The French president’s response to Islam is shot through with hypocrisy and illiberalism
Letters complaining about newspaper articles are unexceptional. Not so letters from the Élysée Palace. Last week, the Financial Times published, after the killing of teacher Samuel Paty in Paris and of churchgoers in Nice, an article by its Europe correspondent, Mehreen Khan, critical of French president Emmanuel Macron’s policies towards Islam. Macron’s desire to “use the state to prescribe a ‘correct’ religion”, she wrote, has “more in common with authoritarian Muslim leaders than enlightenment values of separating church and state”.
Macron responded with a letter-cum-article defending himself and his policies and accusing Khan of “misquoting” him – he insisted he had never talked of “Islamic separatism”, as Khan suggested, only of “Islamist separatism”. By the time the FT published Macron’s letter, however, it had removed Khan’s article for “factual inaccuracies”. One could read the criticism but not what was being criticised. Newspapers do sometimes excise articles – I’m sure the Observer has done so. But they should do so only in truly exceptional circumstances, and then give a full account as to why. The removal of offending articles after criticism is, however, becoming a more acceptable part of our culture.
These policies, like much of the French response to Islam and terror, are shot through with hypocrisy and illiberalism
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