Treatment on a mental level
Erdoğan says Macron is crazy for not being a fan of political Islam.
France has recalled its ambassador to Turkey for consultations after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insulted his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.
He said Mr Macron needed a mental health check for pledging to defend secular values and fight radical Islam.
Mr Macron has spoken out forcefully on these issues after a French teacher was murdered for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
That is, for showing cartoons of Mo as part of a class on freedom of speech. The BBC should have included that instead of making it sound as if Paty showed the cartoons just for the hell of it.
Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad can cause serious offence to Muslims because Islamic tradition explicitly forbids images of Muhammad and Allah (God).
Islamic tradition can forbid what it likes but it’s not the boss of all of us. Paty was teaching a class in a school, not a madrassa; we are not required to obey Islamic tradition.
But state secularism – or laïcité – is central to France’s national identity. Curbing freedom of expression to protect the feelings of one particular community, the state says, undermines the country’s unity.
It’s not a “community,” it’s a religion. Calling it a “community” is manipulative.
Responding to Mr Macron’s campaign to defend such values – which began before the teacher was murdered – Mr Erdogan asked in a speech: “What’s the problem of the individual called Macron with Islam and with the Muslims?”
He added: “Macron needs treatment on a mental level. What else can be said to a head of state who does not understand freedom of belief and who behaves in this way to millions of people living in his country who are members of a different faith?”
Erdoğan is the one who is not understanding freedom of belief here. Freedom of belief includes not believing in any god, and it includes freedom of questioning, discussion, analysis, doubt, disbelief, non-belief.
Macron has plenty of pride, and I hope he digs his heels in. I imagine the mass of the French population would be behind him as well.
And always that ridiculous “causes serious offense”. The cartoons are not to blame for the offense, the religion is. Why not say “Many Muslims take offense…”, which is more accurate and honest?
Erdoğan doesn’t care about freedom of religion or thought. He is so busy erasing all vestiges of that in Turkey. He wants to require everyone to think like him. No thanks. I’ll keep my uncovered head and face, and he can keep his ridiculous beliefs, as long as he doesn’t impose them on us.
Yeah. The BBC always does that. It drives me crazy. Way back when B&W was an infant I spent half my time yelling at the Beeb to stop talking to the MCB and talk to Maryam Namazie instead. They do consult the MCB less now, I think, but they still load the damn language this way.
It’s not a religion that needs to be expulsed from France, just a subgroup of Muslims who find themselves unable to adapt to life in France. Most Muslim people can probably live in France happily and fit in fine. In that sense, those Muslims ill-suited for Western life probably do form a community. That community should find a country more to its liking.
This really isn’t a problem affecting all Muslims. Islam is a big regional religion, and most people who are officially Muslim are about as devout and strict as most people who are officially Christian or Jewish. I’ve poured back many a brew with “Muslim” friends and colleagues, for whom this is theoretically forbidden – just as I’ve gone out for oysters with Jews and… well, I can’t keep track of what Christians aren’t supposed to do, there are just so many sects now. But I’ve probably done it with them.
‘Causes offense’. I don’t care. Spend a couple of hours on the Internet and it’s clear that every fetish, bad idea, mythos, conspiracy theory, ideology, and idiocy, has rabid adherents. If you choose to be guided by your personal area of intellectual perversion, so be it. But try to elevate it to the level of social policy, and many such as I are going to call bullshit.