The New York Times is wrong about Macron’s war on Islamism

Here is what is not happening in France. France is not ‘at war with its Muslims’. Muslims are not being treated like Jews in Nazi Germany. Emmanuel Macron has not ‘strongly boosted the legitimacy of all kind of obsessive Islamophobes’, nor is he contributing to ‘the Islamophobic swamp into which France has sunk’. The French president is not ‘attacking Islam’ and he has not ‘chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims’.

What is happening in France is a world away from these libels. A liberal, secular republic is grappling with the long-gestating menace of radical Islam, a reactionary separatism that has taken grip in the banlieues. While it has brought blood to French streets, the primary target of this extremism is the Muslim mind, especially the young Muslim mind, in which it encourages the belief that Muslims are not participants in the republican ideal but victims of it.

President Macron, a centrist, wishes to root out this insurrectionism, a sentiment shared by many on his left and right, and is proposing