Opinion – Mehdi Hasan
Consider: Successive French governments have criminalized the
face veil and banned the
headscarf in schools. French mayors have targeted Muslim women who want to
cover up at the beach and Muslim school kids who try to have a
pork-free lunch. The French president — and new
liberal heartthrob — Emmanuel Macron has introduced draconian counterterror legislation that United Nations human rights experts have
warned could have a
discriminatory impact on Muslims in particular.
And the latest big idea? To go after the Quran. On April 21, the newspaper Le Parisien published a
manifesto “against the new anti-Semitism,” signed by 300 public figures — ranging from former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, to actor Gérard Depardieu and singer Charles Aznavour. According to
The Atlantic, the manifesto states that “11 Jews have been assassinated — and some tortured — by radical Islamists” in France, and demands that “the verses of the Quran calling for murder and punishment of Jews, Christians, and nonbelievers be struck to obsolescence by religious authorities,” so that “no believer can refer to a sacred text to commit a crime.”