Emre Öngün is a Paris-based activist and a member of France Insoumise’s parliamentary campaign team.
Scenes of burning cars in Parisian streets have been used to paint France’s Kurds as a riotous minority. Yet their angry protests are fueled by a string of racist killings — and French authorities’ refusal to reveal the full facts of the cases.
Ahead of April’s presidential election, France’s left is badly divided. But calls for unity behind a milquetoast centrist threaten only to deepen the Left’s split with its historic working-class base.
On Friday, an Islamist extremist murdered a schoolteacher in a suburb northwest of Paris. In response, the French interior minister has called for a ban on an anti-Islamophobia legal association wholly unconnected to the atrocity. We need to resist this turn against democracy and justice.
After a speaker at France Insoumise’s summer school invoked the “right to be Islamophobic,” the French left is again at war over secularism. But the real problem is a failure to take sides with the victims of racism — and defend Muslims against attempts to stigmatize them.