Is the New York Times right to say Muslims are fleeing France?

Has the New York Times found a new bête noire? It was for a number of years Britain, damned for having had the temerity to leave the European Union. As Steerpike noted, the Sceptered Isle became a ‘plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole’.

But now it is the turn of France to receive a finger-wagging from the Gray Lady. Last week the NYT ran a lengthy article entitled ‘The Quiet Flight of Muslims from France’, in which it claimed that a growing number of French Muslims are emigrating because of the hostility they have experienced since the wave of Islamist terror attacks in 2015 and 2016 that left more than 200 French people dead.

One man of Algerian origin who has relocated to Philadelphia told the paper he ‘no longer felt safe’ in France. ‘When you live in a big Democratic city on the East Coast, you’re more at peace than in Paris, where you’re deep in the cauldron,’ he explained.

Another interviewee had quit France for similar reasons, settling in Leicester, from where he set up a Facebook group for French Muslims in Britain which now has 2,500 members. The Times didn’t elaborate on this incongruity given that Britain is a plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole.

It is not in fact Muslims who are the most common target of religious bigotry in France; it is Christians and Jews. In 2019 there were 1,052 incidents categorised as anti-Christian, 690 as anti-Semitic and 155 designated anti-Muslim.

That is 155 too many but nonetheless France, despite suffering more Islamist atrocities in the last decade than any other western country, has not experienced any fatal retaliatory attacks against its Muslim population, unlike Britain, New Zealand, Canada, Germany and the USA. This fact must have disappointed the Islamists. The week after 130 people were killed in the co-ordinated Paris attacks in November 2015, the Guardian quoted Jean-Pierre Filiu, an Islam scholar and Sciences Po university professor, who said Isis wanted ‘that today in Paris and in France, Muslims are killed in reprisal. They want a civil war in France.’

Several French Jews, on the other hand, have been murdered in a series of brutal attacks. Indeed, despite representing under 1 per cent of the population, Jews suffer a large proportion of the racist attacks committed in France.

According to the New York Times, ‘anti-immigrant campaigns’ are at the heart of the French election. This is inaccurate. Only Eric Zemmour is running on that ticket. The other right-leaning candidates, including Emmanuel Macron, have pledged only to end uncontrolled illegal immigration. And is it any wonder? In 2020 a Tunisian entered France illegally in order to slaughter three Christian worshippers in a Nice church.

It is just one of many such bloody incidents in recent years. The NYT also states that France’s ‘actual immigration lags behind that of most other European countries’, but EU figures in 2020 show that only Germany and Spain have more documented immigrants than France.

Putting aside its animus against Brexit Britain, the NYT praised the country’s ‘easygoing diversity unimaginable in France’. Can this be right? It was only last year that there was uproar among elements of the British left after the publication of a government-commissioned report on race relations in Britain. They refused to accept the report’s upbeat outlook, and so did the NYT. Quoting Kehinde Andrews, a professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, the paper reported that its findings were ‘so brazen it’s ridiculous’.

France also has an easygoing diversity. This was tragically borne out in 2015 and 2016 when dozens of Muslims were among the victims of Islamic extremists, gunned down on café terraces in Paris or run over as they celebrated Bastille Day in Nice.

Racial discrimination does exist in France but this bigotry also extends to the white working-class. Last week a senior member of the centre-right Republican party, Patrick Karam, sneered that Eric Zemmour appealed to ‘frustrated little whites’.

Yellow Vests or members of last week’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ protestors also feel that they have been pushed to the periphery of French society. They call themselves ‘the forgotten’. The real divide in France isn’t between Muslims and non-Muslims; it’s between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, the winners and losers of globalisation.

On the same weekend that the NYT published its article about the exodus of Muslims from France, the Sunday newspaper, Le Journal Du Dimanche, ran a piece on a similar theme. Only they had another explanation for the emigration. As one interviewee put it, he had resettled his family in Turkey because: ‘We wanted to avoid assimilation, and to inculcate our children with an Islamic education so they will remain Muslim for the rest of their lives.’

The Turkish president, Recep Erdogan, has been courting French Muslims for some time, exhorting them to quit a country he derides as anti-Muslim. In 2020 he launched a furious verbal assault on Macron when the French president, speaking after the decapitation of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty by a young Chechen, described Islam as a religion ‘in crisis’.

The truth is that the small number of Muslims who are leaving France aren’t doing so because the country is ‘Islamophobic’; they are going because they don’t like the Republic’s secularism. And nor, it seems, does the Gray Lady.