French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled this Friday his action plan to better protect France against “separatism” at Les Mureaux (Yvelines), a city of 30,000 inhabitants about 40 km from Paris, often given as an example for his initiatives in favour of “living together”.
Accompanied by six ministers, he notably announced a strengthening and modification of the 1905 law on the separation of churches and state, some articles of which are considered obsolete. The bill will be presented to the Council of Ministers on December 9, “115 years after the final adoption of the 1905 law” announced the President of the Republic. It will be discussed in Parliament in the first half of 2021.
Addressing Fight against “Islamist separatism”, he said “The problem is not secularism. I have said it several times: secularism, in the French Republic, is the freedom to believe or not to believe, the possibility of exercising one’s worship, as long as public order is ensured. Secularism is the neutrality of the state, and in no case, the erasure of religions in society, ”said the head of state in the preamble.
“Do not let ourselves be drawn into the trap of amalgamation set by polemicists and extremes, which would consist in stigmatizing all Muslims. (…) What we need to tackle is Islamist separatism. It is conscious, theorized, politico-religious project, which materializes through repeated deviations from the values of the Republic “he continued. “There is in this radical Islamism since it is the heart of the subject (…) a claimed desire to display a methodical organization to contravene the laws of the Republic and create a parallel order of other values, to develop another organization of society ”, added the President of the Republic.
Islam is a “religion which is in crisis all over the world today” he insisted, citing Tunisia as an example. “This crisis is linked to tensions between fundamentals and political projects which lead to a very strong hardening, including in countries where Islam is the majority religion.”
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