Nagib Azergui used to be hopeful that the racism he experienced growing up in a Paris suburb was on its way out. In Emmanuel Macron, the country was getting a president who would heal divisions, an “anti-Trump leader.”
The head of France’s only Muslim political party now says he was wrong. Macron has called Islam a religion in crisis and has moved to shut down mosques accused of spreading hatred. Last week, his government introduced a draft law to fight “separatism,” a term he’s coined for groups that don’t integrate and are susceptible to extremism.
“Muslims are tired of being used by politicians as scapegoats to deflect attention away from real problems,” said Azergui, 41, an engineer of Moroccan descent from Nanterre.
Azergui can’t claim to represent the country’s Muslims—his group still only has about 1,000 members and in last year’s European elections it gained just 0.13% of the vote. But Macron’s policies have reinvigorated his goal of fighting Islamophobia and encouraging citizens of his religion to stop being “invisible.”
France’s president has cultivated an image abroad as a defender of liberalism since coming to power in 2017 in contrast to leaderships in the U.S., Britain and eastern Europe. Yet at home he’s been courting conservatives after a series of horrific attacks by Islamic radicals and that risks alienating a Muslim population that may be heterogeneous but also represents France’s second biggest religious group after Catholicism.
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Nagib Azergui is concerned the crackdown will backfire and drive more youngsters to extremism.
Photographer: Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images
As campaigning for the 2022 presidential election unofficially gets underway, there’s a growing sense of betrayal within France’s 5.6 million-strong Muslim community, the overwhelming majority of whom are integrated and reject terrorism.
Macron hasn’t said whether he’ll run again, but he’s clearly positioning himself as the law-and-order candidate in an election that’s likely to pit him against far-right leader Marine le Pen.
Attacks by extremists have left about 250 people dead since 2015, including a teacher beheaded in October for opening a classroom debate on freedom of speech and cartoons of Prophet Muhammed.
Part of the French president’s plan entails creating an “Islam of Enlightenment” and while he has repeatedly insisted that Muslims shouldn’t be stigmatized, his assertion that the religion is in crisis upset many Muslims in France.
As did his appointment of Gerald Darmanin, a hardliner, as interior minister in a recent cabinet shuffle. His prime minister, Jean Castex, meanwhile has dismissed the idea of making amends for France’s colonization of regions including in North Africa and the Sahel, from where many of its Muslims can trace their roots.
France’s Muslim community is broad and opinions are hard to pin down because of restrictions on collecting ethnic and religious statistics.
The country’s aspiration for universalism and integration makes it harder for those who identify with any religion from entering public life, said Hakim El Karoui, a fellow at Paris-based think tank Institut Montaigne. Polls commissioned by Journal du Dimanche, a French weekly newspaper, and Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine targeted in a 2015 terrorist attack, last year showed that 60% of French deem Islam incompatible with the values of the Republic, with almost half of French Muslims under 25 sharing that view.
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Hakim El Karoui is himself a poster child of success in France.
Photographer: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images
“Society puts Muslims in a double bind,” said El Karoui. “Speak up, but also, don’t show your religion in public.”
El Karoui is himself a poster child of success in France, and said Islam represents a link to his family’s roots. His mother is Protestant, his father a Muslim of Tunisian origin. He’s an ex-banker whose time at Rothschild coincided with Macron’s. Two of his uncles were ministers in Tunisia before the uprising that sparked the Arab Spring. El Karoui served as an adviser to former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.
In his elegant office in Paris’s business district, El Karoui thinks France’s integration system ultimately works well, citing as an example a high rate of mixed marriages. He advocates the creation of a body that would raise funds to encourage Muslims to fund research and train imams.
“After every terrorist attack, discrimination against Muslims jumps,” he said. “What I’m telling them is: It’s not your fault, but now it’s in your interest to get organized.”
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Friday prayers at the Grand Mosque of Paris. President Macron’s assertion that the religion is in crisis upset many Muslims in France.
Photographer: Zakaria Abdelkafi/AFP/Getty Images
The trouble is that when they try to do that, they can run into problems. Fatima Bent is the president of the feminist, anti-racist group Lallab. It describes itself as “pro-choice” on issues from abortion to the veil, but has been accused of being close to the Muslim Brotherhood. When it was set up in 2016, a bank even rejected its application to open an account.
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Fatima Bent’s organizing to help Muslim women share their stories.
Source: Fatima Bent
Bent said she worries most about police violence, which quietly affected Muslims in the suburbs, or “banlieues,” for a long time before entering the public eye more recently. She’s critical of a law provision once pushed by Macron that would have made it harder to share videos of police abuse.
Muslim voters are disappointed by the parties on the political left, which they have tended to support, Bent said. That’s when they don’t abstain.
While Azergui tries to get people behind his Union of French Muslim Democrats, which he founded eight years ago after former President Nicolas Sarkozy began a debate on national identity and immigration, Bent is betting on local initiatives. She’s organizing to help Muslim women share their stories.
“I can’t believe we’re still asked whether Islam is compatible with secularism when we have millions of French Muslims at peace with these two identities, and living peacefully,” Bent said. “The government’s rhetoric is dangerous, it’s widening the rift of ‘them’ against us.”
According to the draft law on “separatism” published on Dec. 9, there will be stricter punishments for those who promote hatred online and threaten civil servants, including teachers. It neither explicitly mentioned Islam nor Muslims.
Doctors who provide “virginity certificates” will also be targeted and scrutiny of the funding of religious associations increased. Home-schooling for kids older than three, meanwhile, will be restricted in a bid to prevent clandestine religious schools. Macron also wants to end the ghettoization of city suburbs and support their residents, though he has yet to unveil firm proposals to do so.
Azergui is concerned the crackdown will backfire and drive more youngsters to extremism. He defends an interpretation of France’s secularism, known as “laicite,” whereby all faiths are respected but kept private, though he’d like women to be allowed to wear veils wherever they want.
Since 2004, the wearing of religious signs has been prohibited in French schools, a ban backed by 44% of Muslims, according to a recent Ifop poll. While the veil may be worn elsewhere, women who do so and take on public responsibilities are often criticized as promoting a sexist symbol, including by government members.
“When Macron speaks about separatism, he deliberately focuses on Islamism rather than on Corsican separatists, or wealthy people building a life on the margins,” said Azergui. “We’re an easy target.”
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
