h/t
The Old Continent: On 19 March French newspaper Le Figaro published a pamphlet titled “No against Islamist Separatism“, signed by 100 French intellectuals, denouncing “a new totalitarianism threatening freedom in general.”
What follows is a translation of the entire pamphlet, with the most notable segments highlighted:
“We are citizens with different opinions, and very often find ourselves opposing one another, who have agreed to express, regardless of what is currently in the news, their concern in the face of the rise of Islamism. It is not our similarities that bind us, but the feeling of the danger to freedom in general and not just the freedom of thought. What binds us today is of a more fundamental nature than that which will undoubtedly separate us tomorrow.
The new Islamist totalitarianism seeks to win ground by any means, and [seeks to] pass for a victim of intolerance. One could observe this strategy when the Teacher’s Union SUD Éducation 93 offered, a few weeks ago, a training course, including workshops on ‘racism by the state’ which were forbidden for ‘whites’. Certain hosts were members or sympathisers of the Collective against Islamophobia in France and of the Party of the indigenous people of the Republic. These kinds of organisations have been multiplying lately. From them, we have learned that the best way to combat racism is to separate the ‘races’. If that idea clashes with ours, it is because we are Republicans.
We also hear it said that, because religions are violated in France by an ‘instrumentalised’ Laïcité, we must give to that which is in the minority, which is to say, to Islam, a special place so it ceases to be humiliated. The same line of thinking continues: by covering themselves with a veil, women protect themselves from men and by setting themselves apart in this way, they are able to set themselves free.
What these proclamations have in common, is the thought that the only way of defending the ‘dominated’ (not our choice of words, but that of the SUD Éducation 93), is to separate them from others and grant them privileges.
It wasn’t long ago, that Apartheid reigned in South Africa. Based on a segregation of the blacks, it sought to exonerate itself by creating Bantustans, which were given a fictional autonomy. A system that fortunately has disappeared.
But here today, there is a new kind of Apartheid proposed for France, a segregation turned on its head, by which the ‘dominated’ preserve their dignity by sheltering themselves from the ‘dominant’.
Read the rest here