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Fourrest is not the only one to complain of cultural imperialism. There is a sense in France that ideas largely imported from elite US university campuses — the likes of intersectionality and identity politics — run counter to French universalism and undermine France’s efforts to tackle its unique social challenges in its own way. To then be hectored by liberal America on how to do community relations on top of this unwanted ideological import, especially in 2020, has left a sour taste in the mouth.
Welcome to the club. The NYT in particular has long been printing offensively inaccurate pieces about the UK as a racist and poverty-ridden hell-hole.
But yes, Macron deserves our unequivocal support. He's called out the Islamists, and we can't pretend it's a problem confined just to France. As Alaa al-Ameri argues today in Spiked, We must refuse to play the Islamists’ game:
Emmanuel Macron’s departure from conventional wisdom is to see the Islamist movement in its entirety as an infringement on French sovereignty. Rather than ‘peaceful’ Islamists and ‘violent extremists’, he sees a single movement whose tactics are mutually reinforcing. While France’s postcolonial history has done most of the work of marginalising many Muslim migrants and their descendants, Macron nonetheless realises that the Islamist movement has taken advantage of this failure in order to carve off a section of French society which it aspires to control for its own political ends.
His concern is corroborated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Yusuf Qaradawi, who argues that the Muslim Brotherhood should ‘play the role of the missing leadership of the Muslim nation’, especially in the West. ‘Try to have your society within the larger society’, urges Qaradawi, ‘otherwise you will melt in it like salt in water’. While Islamists will opportunistically accuse Western societies of rejecting and alienating Muslims, they themselves have been working to create their ‘own Muslim ghetto’ (Qaradawi’s words) within the borders of Western countries, in order to leverage them in return for political influence.
The multicultural policies that have dominated Europe and the UK for decades were a perfect environment for the Muslim Brotherhood’s project….
In casting Macron’s attack on them as an attack on Islam and Muslims, Islamists in France and elsewhere are employing the increasingly threadbare tactic of using Western attitudes, values and sensitivities against themselves, in the hope that cries of ‘Islamophobia’ will be enough to ward off the attack….
What alarms Islamists the world over is that France has now openly acknowledged the rules of this game, and is refusing to play.
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