By Dr. Abdul Ruff
Use of themes like Islam and Muslims in a negative sense helps the presidential-PM candidates to campaign cheaply for a popular mandate – not only in third world countries like India where the Hindutva forces have got an advantage over other parties, and Israel where Jewish politicians use Palestinians, Islam and their illegal settlements for fascist Zionist advances but unfortunately also in former democracies like USA, France and Germany as well. The Sept-11 hoax continues to play a destructive role in polls.
Anti-Islamism and anti-Muslims along with Islamophobia rhetoric have become the most important and most rewarding favorite time pass for the greedy politicians across the globe, more in developed nations like USA, Russia and France, etc, than underdeveloped ones
Former right-wing Jewish President Nicolas Sarkozy of the Les Républicains (LR) party, who earlier had served as president from 2007 to 2012, when he lost his re-election bid to current Socialist Party (PS) President François Hollande, declared his candidacy in November’s LR primary for next year’s presidential election, with calls for unprecedented attacks on Muslims’ basic democratic rights in order to woo essentially the Christian and Jewish voters.
Slender Muslim voters do not make much difference in the outcomes of the national polls and hence the anti-Muslim agenda as the key gimmick of Sarkozy.
With France still under a state of emergency, Jewish Sarkozy made proposals whose political character is unmistakable: they would convert Muslims to second-class citizens deprived of basic social and democratic rights. Sarkozy had chosen to issue his appeal from the town of Châteaurenard in southern France, where the neo-fascist Front National made significant electoral gains in the last regional elections. He called for trampling Muslim women’s right to exercise their religious freedom and their democratic right to dress as they please, with plans to ban the veil and burqa in workplaces and universities. This means placing Muslim women before an intolerable choice: they must either give up their religion, or the right to work and obtain an education. That is the current European and American trend.
Most of Sarkozy’s remarks were taken from his new book, espousing artificial and fake patriotism, “Everything for France”, which came out recently to coincide with French national poll and he announces his candidacy and calls for suspending the right for immigrants’ families abroad to join immigrants in France, drastically reducing the number of migrants, imposing harsh conditions for obtaining French nationality, and eliminating state medical aid for migrants. Sarkozy called for banning the veil including “in the schools, universities, public services, and in the workplaces.” He charged that such practices threaten French identity, brazenly declaring: “Our identity is threatened if we allow minorities to force upon us a lifestyle which will never be ours.” He added, “I want to be the president that re-establishes the authority of the state on every square centimeter of the Republic.” According to him minorities in Europe should not be treated as equals and should be under perpetual surveillance.
Guided by neo-imperialist ideals, Jewish Sarkozy’s proposals to ban Muslim women from jobs and universities recall several of the initial anti-Semitic laws of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II, when it barred Jews from key professions, like medicine and the public service, and limited their access to university posts. This paved the way for Vichy to ultimately deprive Jews of French citizenship and carry out mass deportations of Jews from France to death camps across Europe. Then as now, the targeting of entire ethnic and religious groups for persecution by the state was bound up with escalating class tensions and the eruption of imperialist war on a global scale.
France is deeply implicated in NATO’s ongoing war preparations against Syria in the Middle East and Russia in Europe, and in Washington’s “pivot to Asia” against China. Sarkozy’s speech comes as the French capitalism faces explosive opposition to the PS’ reactionary labor law, which scraps basic social protections for working people, and a danger of world war unprecedented since World War II.
In this context, Sarkozy pledged to introduce the compulsory military service for youth aged 18 who are unemployed or in full-time education. Accusing Hollande of failing to fight terrorism, Sarkozy declared that he would step up the war against terrorism. Sarkozy himself bears substantial political responsibility for this state of affairs. It was under his presidency that France played a key role in pressing for a NATO war in Libya in 2011, arming and financing Islamist proxy militias to topple Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s popular regime. Hollande also continued this strategy, stoking a war in Syria and supporting Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias against the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
If Sarkozy can re-emerge to launch a presidential bid, after having been one of France’s most unpopular presidents in history, it is above all due to the filthy role of the government and its pseudo-left and aimless allies. Their policies of austerity, war, and law-and-order hysteria paved the way for the reassertion of ethnic and religious discrimination as a key aspect of French politics. Hollande seized on the terror attacks to impose a permanent state of emergency in France, scrapping basic democratic rights, and advocated inscribing the principle of deprivation of nationality in the French constitution.
Sarkozy’s attack on defenseless Muslims, close on heels of US precedential candidate Trump’s assertive ideas about blocking Muslims. Sarkozy’s After Sarkozy’s speech, Prime Minister Manual Valls postured as an opponent of Sarkozy, denouncing “the brutality of his proposals…He is following the far right, he is taking the democratic right into its camp, and he is dragging the other candidates in the primaries, including Alain Juppé, in this direction, in this path, and it worries me.” Valls’ comments reek of hypocrisy, as he himself favors anti-democratic policies and the incitement of anti-Muslim sentiment, supporting calls for a veil (burkini) ban. He also played the central role in cracking down in social protests against the PS labor law during the spring and early summer.
Like in USA, cutting across party lines, top greedy politicians harp on anti-Islam themes in an ugly manner to outsmart one another and to win elections. More broadly, the entire French political establishment is implicated in the stoking of anti-Muslim sentiment over more than a decade. The right-wing government of President Jacques Chirac imposed a headscarf ban in public schools in 2004, followed by a burqa ban introduced by Sarkozy and the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) in 2010. Pseudo-left groups including Lutte Ouvri è re (Workers Struggle) and the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) backed the headscarf and burqa ban, fraudulently claiming it was a “secular” measure aimed to defend women’s rights. While supporting anti-Muslim hatreds, they also supported imperialist irrational wars for resources, launched on “humanitarian” grounds, including in Libya and Syria. They bear political responsibility for creating the conditions for Sarkozy to run a far-right campaign calling for unprecedented acts of religious discrimination.
Such essentially racist and anti-democratic remarks from a former head of state Sarkozy testify to a sick mind of European ruling elites and staggering disintegration of French corporatist democracy. Amid an escalating economic and military crisis of the capitalist system, the French ruling class’ decades-long strategy of dividing the common masses along ethnic lines with appeals to anti-Muslim sentiment is taking on vast new dimensions.
An entire religious community of millions of people, consisting of racial minorities largely drawn from the most oppressed sections of the common people in France, is effectively being accused of treason. The implication of Sarkozy’s remarks is that the simple act of peacefully practicing a religion shared by millions of people in France means defying the authority of the state and committing an act of disloyalty to the identity of the French ethnicity.
The resurgence of racist policies in Europe underscores the deep crisis of capitalist rule in Europe amidst rising class tensions. As made clear by the growth of neo-fascist movements across Europe the European bourgeoisie is moving towards fascistic methods of rule.
When will western leaders get out of the irrational madness they are currently in of depending too much on escalating Islamophobia andante-Islamism and hatred for Islam and Muslims and win elections?
