Is France Fueling Muslim Terrorism by Trying to Prevent It?

Once again, terrorism strikes France — and once again, terrorism is exposing the country’s dangerous contradictions.

First there was the murder of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who was decapitated near Paris on Oct. 16 by a young Chechen man after Mr. Paty showed students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression. Then, on Thursday, three churchgoers were knifed and killed in the southern city of Nice. The prime suspect in that attack is a Tunisian man who later yelled “Allahu akbar” at police officers.

Within days of Mr. Paty’s murder, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, announced a crackdown against people “who spread hate online.” {snip}

In addition to security and counterterrorism measures, the French government responded to Mr. Paty’s killing by vigorously reaffirming the right of free speech — including the right to satirize and blaspheme — as well as the central role of France’s version of secularism, known as laïcité, in all state institutions, especially public schools.

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But the French government’s conception of radical Islamism also rests on a problematic assumption: namely that the principal cause of terrorism in France is the failure of French Muslims to fully endorse the country’s secular culture.

In early October, before the recent killings, Mr. Macron had announced a new government plan, including an upcoming comprehensive bill, “to strengthen laïcité and consolidate republican principles” in order to combat what he calls “separatism.”

The president’s notion of “separatism” seems to assume that a significant minority of Muslims are tempted to set themselves apart somehow from the rest of French society, perhaps by creating enclaves in disaffected suburbs or building Muslim ecosystems of sorts around Islamic schools, halal stores or mosques.

But this diagnostic is questionable, and it risks being self-defeating: It, itself, may endanger social cohesion.

One problem with this idea is that it implicitly treats Muslims as though they were a separate category of French people, and immature citizens who lag in their comprehension of secular republicanism.

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Muslims who take issue with laïcité typically do so against a more recent and more ideological interpretation of it that is sometimes brandished to blame Muslims for their failure to integrate, as well as other social ills. They feel and fear that this inherently liberal principle is increasingly becoming a cover for anti-Muslim racism, a concept distorted and deployed to make racism respectable.

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The government’s concern about Muslim “separatism” also is problematic for conflating two distinct phenomena: Islamist terrorism, on the one hand, which does attack the symbols of the French nation and, on the other hand, Muslim communalism, which essentially is an expression of some Muslims’ identity as both French citizens and believers in Islam.

Warning against the purported risk of separatism will not help mobilize French Muslims against radicalism or encourage their sense of belonging to the nation — just the opposite.

If anything, it is the French government’s rhetoric that could end up convincing some Muslims that they are indeed different from other French people. The country’s leaders may well be accelerating the creation of precisely that which they fear: a distinct Muslim identity and community within France.