As the burkini wars roil France, a prominent French Muslim politician has turned accusations of racism on the “modest” swimsuit’s staunchest defenders, who gathered this weekend at a “decolonial” conference that was closed to whites.
Amine El Khatmi, rising young star of the Socialist party, member of its National Council, and assistant mayor of the city of Avignon, told Heat Street he was “outraged” by the “non-mixed” Camp d’ete decolonial (Summer Decolonial Seminar) open only to victims of alleged “French state-sponsored” or “structural racism” — i.e. browns, blacks, Muslims, trans, queers, and various so-called “intersectional” categories. Not even mixed couples could attend if one partner was a member of “dominant social groups.”
Despite his so-called “raced” status, the practicing Muslim of Moroccan heritage, and concrete symbol of the success of France’s immigrant-origin populations, said he was infuriated by the conspicuous silence among his fellow left liberals and other mainstream political groups in France.
“How can people who put themselves forward as ‘anti-racist’ come together and reproduce the same schema that they purport to combat?,” said El Khatmi of the “training seminar in political anti-racism” that took place in Reims, in France’s Champagne-making region. “It is unthinkable.”
“I believe the urgent struggle against all forms of racism is the business of EVERYONE. All citizens who love the Republic and the spirit of its motto [liberty, equality, fraternity and laicite or secularism] must engage in this combat. I denounce the actions of the organizers of this meeting who do nothing to fight racism — on the contrary they play the game of the [far right] National Front.”
“Finally I regret that disapproval of this conference has not been stronger, apart from a few isolated voices like [Prefect and ministerial delegate on the fight against racism and anti-Semitism] Gilles Clavreul and mine.”
“Imagine if the situation were reversed [excluding browns, blacks, Muslims] and no one said anything. It’s intolerable.”
El Khatmi could not contain his “indignation and anger” over the conference, heavily associated with the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), the group that has led the Burkini legal defense challenge in the name of French Muslims and vociferously denounced France as racist toward Muslim women. Except the group is not “mainstream” at all. It emerged from France’s radical Muslim Brotherhood milieu, is supported by the ever-present Islamist polemicist Tariq Ramadan, and fellow Qatar-funded agitators, and has direct ties to extremist mosques and hate preachers, according to recent reports in Le Canard Enchaine.
CCIF director Marwan Mohammed gave a seminar on police violence in French neighborhoods and the “decolonial” conference’s social media pages urged attendees to sign up to the anti-Islamophobia network.
The seminar that critics noted signaled a worrying importation of American academic post-colonialist ideology of “safe spaces” was reprehensible especially because it was taking place in a hotel establishment certified by the sports ministry, El Khatmi said. “That people who are supposed victims of state-sponsored racism meet in a place that is forbidden to a part of the population is something utterly scandalous,” he said. “I am astonished by the absence of reaction by the city’s elected representative.”
The 28-year-old lawmaker is intimately acquainted with the radical anti-capitalist, France-hating (one seminar speaker, Said Bouamama, released a book and song called “Fuck France: the right to be insolent”) Islamophobia-is-everywhere, conspiracy-giddy crowd behind the “decolonial” event.
El Khatmi was defamed and attacked on social media as a Collabeur or Collaborating North African, and ‘Useful Arab,’ received death threats and saw his mother’s home address published online by an ISIS-linked account in January. His crime? Saying on Twitter that he was appalled by radical “anti-racist” Wiam Berhouma’s insulting on national TV of French — and white and Jewish — intellectual Alain Finkielkraut.
Some of El Khatmi’s most aggressive trollers included co-organizer of this weekend’s conference Sihame Assbague. Those behind the conference — co-organizer Fania Noel is an activist for the “non-mixed collective of Africans and Afro-descendants” — have taken care to not say directly that they ban “whites,” however they state that the seminar is reserved for “victims of structural racism” and is unabashed about its “non-mixite” police, excluding by definition Caucasians.
“Whatever dominant social groups are concerned, it seems to us that ‘non-mixite’ (no mixing) is a political necessity,” the organizer wrote on the decolonail conference’s official website.
Although the physical protests against the conference were left to some National Front militants, and journalists were not permitted to attend as observers, some mainstream academics joined in the criticism of the event featuring segments on: “how to decolonize the imagination”; Afro-feminism and “medical racism”; the “struggle against the Negrophobia of raced non blacks”; “white universalism,” and “combat Islamophobia, the most republican of racisms.”
“Rosa Parks would be turning in her grave,” declared the head of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism Alain Jakubowicz in Marianne magazine, in a sign that some French intellectuals and activists are resisting a US-style post-colonial studies takeover of French political thinking.
“All of us who are attached to the universality of our values, so dearly acquired, must resist this logic of poisonous regression that wants to take us back more than two centuries.”
“The logic…is mad and dangerous: to pretend that you must have been a victim of discrimination to fight against it is an aberration which, under the cover of anti-racism, establishes a segregation that would be the envy of the Ku Klux Klan or the worst stalls of the colonial exhibitions. Separating blacks from whites to struggle against racism is the negation of that very fight for equality.”
Jakubowicz also disputed the claim the French state was institutionally racist.
“Vichy [the Nazi collaborationist World War II French regime] was a “racism of the state” because it had inscribed in its laws the segregation of Jews before organizing their deportation in collusion with the Nazis.
“Apartheid in South Africa was a “racism of the State” because it had constitutionally established separatism between blacks and whites. Colonialism rested on a “racism of the state” because it entrenched a legal regime in the colonies that was dominating and unequal. But who can seriously pretend that the French Republican today is a racist state?”
Philosopher Raphael Enthoven scoffed that “They fight against racial profiling, but they ban whites…welcome to the racist antiracists!”
Political scientist Laurent Bouvet also decried the ‘‘cynicism and manipulation’’ of the “decolonial” event: “Combatting racism deserves better than this, and it should be the business of everyone, without distinction. Assuming that because of the color of a person’s skin or their different experiences, they can’t share the same values and join a common cause, reduces the humanity of the person.”
For Bouvet, the “decolonial” fellow travelers mirror the identity-obsessed extreme right: “They share the idea that there is an essence in the identity of each person. They are essentialists, meaning that whatever your will, your desire, your work, your output you cannot detach yourself from what you are by virtue of your birth.”
The assortment of academics, activists, and “feminists” behind this post-colonial studies talkfest have been the ones cheering the loudest for the burkini and insisting on the so-called institutionalized Islamophobia of the French state. They regularly attack white women who dare speak out on feminism, women, and Islam as “oppressor bourgeois white feminists” wielding their “privilege”.
In line with their American peers, they are viscerally anti-Zionist and veer easily into anti-Semitism. Supporters of the camp d’ete decolonial include backers of Les Indigenes de la Republique or the so-called “damned of the earth” indigenous peoples of the French Republic. The subversive group condemns the so-called “Philo-Semitism” of the French State, and has been accused of being anti-gay as well as anti-Jewish.