Macron unveils intend to fight radical Islam in France
04 October, 2020
President Emmanuel Macron unveiled an idea Friday to guard France's secular values against radical Islam, announcing stricter oversight of schooling and better control over foreign funding of mosques.
Describing Islam as a religion "in crisis" worldwide, Macron insisted that "no concessions" will be made in a fresh drive to eliminate extremist religious teaching in schools and mosques.
At the same time, Macron said France should do more to offer monetary and social mobility to immigrant communities, adding radicals had often filled the vacuum.
His long-awaited address came 18 months before presidential elections where Macron is set to handle a challenge from the proper, as public concern grows over security in France.
"Islam is a religion that's in crisis worldwide today, we are not only seeing this inside our country," Macron said in Les Mureaux, a town outside Paris with a historically large immigrant population.
He said extremists were wanting to indoctrinate new converts in the united states, which has among the largest Muslim populations in Europe.
He denounced a trend of "Islamist separatism" that flouts French rules and seeks to make a "counter-society" holding its own laws most importantly others.
This form of sectarianism often results in children being kept out of school, and the utilization of sporting, cultural and other community activities as a "pretext to instruct principles that usually do not comply with the laws of the republic," Macron said.
He said the federal government would present a bill in December that could fortify the country's bedrock 1905 law that officially separated church and state.
Among the brand new law's provisions, you will have closer scrutiny of the curriculum at private schools and stricter limits on home-schooling for reasons other than a child's health issues.
Community associations that receive state subsidies will have to sign a contract avowing their commitment to secularism and the values of France.
There will be closer scrutiny of such organisations, and regulations will make it better to shutter those breaking anti-indoctrination rules.
The new measures will also add a ban on the wearing of religious symbols for employees of subcontractors providing public services, such as for example transport operators.
The rule already pertains to public servants.
Macron said there have been increased reports of abuses by sub-contracting staff, including bus drivers refusing women entry for wearing clothing considered too revealing.
He emphasised that it had been essential to "liberate Islam in France from foreign influences," naming countries such as for example Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
To this end, the government will intensify checks on foreign financing of mosques and clamp down on letting imams go abroad for training, or on hosting foreign preachers on French soil.
Macron stressed that the measures did not seek to stigmatise or alienate France's Muslims but to bolster "our ability to live together."
He urged better knowledge of Islam and said the condition of radicalisation was partly something of the "ghettoisation" of French cities and towns where "we constructed our very own separatism."
"We've concentrated populations predicated on their origins, we've not sufficiently created diversity, or ensured economical and social mobility" in segregated areas, he said.
Radical Islamists have swooped in, taking benefit of "our withdrawal, our cowardice," he added.
France has recently been forced to have a hard look at its core republican values, perceived by many to be threatened by Islam in the wake of several terror attacks since 2015 targeting secular liberties such as for example freedom of expression.
Macron was speaking seven days after a guy wounded two persons with a meat cleaver outside the former Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly, that your government denounced as "Islamist terrorism."
Staff at Charlie Hebdo were massacred in January 2015 by Islamist gunmen seeking to avenge its publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
In January, a renewed debate about freedom of expression erupted whenever a teenager received death threats for attacking Islam in an expletive-laden Instagram rant.
And earlier this month, divisions were highlighted when MPs walked out whenever a university student entered parliament in a headscarf.
Source: japantoday.com