Macron bien accompagné.
France and the spectral menace of ‘Islamo-leftism’ - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/02/22/france-macron-islamo-leftism
It’s a culture war that echoes in other parts of the world, too. Illiberal, nationalist governments from Hungary to Turkey to India have taken aim at certain academic institutions and, in some instances, installed regimes of censorship. In the United States, the political right has spent years grousing against the intellectual left. Anger over “Islamo-leftism” may be an explicitly French concern, but it can already be implicitly heard in the American conversation, with scaremongering over open border invasions of refugees and the “Maoism” of “cancel culture” on university campuses now seemingly the twin pillars of far-right politics.
Some critics likened the charge of “Islamo-leftism” to that of “Judeo-Bolshevism” a century ago. That anti-Semitic slur cast Jewish communities in Europe as dangerous, subversive fifth columns and foreshadowed the hideous genocide to come.
The present term, at best, highlights “the difficulty of the French state to think of itself as a state within a multicultural society,” Sarah Mazouz, a sociologist at CNRS, to the Times. She added the invocation of “Islamo-leftism” was aimed at “delegitimizing” new thinking on race, gender and other subjects, “so that the debate does not take place.”
French scholars criticized both that chilling effect the term seems to have, as well as its crass mischaracterization of the fields of academic inquiry in its crosshairs. That was already apparent in Vidal’s own rather confused rhetoric — in one interview, the minister appeared to link the presence of a Confederate-flag waving Trump supporter at the U.S. Capitol to the spread of left-wing cultural studies on American campuses.