French President Emmanuel Macron Talks About Islam To Brut

Brut India

EXCLUSIVE: French President Emmanuel Macron told Brut what he really thinks about Islam in an exclusive interview.

Transcript

00:00France has no problem with Islam.

00:02France was attacked because we defended freedom of expression.

00:06You can answer me, contest me, bring your truth,

00:09but at no time will I forbid you this freedom,

00:12and I will not justify violence in the name of the fact that I shock you.

00:16I was struck by the Anglo-Saxon press.

00:18They even said, these French are strange,

00:21they insulted the Prophet, they do not like Islam.

00:24This Islamist ideology, and not Islamic, Islamist,

00:28that is, those who, using the religion that is Islam,

00:31make an ideology that consists of saying,

00:34the values of the Republic are no longer mine.

00:36I no longer believe in equality between men and women.

00:40I'm going to take my little girl out of school.

00:44I'm going to veil her entirely.

00:47I'm going to have more rigorous practices.

00:50I'm going to justify acts of violence.

00:53And there is, at one point, if I can say,

00:56a whole series of factors that come to the fore.

00:58Samuel Paty was not someone who did not want to understand Islam.

01:03He had forged a relationship with the Institute of the Arab World

01:06to understand things, to bring his students.

01:09So he knew that, and he was asking himself, I think, the same questions.

01:14But it is that those who have this ideology,

01:18prosper on what?

01:20On our failures.

01:22On our failures, it is the resentment that is born in a part of the population.

01:26For cultural, historical reasons.

01:28That is, the failure of integration with France.

01:31We can go back to it, but it is an imaginary construction

01:35which is, basically, what it is to be French.

01:37And we left a lot of our young and less young people with the idea

01:40that they were not a part of France.

01:42There is then the economic and social resentment.

01:45It is these discriminations,

01:47the hiring, the housing, they feed this resentment.

01:50None of these factors justifies or allows to excuse terrorism.

01:56But it allows to explain it for parties and to deconstruct it.

02:00It means that we have gone crazy.

02:02That's the subject.

02:04And that people do not respect a fundamental principle of the Republic

02:08which is what is called secularism.

02:10That is, the fact that you can, in France,

02:13believe or not believe, freely.

02:16That the only thing I ask you

02:18is to fully respect the laws of the Republic.

02:21And that in France, we can indeed criticize absolutely everything.

02:24President of the Republic, government, journalists, a religion.

02:27But we can criticize any religion.

02:29We can criticize any philosophical current.

02:31And we must not tolerate any violence in the name of this criticism.

02:34We have the right to criticize a religion in France, whatever it is.

02:37But we have criticized much more in France the Catholic religion

02:40than we have criticized Islam.

02:42But because we are protected in a free debate.

02:46And that does not mean that we do not respect this religion.

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