#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #France, UCL AL #331 - Politics, 2012: The call of libertarians against Islamophobia (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 In 2012, the "libertarian and uncompromising appeal against Islamophobia" was

published. Signed by dozens of activists, it raised awareness among libertarians.
---- In September 2012, there was the heckling of Caroline Fourest at the Fête de
l'Huma and a molotov cocktail attack on Charlie Hebdo: following these events, we
were several activists who were exasperated by the debates and comments racists
that can be heard from fellow anarchists in the name of criticism of religion.
Co-written alongside the newspaper L'Autre-Ment and the rap collective
BBoykonsian who published it on their site, this call had a small impact and
triggered a start. Several activists from all currents, and in particular from
Alternative Libertaire, signed the appeal. ---- The year 2012 was that of turning
points on the question after eight years of divisions on the left since the law
of March 15, 2004 which divided the entire progressive spectrum. At the forefront
of the prohibition of the veil we thus find, in addition to the PS and the
chiraquie, actors of the extreme left (these are members of Lutte Ouvrière and a
member of the political bureau of the Revolutionary Communist League who 2003
demanded the expulsion of Alma and Lila Levy from the Henri Wallon high school in
Aubervilliers, a case which gave birth 6 months later to the law of March 15, 2004).

A beginning of mobilization
At the time, apart from the Revolutionary Communist Youth and individual
activists, the far left remained massively aloof from the mobilization initiated
among others by the MIB[1]"a school for all". Ideologically, the reaction won on
the left at that time. In 2005 the growing influence of Michel Onfray made itself
felt (he was quoted for a long time in Le Monde libertarian until recently) with
the publication of his Traite d'athéologie which was extremely well sold and
defended a form of militant atheist identitarianism.

At the turn of 2010, the anti-fascist movement took note that the far right,
notably via the Identitaires and then the FN, made Islamophobia their battle
horse, which initiated the beginnings of mobilization and counter-argumentation.
It was at this time that Riposte Laïque emerged at the initiative of former trade
union and feminist activists, which appeared with the far right from 2009, but
whose speech passed cream on Libertarian Radio which invites them. In 2011, there
was a controversy over the candidacy of Ilham Moussaïd, an NPA activist from
Avignon wearing the hijab, which reignited the debates, especially as the
controversy was national. It forced the NPA to clarify its positions in the
following years, while members and supporters of the Left Front published on
April 20, 2012 on Mediapart a text denouncing the phenomenon of Islamophobia. In
2013 Pierre Tevanian published La Haine de la religion, dismantling the cabal
against Ilham Moussaïd in the name of Marx's sentence on religion as the opium of
the people.

And the "no god, no master"?
One of the motivations for the appeal, in the wake of the Ilham Moussaïd affair,
was in particular the logic of exclusions vis-à-vis activists who call themselves
libertarians but believers. It was about refusing the requirement of atheology
certificates to comrades, especially when they came from working-class
neighborhoods or from Muslim families. For this, the editors of the appeal were
regularly attacked and accused of "theo-compatibility" by certain reactionaries,
and... certain anars.

Now dragging Marx into patents of atheology is not serious, dragging Bakunin into
it is no more serious because in the text God and the State we find all the
theoretical arguments to denounce republicanism and secularism (a very present
day) as an alternative religion for the modern bourgeois state.

During the years that followed, other texts were published[2], and a small
collective took shape, participating in mobilizations, gatherings such as March
14, 2014 for the tenth anniversary of the 2004 law at the call of the collective
Mom All Equal. After the attacks of 2015, the collective decided to strengthen.
He participated in Nuit Debout where he organized workshops alongside other
actors including the CCIF. A public meeting also took place with the CGA in 2016.
In the spirit of a Bernard Lazare who defended Dreyfus despite the denials of
libertarians who, at first, dismissed Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards back to
back and who bathed in the ambient anti-Semitism. The collective was also keen to
denounce the arguments polluting our current, in particular those of Michel
Onfray, the injunction to be "Charlie" in the name of the "libertarian" spirit of
the newspaper, and the excesses that may have appeared in particular at the
Anarchist Federation. The collective had the merit on its small scale of moving
the lines in the anarchist current. When UCL was created, the denunciation of
Islamophobia entered the statutes and the organization made the decline of
Islamophobia on a mass scale a central anti-racist objective, and in particular
committed itself to mobilizing the march against islamophobia november 2019.

New challenges for the decade are to come : if the Republican Spring, the
right-left vanguard of the Islamophobic fight, emerged weakened from the last
elections, the right-wing movement has nevertheless accelerated. The separatism
law was accepted following a weakness in the balance of power to oppose it, and
the state violence, the decline in rights and the permanence of the controversies
no longer cease. Today, the challenge is for activists to advance the issue in
associations and unions, where Islamophobia still arouses major divisions and
where the broader issue of racist discrimination is little taken into account. A
rollback of Islamophobia on a mass scale will not be possible without them.

Nicolas Pasadena (UCL Montreuil)

To validate

[1]Immigration and Suburbs Movement.

[2]Read also "No Islamophobia in the name of libertarian ideas" by Nicolas
Pasadena, on QuartiersLibres.wordpress.com, July 25, 2014.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?2012-L-appel-des-libertaires-contre-l-islamophobie
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