Even if the Financial Times, the prestigious British daily, withdrew from its site an article published on Monday accusing Emmanuel Macron of “stigmatizing French Muslims for electoral purposes; worse, to maintain a climate of fear and suspicion towards them ”, the President of the Republic replied. He published a “letter to the editor”.
“I will not let anyone say that France, its state, cultivates racism vis-à-vis Muslims,” he insists, believing that his words have been distorted.
As on the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera last week, the French president wants to explain beyond the borders of France that his fight against “Islamist separatism” is not a fight against Islam, while the Muslims of several countries reacted with anger to his words, with a call for a boycott of French products.
“For more than five years and the Charlie Hebdo attacks, France has faced a wave of attacks perpetrated, in the name of an Islam that they are exposing, by terrorists. More than 300 women and men, police officers, soldiers, teachers, journalists, cartoonists, Jews, a priest, young people attending a concert or having a drink on the terrace, children in front of a school, ordinary citizens , were cowardly murdered on our soil. And these last days, an attack, which fortunately did not make a victim, again targeted the premises of Charlie Hebdo; a professor of History and Geography, Samuel Paty, was beheaded; in Nice, two women and a man were murdered in a church, ”he adds.
According to him, France is under attack for its values, secularism, freedom of expression and it “will not give up. “
And the head of state to give his vision. “As early as 2015, it appeared, and I said it even before becoming President of the Republic, that terrorist vocations were thriving on a breeding ground,” he explains, adding: “in certain neighborhoods as much as on the Internet, groups linked to radical Islam teach the children of France to hate the Republic, call for disrespecting the laws. This is what I called in a speech the separatism. “
And to add: “you do not believe me? Reread the exchanges, the calls to hatred broadcast in the name of a misguided Islam, on social networks which finally led to the death of Professor Samuel Paty a few days ago. Visit the neighborhoods where little girls of three or four years old wear the full veil, are separated from the boys and, from an early age, are set apart from the rest of society, raised in a project of hatred for the values of the France “.
According to him, “this is what France intends to fight today. Against projects of hatred and death that threaten his children. Never against Islam. Against obscurantism, fanaticism, violent extremism. Never against a religion. We say : not with us !.
Before concluding: “We don’t need newspaper articles trying to divide us. “
Original article by : www.leparisien.fr
