There’s nothing wrong with Macron’s war on Islamism

It’s always the French, isn’t it? Not content with having given the modern world existentialism, structuralism, deconstructionism (with some help from the Belgians) and Marxist psychoanalytic, they have also, it seems, produced something called Islamo-gauchisme — allegedly an unholy alliance between some on the left and Islamists.

And a lot of people are very cross about this. Or rather, cross with President Macron and his ministers for daring to suggest first that Islamo-gauchisme is actually a thing, then that it might represent a threat to the cohesion of the Fifth Republic — indeed the western liberal order as a whole — and that it, therefore, needs to be resisted.

It’s not just French leftists and their intellectual fellow travellers who are up in arms. Lots of right-thinking US, Canadian and British academics are also very indignant. Islamists and their sympathisers think that Macron is trying to weaponise republican laïcité against Muslims. And those self-appointed curators of elite opinion in the Anglosphere, the New York Times and the Washington Post have accused the French President — and at times the French in general — of being racist, Islamophobic and authoritarian.