John Jenkins

There’s nothing wrong with Macron’s war on Islamism

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

It’s always the French, isn’t it? Not content with having given the modern world existentialism, structuralism, deconstructionism (with some help from the Belgians) and Marxist psychoanalytic, they have also, it seems, produced something called Islamo-gauchisme — allegedly an unholy alliance between some on the left and Islamists.

And a lot of people are very cross about this. Or rather, cross with President Macron and his ministers for daring to suggest first that Islamo-gauchisme is actually a thing, then that it might represent a threat to the cohesion of the Fifth Republic — indeed the western liberal order as a whole — and that it, therefore, needs to be resisted.

It’s not just French leftists and their intellectual fellow travellers who are up in arms. Lots of right-thinking US, Canadian and British academics are also very indignant. Islamists and their sympathisers think that Macron is trying to weaponise republican laïcité against Muslims. And those self-appointed curators of elite opinion in the Anglosphere, the New York Times and the Washington Post have accused the French President — and at times the French in general — of being racist, Islamophobic and authoritarian.

So what’s going on? Is Macron right that we are witnessing a conspiracy of Islamists and leftists against the liberal order and need to do something about it? Or are his critics right when they say that there is either nothing to see or that, if there were, then it would probably represent an entirely justified response to brutal white supremacism masquerading as repressive liberal tolerance?

There is nothing that speaks to the narcissism of the postmodern western left as someone else’s command of their pet theories

As I explore in a new Policy Exchange paper, it is undoubtedly true that Islamists and the western left have made common cause over the last 30 to 40 years.

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Written by
John Jenkins

Sir John Jenkins is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and former UK Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He co-leads the ‘Westphalia for the Middle East Project' at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics

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