Is Madame Macron Secretly a Muslim?

C

ould Brigitte Macron, the wife of President Macron, secretly be a Muslim? According to Gabriel Attal, Minister of National Education and Youth, it is possible.  If Madame Macron were a teenager who tried to enter school in the long white Louis Vuitton dress she wore to the White House reception in December 2022, would she be allowed in? Or, would she be allowed to enter school in the long black dress she wore on her husband’s visit to China?

Last week, a female student wearing a hip-length black jacket and trousers was refused entry on the grounds that her outfit was “too black.”  A female student named Nasima, wearing a cotton, cream-colored tunic and trousers, was also denied entry to her school. Both female students are Muslim. So is Madame Macron secretly Muslim?

Perhaps the answer would be clear if the two moderators on the TV channel BFM TV cross-examined her like they did Nasima: “So your dress is not a religious dress for you, is it? Then, why are you wearing this outfit that is a little bit draped? If it’s fashionable, where did this trend come from? Are you wearing this slightly flowy outfit to hide your curves? Is this outfit related to your religious beliefs? Are there any non-Muslims who dress like this, and if so, can they go inside? Do you wear a headscarf outside school?”

It, thus, transpires that if Madame Macron were a teenage schoolgirl, she would have managed to prove that she was not a Muslim at the very beginning of this interrogation and she could have entered the school without any problems, taking into account her attire on other occasions.

You may be thinking, “What an absurd and stupid fictional discourse!” But I am not the one who started it. What I am trying to do is to explain, in the laconic words of Le Figaro, “the ban on the abaya, the symbol of an education system that fails to transmit the richness of reason, the joy of freedom and the pride of a common heritage.” Otherwise, thank goodness, I am sufficiently intelligent and have common sense.

At the start of the new school year, Minister of National Education and Youth Gabriel Attal announced: “I have banned long dresses for Muslim girls in schools. If you wear pants or a skirt under a short dress or tunic, that is also forbidden.” However, the actual ban would have sounded something like this: “I have banned the wearing of abaya in schools. When you step into the classroom, you should not be able to tell at a glance which religion the students belong to.”

Just like the 2004 ban on the use of large crosses, kippahs, and headscarves in schools, Muslims are the subject of the ban and are facing open discrimination, racism, and persecution. Since students wearing crosses go to private Catholic schools, and Jewish students wearing kippahs from kindergarten onwards go to private Jewish schools, it is no secret that from the very beginning the 2004 ban targeted Muslim girls attending public schools.

Now, the French state is trying to control the body of Muslim girls from head to toe! Like his predecessors, Attal does not openly say “we are practicing cultural racism or Islamophobia,” but instead proclaims “secularism is the freedom to save oneself through education.” “These garments,” he contends, “are a religious expression that tests the resistance of the Republic in schools that are supposed to be the refuge of secularism!” According to the minister, 298 students wearing tunics and long flowing dresses were identified in the first week, more than half of them changed, 67 did not and were not allowed to enter the school. France has launched a mobilization to successfully implement the ban, and starting this year, 14,000 teaching staff will be trained by the end of 2024 and 300,000 by 2025.

President Macron also commented on the ban. “It is not our intention to label,” he began, in an assessment that, because he is the president of the Republic, naturally brought his formidable “French wisdom” to the fore. “We cannot pretend that the terrorist attack or the murder of Samuel Paty did not happen,” he said, emphasizing that the French people live with a minority in French society that “challenges the Republic and secularism” and “abuses religion,” sometimes with “very bad” consequences.

Jérôme Legavre, a deputy from the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) said, “Are these girls suspects who want to behead their teacher? What is Macron looking for? Does he want to create worse conflicts?” He presumably doesn’t want to, but if one remembers that the gap between him and his far-right rival Marine Le Pen in the 2017 presidential elections narrowed from 32 points to 17 points in the 2022 elections, one gets an idea of where France is heading.

This is how Jews, whose Frenchness is not doubted today, were targeted 80 years ago, denounced by their French neighbors, until France eventually became an accomplice to the Holocaust. Thanks to strong legal protection against anti-Semitism after the Holocaust, no one today talks about the Jews observing a kosher diet, the floor-length skirts of Jewish women, the bonnets or turbans worn by some Jewish women, the robes of Jewish men, the beards that go halfway down their chests, their kippahs, or the academics asking people to help them turn on the light switch at the university on the Sabbath. No one calls it “bondage” when religious Jewish women walk behind their husbands and greet their husbands’ friends only from a distance.

Eighty years later, Muslims are demonized with the help of the media and intellectuals through the “Law of principles strengthening respect for the values of the Republic,” the “Charter of Imams,” and the invention of so-called French Islam. Islam is portrayed as a dangerous religion in need of mass surveillance and repression, and Muslims as an existential threat to the country’s “Civilization,” “Tradition,” and “Values.” Speaking on the occasion of this latest ban, Government Spokesperson Olivier Véran said that these disguises amount to “a political attack,” but also “an act of proselytizing,” and “an act of trying to convert people to Islam.”

According to the national education minister’s formula, it will not be possible to tell what religion a student is when they walk into class—only a few minutes later, perhaps, when asked for their name, “it will be obvious who is a Muslim!” In other words, the names of Muslim students could well be defined as “offenses” as well. Indeed, far-right leader Èric Zemmour has suggested that the names of Muslims should also be frenchized. Considering that Macron’s former interior minister Gérald Darmanin criticized Marine Le Pen for being “soft on Muslims,” why not?