“Attacking the League for Human Rights is undermining our fraternity”

2023-04-24 15:00:12

GÉrald Darmanin, Minister of the Interior and Religious Affairs, then Elisabeth Borne, Prime Minister, have now made history by attacking the League of Human Rights (LDH) head-on. They accuse him in particular of doing the short scale to “radical Islamism”or to cultivate “ambiguities” towards him, which insidiously amounts to the same thing.

No other executive since the Liberation had ever dared to attack, in such crude terms, the watchdog of human rights represented by the LDH since its creation on the occasion of the Dreyfus affair.

In other circumstances, it could have been laughable but, alas, this diatribe coming from the highest echelons of the state comes at a very bad time. The string is big. It is in any case the symptom of a form of radicalization of the power in place, which should rather worry about the fact that information from Amnesty International is more and more frequently devoted to French news. Especially when this power was largely re-elected to “block” the far right. In view of the claims displayed, however, let’s check that it is indeed a dam and not a slide.

This is not the first time the government has flirted with words about its supposed adversaries.

Academia Stupor

Let us recall the controversy over the so-called “Islamo-leftism”, become a political slogan for reactionaries of all stripes on television sets. In February 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and while teachers and administrative staff were concerned with maintaining at all costs the educational continuity of students already greatly affected by indecent precariousness, the former Minister of Higher Education , research and innovation, Frédérique Vidal, had indeed aroused the amazement of the academic world by claiming that “Islamo-leftism (…) plagues society as a whole” and “the university is not impermeable” to this phenomenon.

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Let us repeat it here, “Islamo-leftism” does not correspond to any measurable reality. It is a specious rattle word in the hands of authoritarian minds, which only serves to disqualify.

Then came the law against “separatism” (which became a law consolidating respect for the principles of the Republic) which devoted an exacerbated policy of suspicion towards the visibility of practicing Islam, with very meager results, but at a high cost in terms of the stigmatization of a population tired of seeing its religion at the center of all controversy, while it contributes no less than others to the daily life of this country.

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