Something is not quite right about France's response to the Charlie Hebdo crimes. The government is taking on thousands more security people to monitor “Islamic extremists”. It has reversed a seven-thousand reduction in the armed forces and has mounted armed guards over Jewish targets throughout the country. None of this is open to criticism after the enormity of what has happened. But where are the armed guards on mosques and other centers of France's Muslim community? These buildings are already being attacked and desecrated. It will not be long before racist thugs kill innocent Muslims. When that happens the short-sighted and highly-partial policy of the Hollande administration will be laid bare. More tragically, many Muslims, not just in France but throughout Europe, will have become even more certain that they are second-class citizens in their own countries. And there is, of course, more than this, which is promoting a growing despair among Muslims. The liberal establishment has rallied around Charlie Hebdo in defense of its “freedom of speech”. Thus the first post-massacre edition featured yet more cartoons that were custom-built to offend the sensibilities of most Muslims. Yet when controversial French comedian, Dieudonné posted a silly comment on social media, he was roundly condemned. This may have been something to do with the fact that the comedian is banned from performing in France because of his perceived antisemitism. One wonders what the French authorities would have thought of Charlie Hebdo if, during the Israeli bombardments of the Gaza ghetto, it had printed a front-page cartoon of a blood-stained Benjamin Netanyahu drawn as a Nazi with a silhouette of Auschwitz behind him. Would they have defended the scurrilous magazine's right to publish what it wanted, in the name of press freedom, or would it have been banned because it was antisemitic and promoting race hatred? Then there is European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans who is warning, with a straight face, of a “Jewish exit” unless anti-semitic Islamists are curbed. Not only is this alert utterly fatuous but it completely ignores the Jew-hating, as well as Muslim-hating Front National of Marine Le Pen, the rising threat to the French political establishment. Why is Timmermans not warning of an exit of Muslims in the face of growing persecution that is arguably far more extensive than the present wave of anti-semitism? The answer of course is that French Muslims are no more likely to abandon their country than are French Jews. Charlie Hebdo's much-vaunted freedom to print what it likes is a sham. It if had used its pages to deny the holocaust or the massacres of Armenians in Turkey, it would have felt the full weight of French law, which says neither event can be questioned in any way. This is not press freedom. And if a Muslim woman insists on wearing a modest head scarf in school, as well as on all other occasions when she is in public, she is also committing a crime. She cannot wear what she likes. This is not freedom. “Equality” is one of the three values pivotal to Republican France. Islamophobia and anti-semitism are equally despicable. Yet it is becoming depressingly clear that the French authorities take anti-semitism far more seriously than hatred of Muslims.
