France’s Left Is Finally Fighting Islamophobia
The recent mosque shooting in Bayonne was just the latest violent attack against France’s Muslims. The secularist left has long rejected the idea of “Islamophobia” — but as the far right goes mainstream, Muslims’ calls for solidarity have become impossible to ignore.
Demonstrators against Islamophobia and anti-Muslim discrimination gathered in Paris on November 10, 2019. Lisa Bryant / VOA
For decades, Islamophobia has been central to the exercise of political power in France. Now, after years of paralysis, the Left is finally starting to fight it.
On October 28, two elderly Muslim men were badly wounded when a gunman attacked a mosque in Bayonne in southwest France. In recent years, French mosques have been defaced, rammed, and burned down, and their congregations harassed and targeted. Bayonne represented a dangerous new escalation. The response in Paris last Sunday — as 25,000 people took to the streets demanding an end to Islamophobia — offers hope that the anti-Muslim consensus may finally have splintered.
The Bayonne attack’s political motivations were immediately clear. The alleged perpetrator, eighty-four-year-old Claude Sinké, wanted “revenge” on Muslims, whom he baselessly blamed for April’s fire at Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral. Sinké was not just some lone crank: in 2015, he had stood in regional elections for Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National (in mid-2018 renamed the Rassemblement National).
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