Anwar calls out Macron for ignorance on Islam
Anwar Ibrahim, the opposition leader of Malaysia says French President Emmanuel Macron’s statement about Islam is offensive as it is unreasonable.
Macron’s statement promotes the very impasse it seeks to denounce, says Anwar.
“More importantly, it makes the ‘problem’ exclusively a Muslim affair rather than a pernicious perspective embedded in doctrinaire French laïcité.”
Anwar adds there is no defence for the violence and murders of the men of blood, the misguided homicidal monsters who pervert Islam.
“Macron himself has, on occasion, recognised informed definition of the complex origins and aberrant nature of this modern scourge.
Anwar says he mourns for Mr Samuel Paty as for all the victims of such depredations.
“It is an evil that afflicts Muslims and the Muslim World far more than the tragedies that have overwhelmed France. I mourn for Mr Samuel Paty as for all the victims of such depredations.”
In Anwar’s view, Macron is wrong in implicating the whole of the Muslim communities and Islam altogether is gross ignorance.
Monsieur Macron needs to be aware that freedom of speech is an essential value of Islam, says Anwar.
“Without freedom of debate, thought and inquiry one cannot pursue the prime objective of identifying and promoting what is good and denouncing, defying and defeating that which is evil.
“With freedom comes responsibility, a responsibility notably absent from the rabblerousing smears essayed by Monsieur le President.”
ANWAR IBRAHIM, MALAYSIAN OPPOSITION LEADER
He says it was French laïcité that first gave the world the concept of terrorism in the aftermath of the Revolution.
No society, ideology or religion is immune from spawning single minded brutality and plunging into barbarism.
To misdiagnose, misconceive and misrepresent the commonality of the problem is to foreclose the possibility of open, reasoned debate of the issues, insists Anwar.
“France cows its own Muslim community with the dehumanizing and demonising effects of the kind of harangues Macron so easily lapses into.”
ANWAR
Anwar says the Muslim World does not need lectures any more than it can tolerate libellous smears and Islamophobic rhetoric from the French President.
:So long as he persists in his purblind ignorance of the breadth and sophistication of Islam as a world of values and ideals so long we will fail to advance the cause of confronting the fundamentalist prejudices that afflict both sides.
“The persistent danger exists of propelling us all towards an erroneous and futile clash of civilizations scenario.”
“I acknowledge that President Macron and the French intelligentsia are not alone. Muslims the world over need to recover and reconnect with a higher vision of Islam.”
Locking them into perennial sterile refuting unjust accusation and slur may serve France’s national political agenda, says Anwar.
“It does nothing to advance open debate, mutual understanding and common cause against the evil of terrorism.”
ANWAR