change” and his opposition to Bush’s wars in the Middle East. The Nobel committee was so impressed it immediately awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. Once in action, “hope and change” oddly morphed into “pretty much the same thing,” but with better PR than the Bush-Cheney team. That consolidated a different kind of change, within the Democratic Party itself, which now felt totally comfortable embracing the traditional free market ideology of the Republicans. It fulfilled the trend that Clinton had launched in the 1990s.

      Obama, the peace candidate of 2008 who defeated the hawkish wife of Bill Clinton in the Democratic primaries, became the US president who dropped the most bombs on foreign countries. Under the Espionage Act, he arrested more of the whistleblowers he had promised to protect than all other presidents combined. He installed and defended a profoundly military conception of US democracy, which extended to the militarizing of urban law enforcement, to the extreme detriment of the black community. His practical understanding of change was to shift as far away from his campaign promises as possible.

      .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      Donald Trump presented himself in the 2016 election as the ultimate outlier. To win over the voters disappointed by Obama’s policies, he promised to change everything. He definitely changed the idea of presidential style and its methods of communication. Trump promised much more, such as draining the swamp and bringing home US troops after ending the wars. He did neither. Instead, the institutions of the US found themselves more deeply ensconced in an immobile status quo imposed by an oligarchy that had been in place for decades. What did change, however, was the image of the US across the globe. US prestige reached an all-time low.

      All this highlights the weird relationship US politics now has with the very idea of change. What was once framed as the nation’s historic mission to ameliorate the conditions of humanity by spreading democracy and modernizing the economy (the ideology some call neoliberalism) now could be seen as a cynical tactic for promoting any number of vested interests, all in the name of positive change. When Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and the 2015 Paris climate accord — two agreements that most of humanity considered vital to the future — the idea of change would always come from the whim of an executive suddenly achieved a legitimacy that no previous president had dared to affirm.

      Trumpism appears to have left a serious trace on all forms of political discourse in the US. It has validated cynicism and opportunism in a way that was previously unthinkable. It has modified the expectations of political actors and of the public itself. Although the accumulation of power by the executive has been in the works for some time, Joe Biden’s signing a mountain of executive orders in his first days in office validates the legitimacy of Trump’s innovation.

      Americans once believed that a signed contract was law and could not be changed even in changing circumstances. That assumption in US culture appears to have changed.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      'Great expectations': how world leaders reacted to Biden and Harris's election win – video

      by

      Most world leaders rushed to congratulate Joe Biden on his election on Twitter, and spoke of ‘hope’ and ‘expectation’ in later statements.
      Biden’s key foreign policy priorities are cooperation in the fight against coronavirus, a commitment to rejoin the UN Paris climate agreement and, more broadly, to promise a change in tone toward traditional US allies. 
      Russia and China are yet to congratulate the president-elect, as the outgoing president, Donald Trump, is yet to concede defeat
      Russia and China silence speaks volumes as leaders congratulate Biden More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      Muslims Will Not Kill God for Marianne

      by

      Two conflicting narratives have been clashing anew in extremely heated debates amid what we may call “a new cartoon crisis.” On one side, there is a sizable portion of orthodox Muslims with a strong aniconism tradition and who perceive the representation of sacred characters as unpardonable blasphemy. On the other are defenders of secularism who consider freedom of expression a holy human right. The world is witnessing the confrontation of two epistemologically divergent civilizations: a humanist one that killed God and put the human at its center, and a metaphysical one ready to die and kill for its deity and sacrosanct icons.

      Is Peace Religious or Secular?

      READ MORE

      “Islam is a religion that is in crisis,” stated French President Emmanuel Macron, as he unveiled his plan to defend French secularism against Islamic extremism in early October. This prompted a backlash from Muslim communities around the world. The events escalated further amidst the beheading of a French teacher who shared with his class derogatory caricatures featuring Prophet Muhammad. In an act of defiance, Macron insisted the French will make no concessions and would “not cease drawing caricatures” as Paris displayed gigantic reproductions of the cartoons in question on government buildings.

      Post-Truth Era

      The current situation is a classic case of a post-truth-era dilemma. Each camp firmly believes it is the keeper of a universal, irrefutable truth, while in reality it lives inside its own ideological bubble and refuses to accept that there are other truths out there and probably a transcendental one that is beyond all opposing paradigms.

      Post-truth — which was named the Word of the Year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary in the midst of the divisions caused by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump — is a philosophical concept that signals a context where shared rational facts are replaced by subjective and emotional beliefs that shape public opinion. French humanism is rooted in centuries of reforms ending in a rupture between the state and the church. Muslim societies lived a completely different historical reality, where metaphysics are central and populations still romanticize the theological concept of the umma (global Muslim community).

      Embed from Getty Images

      In an ideal world, both “truths” would be able to coexist peacefully. Nevertheless, France never overcame its colonial mindset with its good old “civilizing mission.” Macron arrogantly insinuates that it is the white man’s burden to modernize and secularize a Muslim world “in crisis.” Acts of terror committed by Muslims are indubitably repugnant and humanly unacceptable, but so is radical secularization and the extremist modernization dogma that blindly attempts to assimilate citizens into the fifth republic’s grinding machine.

      Defenders of the French perspective would say: Why don’t followers of other religions get angry when we draw Jesus or Moses? This is a shallow and simplistic comparison that does not take into consideration the cultural and anthropological particularity of the Muslim community, nor the sanguinary colonial encounter it had with France just decades back in Africa. It also characterizes the obstinate myopia with which the country of Marianne continues to deal with its almost 6 million Muslims.

      Maybe the most revealing inconsistency in the French discourse can be summed up in a saying repeated by those who call to boycott French products: “Insulting a black person is racism, insulting a Jew is anti-Semitism, insulting a woman is sexism, but insulting a Muslim is freedom of expression.”  

      Both Sides Demonize the Other

      Of course, not all French people are rigid defenders of the values of the republic. Many philosophers, artists and journalists came out to condemn the French president’s provocations. However, as in many post-truth dichotomies, both antagonists compete to demonize the other, which fuels further hate and animosity. Moreover, instead of fighting violent extremism, it can do just the opposite, such as with the previous Danish cartoon controversy of 2005 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015. Meanwhile, Muslims are flooding the internet with hashtags and memes against Macron, while countries like Kuwait removed French products from its shelves and the Turkish president even questioned the mental health of his counterpart in Paris.

      To answer Macron’s statement, we can regrettably say that France is a country in crisis because of its failure to address systemic racism against Muslims and its refusal to embrace cultural plurality and hybridity. In the French context, Edward Said’s “clash of ignorance” can no longer be used as an excuse to hide the clash of truths between radical secularism and Muslims refusing to kill God for Marianne.

      *[An earlier version of this article was published by Raseef22.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in World Politics

      Is Peace Religious or Secular?

      by

      Reporting on yesterday’ horrendous knife attack in Nice’s cathedral, Al Jazeera defined the context: “The incident comes amid growing tensions between France and the Muslim world over French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent speech wherein he said Islam was in ‘crisis’, and amid renewed public support in France for the right to show cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.”

      After the US Election, Will Civil War Become the Fashion?

      READ MORE

      Earlier this week, Fair Observer’s founder, CEO and editor-in-chief, Atul Singh, teaming up with the great and respected scholar Ishtiaq Ahmed, published an article with the title, “Macron Claims Islam Is in ‘Crisis.’ Erdogan Disagrees.” Citing the public quarrel that recently broke out between the French and Turkish presidents, the authors review various moments of violence in the political history of Muslim expansion in Asia.

      France finds itself undergoing a historical psychodrama with existential implications. At the beginning of October, Macron asserted that “Islam is a religion that is in crisis,” accusing it of the anti-republican crime of “separatism.” Commentators avoided noticing that this was a clever ploy on Macron’s part to distract attention from the fact that France and Europe have been in an existential crisis for some time. Pointing to someone else’s crisis is an efficient way of hiding one’s own.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Above all, Macron wants to convince voters in France that he, far better than the nationalist Marine Le Pen, has the stature to confront the consequences of Islam’s global crisis. The president has built a fragile center-right power base, and his main challengers in the 2022 election are on the right and the extreme right. He must at all costs occupy some of their terrain. The Muslim threat is the hot-button issue that has the most immediate impact.

      Shortly after President Macron’s denunciation of the global crisis of Islam, the gruesome killing and beheading of Samuel Paty took place. The history teacher’s 18-year-old assassin, born in Chechnya, had been educated in French public schools from the age of 6. Paty’s crime had been to show his class the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons ridiculing Islam in a lesson about freedom of speech. Macron has since made a point of defending the “liberty of blasphemy” as a basic right, protesting that he would not “renounce the caricatures,” which for some may sound as if he is endorsing their content.

      The article by Ahmed and Singh builds up to a fundamental question: “Does Islam lead to violence and terrorism?” After noting that “[m]any Islamic scholars and political analysts argue in the negative,” the authors boldly announce their “contrarian view that Islam can only be a religion of peace after it conquers the world and establishes a supremacy of sharia.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Religion of peace:

      Every religion at its spiritual core, just as every religion as soon as it is appropriated or overtaken by political forces becomes a religion of war

      Contextual Note

      Throughout mankind’s history, there have been so many sects, cults, churches and spiritual philosophies that generalizing about religion itself can only be a futile exercise. Generalizing about any single religion, especially one shared by more than a billion people and that has lasted over a thousand years, is equally fraught with ambiguity. Attributing to a religion the ambition of conquering the world begs so many questions of history, economy, political organization and culture that no discussion, however rational, can hope to produce an acceptable general conclusion.

      St. Augustine observed that if fire is used to produce warmth, we see it as good and peaceful, but if used to burn and destroy, it appears aggressive and evil. The same is true of any religion. History offers examples of both the good and evil uses of religion. Searching the sacred texts of any religion will provide examples of exhortations that may at times suggest aggressive inclinations and at others, peace and harmony.

      It is not the task of a Devil’s Dictionary’s to defend any particular religion or religion in general, but rather to recognize those occasions when even secular thought — and more particularly political thought — hides the fact that it has its own dogmas, often as categoric and absolute as the most puritanical religion.

      .custom-post-from {float:left; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      Most media commentators have refused to notice what is obvious about the situation in France. Laicité in the hands of French politicians has become a surrogate religion. It has produced a belief system with doctrines increasingly formulated as dogmas. Political scientist Olivier Roy wonders whether Macron isn’t seeking to abolish the separation of church and state, the foundation of laïcité, by focusing only on Islam. Macron’s stance implies that “the simple fact of placing God above men is a declaration of separatism.” Laïcité risks becoming a religion of war, not peace.

      Emulating the Catholic Church, Macron’s government turned Paty into a republican saint and martyr when it instantly conferred upon him the Légion d’honneur. In the days following his killing, some had proposed to have him interred at the Pantheon, to be entombed with the “gods” of the republic. In contrast, the Vatican requires an elaborate procedure, the passage of time and the intervention of the devil’s advocate before canonizing its saints and martyrs.

      One prominent voice in French politics has suggested a subtle but necessary distinction that Macron’s government and the media prefer to avoid. Jean-Luc Mélanchon, the head of the party La France Insoumise, has consistently militated in the past for severe punitive measures directed not at “Islam in crisis,” “radical Islam” or even fundamentalism, but at the actors of “political Islam,” a term Roy defines as “the contemporary movement that conceives of Islam as a political ideology.” For this crime, Macron’s minister of education calls Mélanchon a treasonous “Islamo-gauchiste.”

      Historical note

      Though the characterization of Islam by Ishtiaq Ahmed and Atul Singh appears abusive in its generality, there is a very real sense in which is true. All systems of thought that claim to be universal are tempted by despotism. If we define secular peace as a state of shared understanding and harmonious interaction across an entire population, we must recognize that it implies some degree of submission and conformity to an order, usually a political order. It’s a question of degree and the means of enforcement available. France’s Reign of Terror was conceived by secular rationalists. Throughout history, submission and conformity have been achieved through fear and intimidation, conquest and slaughter.

      Both Christianity and Islam claim to be universal. In the history of both religions, we have seen examples that tended toward two extremes: the generous belief that the religion is accessible to all people and the insistence that all people in a specific region embrace it. The determining factor has always been the political climate and social traditions within which the universality of the religion and its moral system have been applied or imposed.

      The same is true of secular religions such as French republicanism and American exceptionalism. These non-religious cults play a determining role in the nations’ foreign policy. The US and France have each created a political religion that they believe is not only proper to their nation, but represents a universal model that other nations should emulate. In both cases, the separation of church and state plays an important role, clearing the way for universal adherence to the declared values of the republic and the civic religion.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Some point out that Islam differs from Christianity, whose founder insisted on rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s but not what is God’s. They may argue that Islam has never taken the trouble to distinguish between religious and political authority and has, throughout history, consistently invited confusion between the two. But in the Muslim world, the tradition of Sufism dates back to the early Umayyad period. Though it never had any pretension of becoming dominant, its historical reality demonstrates the awareness of a radical distinction between the spiritual (faith) and the worldly (politics).

      In short, religions play the role that history allows them to play. They also influence the politics we in the West, somewhat presumptuously, consider to be the unique basis of history. Moral philosophy always accompanies religion and can at times play a dominant role. But more often, political forces associated with religion manage to push it aside or mold it into something new. Whether any dominant religion becomes a religion of war or peace lies in the eyes of the beholder at a specific moment of history.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      Macron Claims Islam Is in “Crisis.” Erdogan Disagrees

      by

      In France, Samuel Paty was beheaded on October 16 near Paris. He was a history teacher who had shown caricatures of Prophet Muhammad to his students in a lesson on freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

      Paty’s killer, Abdullakh Anzorov, is an 18-year-old of Chechen origin. He arrived in France at the age of 6 as a refugee and was granted asylum. In an audio message in Russian, Anzorov claimed to have “avenged the prophet” whom Paty had portrayed “in an insulting way.” Before he was murdered, Paty was the victim of an online hate campaign orchestrated by the father of a student who reportedly might not even have been in the class.

      As Agnès Poirier wrote in The Guardian, since the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, the French seem to be “living [their] lives between terrorist assaults.” Since then, she writes, “Islamists in France have targeted and murdered journalists, cartoonists, policemen and women, soldiers, Jews, young people at a concert, football fans, families at a Bastille Day fireworks show, an 86-year-old priest celebrating mass in his little Normandy church, tourists at a Christmas market… the list goes on.”

      Emmanuel Macron, France’s Islamophobe-in-Chief

      READ MORE

      Yet Paty’s killing has touched a chord. Arguably, no country venerates its history teachers more than France. After defeat against Prince Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia in 1870, the Third Republic emerged. In the 1880s, it took away education from the Catholic Church, making it free, mandatory and secular. Poirier observes that the “peaceful infantry of teachers” has since “been the bedrock of the French republic.”

      She poignantly points out that the first generations of teachers were nicknamed “the Black Hussars of the Republic” because they had to battle the local priest for influence. Thanks to these teachers, as per Poirier, “religion was eventually relegated to the spiritual realm.” More than others, history teachers are the keepers of the revolutionary and republican flame, exposing young minds to Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot et al and emancipating their thinking.

      French President Emmanuel Macron called the brutal beheading an “Islamist terrorist attack.” At a ceremony at Sorbonne University, he conferred the Légion d’honneur on Paty. Macron awarded France’s highest honor posthumously to the late history teacher because he died for trying to explain freedom of speech.

      Macron has since defended the right of French citizens to publish anything, howsoever offensive others might find that to be. Earlier this month, he claimed, “Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country.” His comments enraged many Muslims inside and outside France.

      Paty’s killing has shaken France to the core. After more than a century, religion is back to the forefront in the country. This time, it is not Catholicism but Islam.

      A History of Blood and Gore

      At the heart of the matter is a simple question: Does Islam lead to violence and terrorism? Many Islamic scholars and political analysts argue in the negative. After all, the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno and launched the Inquisition. Jews fled Spain to find refuge in Ottoman lands. These authors take the contrarian view that Islam can only be a religion of peace after it conquers the world and establishes a supremacy of sharia.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Writing about Islam’s links to violence and terrorism is sensitive and controversial. There are nuances to be sure. However, most scholars know fully well that Islam has a just war theory. It rests on the assumption that justice would not be served unless the will of Allah is established all over the world. As per this theory, non-believers in Islam have three choices.

      First, they can convert to Islam and become part of the umma, the global community of Muslims who recognize there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his final messenger. Second, they can refuse to submit to Allah, but they must then flee their homes or face the sword. Third, they can surrender to Muslims and pay jizya, a poll tox for non-Muslims in a state run according to Islamic principles.

      Both Sunnis and Shias prize jihad, which denotes both personal struggle and just war. Both Sunnis and Shias believe that jihad is the duty of an Islamic state, should certain conditions arise. There is little daylight between Sunnis and Shias on their ideas of jihad against non-believers. Many Muslim jurists considered the non-acceptance of Islam by non-Muslims an act of aggression that had to be countered through jihad. Like Christianity, Islam lays claim to universality and jihad is its version of a crusade.

      Arguably, the most interesting reform of Islamic law occurred when Arabs conquered Sindh in the eighth century. For the first time, Islam encountered Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. A puritanical Abrahamic faith encountered much older spiritual traditions of the Indus and Gangetic river basins. These pagan polytheists were not covered by the Quran. Its verses recognized Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and the imprecisely defined Sabians. These religions are based on divine revelations and came to be known as Ahl al-Kitab, the People of the Book.

      The Indo-Gangetic spiritual traditions were clearly not the People of the Book. When Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh, he approached the then-caliph in Damascus for how to deal with Indian polytheists. The fuqaha (Islamic jurists) and the ulema (clergy) in Damascus ruled that these new religions ultimately believed in the very same god as Muslims and the People of the Book. Therefore, through the exercise of qiyas — analogical reasoning as applied to the deduction of Islamic juridical principles — these non-Muslim Sindhis were to be treated as protected minorities if they paid the jizya.

      As waves of Muslim invaders came to the Indian subcontinent, conversion took place both through peaceful and violent means. Lower-caste Hindus turned to Islam because it offered a greater sense of community, charity for the poor and egalitarianism. Yet violence was par for the course too. Idols were smashed, temples desecrated and local communities slaughtered.

      Muslims who claim that theirs is a religion of peace could do well to remember that even the golden age of Islam is full of blood. The first three caliphs were assassinated. Ali ibn Abi Talib and Khalid ibn al-Walid were brave generals who led aggressive armies and did not hesitate to spill blood.

      The Battle of Karbala exemplifies the violence that has accompanied Islam from its early days. In 680, Umayyad Caliph Yazid I’s troops massacred the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and son of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph. For Shias, it remains an annual holy day of public mourning. This was a bloodthirsty struggle for succession and has led to a Shia-Sunni divide that runs deep to this day.

      The Umayyad Empire’s extravagance and decadence led to a successful Abbasid rebellion in 750. The victors invited over 80 Umayyad family members to a grand feast on the pretext of reconciliation. In reality, this feat was the infamous Banquet of Blood in which the Umayyads were killed in cold blood. Abd al-Rahman I was the only Umayyad who escaped, and he fled all the way to Spain to set up the kingdom of al-Andalus.

      Violence in Modern Times

      Over time, Arab rule became benign. There is a strong argument to be made that Muslim rule was more tolerant than Christian rule in many matters. Minorities who paid jizya carried on with their business and way of life. The Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals governed multi-ethnic empires even as Europe imploded into religious wars.

      Once Europe took to technological, industrial and military innovation, the rest of the world fell under its sway. Tottering Muslim empires were no exception. This defeat still rankles among many Muslims. Many have turned inward and hark back to a glory period of Islamic dominance. They dream of the days when Muslim armies swept all before them, including Jerusalem in 1187 or Constantinople in 1453.

      After World War II, European colonial rule has been replaced by American economic domination. Oil was discovered in key parts of the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia and Iran. However, it was Western companies that took much of the profits. Till today, the price of oil is denominated in dollars. The formation and domination of Israel in the Middle East added to this Muslim angst. In 1979, a millenarian revolution succeeded in Iran. In the same year, militants seized the Grand Mosque of Mecca, and it took two weeks of pitched battles for Saudi forces to regain control. The militants might have lost, but Saudi Arabia emulated Iran in hardening sharia and giving more power to the ulema.

      In Iran, the new regime killed thousands who did not agree with it. They included liberals and leftists. Led by hardline clerics, the Iranian regime liquidated the minority Bahai sect in Iran. It set out to export its Islamic revolution. In response, the Saudis began to export their own puritanical Wahhabi Islam. Saudi money poured all the way from Indonesia and India to Bosnia and Chechnya.

      This took place at the height of the Cold War. This was a time when the West in general and Washington in particular were terrified of the Soviet Union. The fear of communism led Americans to intervene in Iran, Vietnam and elsewhere. They made a Faustian pact with militant Islam. The CIA worked with god-fearing Islamists to fight godless communists. These Islamists went on to become a trusty sword arm for the US against the communist menace of the Soviet Union. Nowhere was this best exemplified than the jihad Americans funded in Afghanistan against the Soviets. As is hilariously captured in Charlie Wilson’s War, the Saudis matched the Americans dollar for dollar.

      Eventually, the Soviet Union fell and the West won. As nationalism, socialism and pan-Arabism stood discredited, the battle-hardened jihadis stood ready to take their place. Conservative, fundamentalist, extreme and radical Islamists soon found their spot in the sun. The Molotov cocktail of violence and terrorism spread throughout Muslim societies. Disgruntled young Muslim men in the West found this cocktail particularly irresistible. In the post-9/11 world, there is a mountain of literature that chronicles all this and more.

      Embed from Getty Images

      American action after the attacks on September 11, 2001, have strengthened rather than weakened this culture of violence and terrorism. George W. Bush’s war on terror has proved an unmitigated disaster. In 2003, the Americans unleashed chaos in Iraq by dismantling the Baathist regime and leaving nothing in its place. A Shia-Sunni civil war followed. Iran became a touch too powerful in Iraq. Sunnis who had been dominant during the Baathist era under Saddam Hussein were left leaderless and felt marginalized. In the aftermath, the Islamic State emerged in the vacuum. Syria imploded as well and the Sykes-Picot construct collapsed. The Islamic State’s messianic message of violence and terrorism not only garnered local support, but it also drew in recruits from Europe, South Asia and elsewhere.

      Eventually, Syria, Iran and Russia allied together even as the UK and the US collaborated quietly to crush the Islamic State. They were able to destroy it militarily, but radical Islamist ideology lives on. It is the same ideology that powered the Iranian Revolution, the Afghan jihad and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. Now, it is inspiring Anzorovs to behead Patys.

      A Clash of Cultures

      In the aftermath of Paty’s beheading, France and Turkey have fallen out. Macron has championed freedom of expression, which includes the liberty of publishing cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. Like many of his countrymen, Macron sees freedom of expression as an essential part of France’s secular values. Laïcité, the French version of secularism, is enshrined in the very first article of the constitution. It declares, “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic.” Macron has pledged to “to defend secular values and fight radical Islam.”

      Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan takes objection to Macron’s position. He believes that there must be limits to freedom of expression. With millions of Muslims in France and over a billion around the world, the French should desist from insulting Prophet Muhammad. Erdogan sees Macron as having a problem with Islam and Muslims. In a speech, the Turkish leader declared, “Macron needs treatment on a mental level.” In response, France has said Erdogan’s comments are unacceptable and recalled its ambassador to Turkey.

      A new kind of Islamism has now entered the scene. Unlike clerics in Iran or royals in Saudi Arabia, Erdogan is a democratically elected leader. Ironically, he rose to power in Turkey thanks to the country’s growing democratization, which in turn was fueled by its quest to join the European Union. In Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secular Turkey, the Islamist Erdogan seized power and brought in a very different vision for the future.

      Erdogan jettisoned Ataturk’s Europeanization of Turkey. Instead, he decided to become the popular, democratic voice for Islam. He has championed causes like Palestine, Kashmir and Xinjiang that resonate with Muslims worldwide. Even as the Turkish economy stumbles, Erdogan is taking on Macron as a defender of Islam. Erdogan gains inspiration from the Ottoman Empire. Until a century ago, the Ottoman sultan was also the caliph, the spiritual leader of the Sunni world. In fact, Mahatma Gandhi’s first mass movement in 1919 demanded the restoration of the Ottoman caliphate.

      President Erdogan wants to bring back Ottoman cultural glory to Turkey. One by one, he is smashing up the symbols of secular Turkey. A few years ago, Erdogan built a 1,000-room white palace on 50 acres of Ataturk Forest Farm, breaking environmental codes and contravening court orders. On July 10, 2020, he reversed the 1934 decision to convert Hagia Sophia into a museum. Now, this architectural marvel is a mosque again.

      Embed from Getty Images

      France is a land of joie de vivre, which favors bikinis over burkinis. Laïcité emerged after a bitter struggle with the Catholic Church, is central to the republic and is an article of faith. In contrast, Turkey is rolling back Ataturk’s version of laïcité. Erdogan is striving to emerge as the popular Islamic leader who takes on the West, India and even China. He has thus thrown the gauntlet to Macron.

      Erdogan has geopolitical reasons to rile Macron. Turkey and France are on opposing sides in Libya’s civil war as well as the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. France has deployed jets and frigates to counter Turkish oil and gas exploration in disputed waters in the eastern Mediterranean. Now, the two countries are squaring off on religion.

      The Turkish president is not alone in criticizing Macron. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has also accused Macron of “attacking Islam.” Erdogan is urging a boycott of French goods. Many others in the Muslim world are also calling for such a boycott. Some shops in Kuwait, Jordan and Qatar have already removed French products. Protests have broken out in Libya, Syria and Gaza.

      Secularism vs. Faith

      Erdogan’s actions and the support they have garnered raise uncomfortable questions. In the Westphalian system of nation-states, what right does he have to tell Macron how to run his country? More importantly, his rhetoric raises a key question about the world. Who decides what is offensive? Can a popularly elected leader of a former imperial power speak up for co-religionists to another former imperial power or anyone else? If so, are we seeing a drift toward Samuel Huntington’s famous proposition about a clash of civilizations?

      This question assumes importance in the light of the past. When Spanish conquistadores took over Latin America, they did not just rape, torture and kill. They killed the local gods and ensured the triumph of the Christian one. In “Things Fall Apart,” the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe chronicles how Christianity went hand in hand with colonization in Africa. In India, Muslim invaders sacked temples. In Iran, Safavids destroyed Sunni mosques and converted them into Shia ones. In recent years, many have seen secularism as a way out of this maze of centuries-old religious conflict.

      Intellectually, secularism is the legacy of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It involves the shrinking of religion from the public to the private sphere. After all, religious wars tore apart Europe for more than a century and a half. Today, France is thankfully not ruled according to l’ancien regime’s dictum of “un roi, une foi, une loi” (one king, one faith, one law). Unlike Huguenots, Muslims have not been subjected to St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Laïcité may not be perfect, but it is much better than the alternative.

      Unfortunately, Muslim societies have failed to embrace secularism. From Indonesia and Pakistan to Iran and Turkey, there is a disturbing intolerance afoot. Of course, the West fanned the flames, but now this conflagration inspired by religion is singeing societies, states and even the international order. Earlier this year, the Islamic State group massacred Sikhs in Kabul. By September, most of the Hindus and Sikhs had left Afghanistan. It is important to note that these communities had lived in Afghanistan for centuries and even stayed on during the heydays of the Taliban.

      After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of American-style capitalism to provide prosperity or opportunity, people are turning again to religion. On October 22, a Polish court banned almost all abortions. In Eastern Europe and Russia, the influence of the church has been increasing. Even benign Buddhists have turned malign and are targeting minorities in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Yet the scale of what is going on in the Muslim world is different. There are tectonic shifts underway from Islamabad to Istanbul that are disturbing. Minorities are fleeing Muslim countries and radical Islamists like Anzorov are taking to the sword.

      Does Macron have a point? Is Islam truly in crisis?

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More