only timidly, and is on the way to being supplanted by "Islamophobia". And the campaigners for multiculturalism, who try to foist the notion of "Islamophobia" on the judicial and political authorities, have only one aim in mind: to force the victims of racism into identifying themselves as Muslims.
The fact that racists are also Islamophobic is, I'm afraid, irrelevant. They are, first and foremost, racists. By attacking Islam, they are targeting foreigners or people of foreign origin. But by focusing only on their Islamophobia, we are minimising the danger of racism. The anti-racist campaigners of old are in danger of becoming overspecialised niche retailers in a minority form of discrimination.
To combat racism is to combat all forms of racism. To combat Islamophobia is to combat – what exactly? Is it a means of suppressing all criticism of the religion? Or is it a way of resisting hatred of Muslims because they are of foreign origin? While we are arguing over whether it is racist to say that the Koran is nonsense, the racists are laughing up their sleeves. If, tomorrow, all the Muslims in France converted to Catholicism – or gave up religion completely – the racists would not blink an eye. Foreigners, or French people of foreign origin, would still be the source of all evil.
Take Mouloud and Gérard. Both are Muslims. Mouloud is of North African origin. Gérard is of European origin. Both go after the same flat. Which has the best chance? The one with an Arab face or the one with a "Frenchy" face? The flat would not be refused to the Muslim. It would be refused to the Arab. Or take the example of Mouloud and Abdelkader. Both are Muslims. Both are foreign. Both have better sun tans than Gérard. Mouloud doesn't have a bean, Abdelkader is a millionaire. Which one would be refused the lease on the flat? The Muslim or the millionaire?
To be scared of Islam is, doubtless, cretinous, absurd and lots of other things but it is not a crime. You can, equally, express your fear of Christianity or Judaism without interrupting the slumbers of an investigating magistrate or setting the judicial machinery rumbling. Believers are often scared of one another's religions. They have been told that their own is the best in the
world – no, not the best, the only one. But by proclaiming that their own sacred texts are the truth, they are implying that all the others are fibs. It's easy to imagine that a believer could be scared by the idea that most people might convert to a false religion. Or, more likely, that the competition might pinch all the customers.
However, a sacred text only becomes dangerous when a fanatical reader decides to apply his bed-time reading literally. You have to be really naïve to take at face value the founding texts of all the great religions. You have to be psychopathic to try to do what they say in your own home. In short, the problem is neither the Koran nor the Bible (both of them being boring novels, incoherent and badly written). The problem is the believer who reads the Koran or the Bible like an instruction leaflet for a set of Ikea shelves: "If I don't cut the throat of the infidel, God will banish me from Club Med when I am dead."
Take any cookbook and declare it to be the Truth. The result? A bloodbath. Your neighbour makes gluten-free pancakes because he has an allergy? The sacred Book doesn't mention it. Burn your neighbour, he is a blasphemer! He puts too much butter on the bottom of his cake tin? Kill him!
It would never enter the minds of communists to call anti-communists "communismophobes" or to demand that they are prosecuted for anti-communist racism. However much you twist reality, you will never get the world to say that there is a "communist" race. Equally, there is no "Islamic" race. In France today, communism is a minority viewpoint which is mocked, sometimes violently, by the faithful defenders of the all-conquering pro-market liberal mode. Now, unlike God, it is hard to deny that Marx or Lenin or (the former French Communist Party leader) Georges Marchais ever existed. But it is not a blasphemy, nor racist, nor communismophobic to dispute the validity of their writings or their sayings.
Equally, in secular France, all religions are just a collection of texts, traditions and customs which anyone is entitled to criticise. To put a clown's nose on the face of Marx is no more outrageous or scandalous than to put the same conk on the face of Mohamed.
A non-believer, however hard he may try, cannot