Pakistan PM Slams Macron, Demands Facebook Censor ‘Islamophobia’

Macron
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Virginia Hale

Pakistan’s prime minister has slammed Emmanuel Macron over measures by the French leader to stem the tide of radical Islam.

Imran Khan took to Twitter to accuse the globalist French president Macron of “attacking Islam” in a way that was likely to increase “radicalisation” amongst followers of the religion.

“This is a time when President Macron could have put a healing touch and denied space to extremists rather than creating further polarization and marginalization that inevitably leads to radicalization,” Khan tweeted.

“Sadly, President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, including his own citizens, and encouraged the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam and our Prophet [Muhammad].”

Also on Sunday, the politician and former international cricket star wrote to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg demanding the platform take measures to ban “Islamophobia”, asserting that “marginalisation inevitably leads to extremism”.

“I appreciate you taking the step to rightly ban any posting that criticises or questions the Holocaust, which was the culmination of the Nazi pogrom of the Jews in Germany and across Europe…

“However, today we are seeing a similar pogrom against Muslims in different parts of the world,” Khan said in the letter, which he also posted to Twitter.

Later on Sunday, Macron wrote to Twitter that the French government does “not accept hate speech” and would “always be on the side of human dignity and universal values”, though he did not address the Pakistani premier directly.

Khan’s denunciation of the French leader followed attacks by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who on Saturday alleged that his French counterpart needed “mental checks” for his criticism of Islam and radical Muslims.

Speaking to German state media outlet DW, Pakistani researcher and anthropologist Adeel Khan described Imran Khan’s timing in picking a fight with the French president as “terrible”, noting that “last month, a Pakistani migrant attacked two people outside the former Paris headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. It was a foreign policy disaster for his government.”

Khan, who earlier this year provoked astonishment with his hailing of the deceased al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as a “martyr”, last month called on the United Nations (UN) to support the “universal outlaw[ing]” of criticism, mockery and other expression deemed offensive to Muslims.

He made no mention of Islamic bigotry towards other faiths in countries including Pakistan, which is ranked by Christian aid group Open Doors as the fifth most dangerous in the world for Christians, with one man sentenced to death by a Lahore court last month on charges of blasphemy.

Since the public beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty who showed caricatures of Mohammed to school pupils, Macron has been vocal in condemning Islamism and last week projected a giant picture of the Muslim figure onto the side of a government building.

The attack, one of many committed by Islamic radicals in France in recent years, prompted a fierce response from Paris, which has since ordered police to raid mosques and individuals who expressed support for the murder, and is looking at forcing controversial Islamist organisations including “anti-racist” outlet the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) to disband.

Macron was also attacked for alleged Islamophobia earlier this month when he unveiled plans to counter so-called separatism in the country, declaring that Islam was “a religion in crisis all over the world today that is corrupted by radical forms”.

However, as well as giving authorities the power to shut down unregistered religious schools in France, where children were allegedly being taught only prayers and the Koran, he announced a blanket ban on all homeschooling except for medical reasons, to “protect children from religion” including Christianity.

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