Anwar, PAS slam French president over remarks on Islam

 

French President Emmanuel Macron’s comments were in response to the beheading of a teacher who showed cartoons of Prophet Mohammad in a class. (AFP pic)

PETALING JAYA: Malaysian political leaders have criticised French President Emmanuel Macron over his insensitive remarks on Islam.

In a statement today, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim said Macron’s statement that Islam was facing a crisis around the world was offensive as it was unreasonable.

“To expand reasoned diagnosis of a radical fringe in order to then implicate the whole not only of Muslim communities everywhere but the character of Islam itself is gross ignorance,” he said.

Macron’s comments last week came in response to the beheading of a teacher, Samuel Paty, outside his school in a suburb outside Paris earlier this month, after he had shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad during a class he was leading on free speech.

The teacher became the target of an online hate campaign over his choice of lesson material – the same images that unleashed a bloody assault by Islamist gunmen on the office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the original publisher, in January 2015.

Anwar said the Muslim world did not need lectures any more than it could tolerate libellous smears and Islamophobic rhetoric from the French president.

“So long as he persists in his purblind ignorance of the breadth and sophistication of Islam as a world of values and ideals, so long we will fail to advance the cause of confronting the fundamentalist prejudices that afflict both sides.”

Meanwhile, PAS today submitted a memorandum to the French Embassy in Malaysia objecting to the French president’s statement.

“PAS calls on Muslims to defend Islam. Muslims must unite to keep the sanctity of this religion from being torn and insulted by the enemies of Islam around the world,” PAS information chief Kamaruzaman Mohamad said in a Facebook post today. - FMT