Tangled in conspiracy theories and violence, Muslims prepare for a new Islamophobic law

In the wake of the tragic and violent Islamophobic murder of Aboubakar Cissé — who was stabbed 57 times in a mosque — Muslims were left to grieve for both his loss and the countless lives lost in Palestine. The State had the opportunity to halt its relentless Islamophobic agenda. It did the exact opposite. The Minister of the Interior refused to visit the mosque where the murder took place, and on 21 May he divulged a report on the alleged infiltration of French society by the Muslim Brotherhood. The publication exacerbated an already intense moral panic, depicting Muslims as conspirators on the verge of seizing power. Ten days after the publication, a second racist murder occurred: a man stabbed his Tunisian neighbour, Hicham Miraoui, to death and subsequently published a series of videos on social media in which he declared his racism.

The stark contrast with the official response to the Islamophobic attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, six years ago — where former Prime Minister Ardern wore a hijab to express solidarity with the Muslim community — highlights the definitive collapse of any empathetic bridge between France and Muslims. Western societies have become blind to the humanity of Muslims, whose essential guilt is demonstrated by conspiracy theories now adopted by the State. If loss of empathy is the most telling sign of a barbaric culture, as indicated by Hannah Arendt, it becomes increasingly difficult to exonerate France — and others — from this charge.

A baseless report

The report was commissioned a year ago by President Macron and former Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, a few weeks before the Olympics in Paris. It was announced as part of a large series of measures aimed at stifling Muslims’ political agency under the pretext of protecting national cohesion and the Games’ security. The report was supposed to give an exact description of the “Islamist threat” in the country. In other words, officials of the State — including a former ambassador to the Muslim world — were tasked with the collection of evidence pertaining to a Muslim Brotherhood covert plot to overthrow the Republic and establish Shariah Law through a strategy of entryism.

The document was expected to be published in autumn last year. But the political instability of the country, home to a fractured Parliament and a precarious government, delayed its publication and institutional use. New Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau explained in March that the report’s results were alarming and classified. He requested experts to write a toned-down version he could unveil to the public. The 76-page-long text was written in accordance with these guidelines.

What’s actually in the report? A historical breakdown of the Muslim Brotherhood, its current political state in the Muslim world and a description of the alleged political ecosystem the movement planted and nourished at the local level in France. The organisations singled out as being emanations of the movement operate in very different spaces: humanitarian support, Islamic education, advocacy for Muslims’ rights. What do they actually have in common? They are led by Muslims and demonstrate their wide-ranging agency and natural growth, as expected of a community whose presence in the country spans over a century. No evidence demonstrates the affiliation or allegiance of these organisations to the Brotherhood. Furthermore, and quite ironically, the report itself acknowledges in its first page that it cannot definitively prove the Brotherhood’s presence in the country…

The consequences of white supremacist paranoia

In a sense, the precise content of the report matters less than the conspiratorial narratives it supports and the political purpose it serves. In essence, existential threats to the nation’s survival are manufactured through biased “expertise”. This pattern is not unique to France: it is a feature of the global War on Terror. Paranoid States instrumentalised false testimonies or baseless science to promote Islamophobia. Examples of this mechanic are, unfortunately, many.

In 2003, dozens of Muslims were arrested, accused of planning a chemical attack in the UK and France, known as the “Ricin plot”. The accusations were completely based on false confessions. The trials later collapsed and all of the accused were found innocent.

The Prevent programme, a key component of the British counter-terrorism strategy, is grounded in a framework known as the Extremism Risk Guidance 22+ (ERG22+). The scientific underpinnings and transparency of this framework have been called into question by 140 prominent academics and scholars, who have described it as an absurd “science of pre-crime”. Despite the complete lack of serious foundation, the policy has become a duty for every civil servant. Prevent statistics showed that 95 per cent of referrals were Muslims, who were 50 times more likely to be referred. In other words, the programme serves as a tool for mass surveillance, rendering the safeguarding rationale obsolete and instead borders on harassment of a whole community.

The danger of the entire process lies here: narratives with no rational foundation have devastating consequences. As the natural expressions of the Muslim community’s presence are deemed illegitimate, then the real underlying issue raised by French politicians is the very presence of Muslims on the territory. White supremacist paranoia, emotional foundation of an “old conspiracy theology firmly believing in Semites capacity to contaminate, destroy and undo Europe”, grows deeper by the day. It reached new heights with the publication of the report, which both helped ignore the murder of Aboubakar Cissé and stimulated the murderer of Hicham. In France, a country which pioneered the Great Replacement theory, where racist conspiratorial imagination knows very few boundaries, murders are caused and justified by this irrational landscape.

Unfortunately, more Islamophobia is expected to gush out from this political sequence. Muslim activists are already preparing for a new Islamophobic law. As evidenced by past legislation, reports also serve as institutional incentive. A State-commissioned report on “Islamist radicalisation” published in 2020 served as the foundation for the anti-Separatism Law adopted in 2021. The Stasi report in 2003 announced the 2004 ban on hijab in public schools. What should we expect then? More crackdowns on Muslim civil society? A ban on hijab in universities? All options are on the table.

“It takes power to make power respect you. It takes madness almost to deal with a power structure that’s so corrupt, so corrupt,” said Malcolm X in 1965, when Afro-Americans faced racist persecution. Muslims in France and elsewhere should follow his wise advice

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.