Xenophobic and anti-Muslim remarks are becoming dangerously commonplace in France in the context of the rise of the extreme right in this country.
While three people of Kurdish origin were murdered in the heart of Paris by an individual suspected of having racist motivations, many voices were raised to point the finger at the release of xenophobic discourse in particular media and on social networks.
This does not prevent the skids from continuing, with the same lightness and on the same media supports.
At 80, Jean-Claude Dassier continues to intervene in the media as a columnist, particularly on CNews, the channel which revealed the polemicist Éric Zemmour, who has become the spokesperson for the extremist and openly anti-Muslim xenophobic current in France.
Jean-Claude Dassier has a long career behind him. He was notably the president of Olympique de Marseille between 2009 and 2011 and the news director of TF1.
He is currently vice president of the far-right magazine Current Values and participates as a controversial columnist on a news program. He reserves his punchlines for the Muslim community in France and Muslims in general. His latest release has not gone unnoticed.
It is not the extremist fringe of political Islam that Jean-Claude Dassier attacked, but all Muslims who, according to him, are unaware of what the word “Republic” means.
“ Muslims don’t give a damn about the Republic, they don’t even know what the word means, ” he said, triggering an avalanche of reactions on social networks.
” We’re not going to get there because it’s too complicated, the cultures are distant from each other and we’re slowly moving towards an English or American -style community society,” he continued.
“A Bataclan upside down”
The “ community society ” is to Jean-Claude Dassier what the “ great replacement ” is to Eric Zemmour, that is to say, a specter that he constantly brandishes in his public interventions.
Even when he presided over the Olympique de Marseille, a city with a strong Muslim community, he did not prevent himself from skidding with xenophobic remarks. In 2009, when he was appointed head of the Marseille club, he had to apologize publicly for declaring that he would not be “ a Lebanese or African president ”.
Simultaneously with the words of Jean-Claude Dassier, the Great Mosque of Paris reacted to serious remarks made in La Revue Populaire by Michel Houellebecq during a conversation with Michel Onfray.
Houellebecq spoke of a ” Bataclan upside down ” and people who arm themselves, who take shooting lessons, and who will resist ” when entire territories are under Islamic control “.
“ The wish of the native French population, as they say, is not for Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop stealing from and attacking them. Alternatively, let them go,” he wrote. Remarks that the Grand Mosque of Paris describes as ” pithy sentences “, ” unacceptable ” and of ” staggering brutality “.
Such statements ” aim to stir up discriminatory speeches and acts ” and to legitimize an opposition between ” Muslims ” and ” native French “, denouncing the French religious institution.
