While Emmanuel Macron will receive this Monday afternoon in Paris, at the latter’s request, the very Trumpist head of American diplomacy Mike Pompeo, the President of the Republic is still speaking in the Anglo-Saxon press.
This time it’s at the very influential New York Times that he spoke, as well as to the magazine Great Continent, edited by the Geopolitical Study Group, an independent association domiciled at the École normale supérieure (ENS). He speaks of secularism with force and pain, regretting the little international support after the last attacks endured in France, in particular the death of Professor Samuel Paty on October 16, and the death of three people in Nice thirteen days later.
“I will not change my law because it shocks elsewhere”
“Five years ago, when we killed those who made caricatures, the whole world marched in Paris and defended these rights”. This time, “a lot of condolences were modest”, he regrets. “We had, in a structured way, political and religious leaders from one part of the Muslim world – which however intimidated the other, I have to admit – saying: they just have to change their right. This shocks me “,” I am for respect for cultures and civilizations, but I am not going to change my law because it shocks elsewhere “.
The head of state appears to denounce media coverage in his remarks to the New York Times. He believes that “the fundamentals are lost” when he sees “in this context, many newspapers which, I think, come from countries which share our values, which write in a country which is the natural child of the Enlightenment and the Revolution French, and which legitimizes this violence, which says that the heart of the problem is that France is racist and Islamophobic ”.
After Emmanuel Macron had defended the right to caricature, during the national tribute paid to Samuel Paty in the symbolic setting of the Sorbonne, in several Muslim countries, demonstrators, galvanized by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had called to boycott France and its products.
For Emmanuel Macron, “it is precisely because hatred is prohibited in our European values, that the dignity of the human person prevails over the rest, that I can shock you, because you can shock me in return. We can debate and argue about it because we will never come to grips with it since it is forbidden and human dignity is superior to anything ”. To respond timidly to this is “to accept that leaders, religious leaders, put a system of equivalence between what offends and a representation, and the death of a man and the fact of being a terrorist”.
“The fundamentals are lost”
“The fight of our generation in Europe will be a fight for our freedoms. Because they are in the process of rocking, ”he warns.
In early November, Emmanuel Macron responded to an article in the British newspaper Financial Times where he was accused of “stigmatizing French Muslims for electoral purposes”. He had published a “letter to the editor” to denounce these accusations.
Journalist Ben Smith writes that the French head of state accuses the English-speaking media, and the American media in particular, of seeking “to impose their own values on a different society”. He would reproach them for not understanding “laïcité à la française – an active separation of Church and State which dates from the beginning of the 20th century”.
Original article by : www.leparisien.fr
