France Considers Envoy to Explain Macron’s Ideas to Muslim States

By Staff, Agencies

France is looking at appointing a special envoy to explain Emmanuel Macron’s thinking on secularism and freedom of expression in a bid to quell the anti-French backlash growing in some Muslim countries, officials have said.

The growth in anti-French sentiment also has the potential to deepen the already entrenched conflict between Macron and Turkey over Libya and oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean.

Macron has already conducted one lengthy interview on al-Jazeera Arabic seeking to justify his approach.

Many Arab leaders have condemned the killing of the French teacher Samuel Paty on 16 October, the subsequent killings in Nice and the latest murders on Monday night in Vienna, but the degree of explicit and implicit criticism of Macron’s stance on freedom of expression has startled some French officials.

There was also concern that some mainstream news agencies in Turkey and Qatar have carried opinion pieces claiming that the rights of Muslims in France have been suppressed.

Macron has been personally caricatured in the Iranian press as the devil and his effigy burned in Bangladesh as 50,000 protesters took to the streets. A call to boycott French products, encouraged by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has also been launched with little effect.

The Saudi foreign ministry said it “rejects any attempt to link Islam with terrorism, and condemns the offensive cartoons of the prophet.”

The former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad wrote on Twitter that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past. But by and large the Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t. Instead the French should teach their people to respect other people’s feelings.”