French President Emmanuel Macron has said his country is against “Islamist separatism — never Islam”, responding to Financial Times correspondent Mehreen Khan’s op-ed that he claimed misquoted him and has since been removed from the newspaper’s website.
In a letter to the editor published Wednesday, Macron said the British paper had accused him of “stigmatizing French Muslims for electoral purposes and of fostering a climate of fear and suspicion towards them”.
Let us not nurture ignorance by distorting the words of a head of state. We know only too well where that can lead.https://t.co/nRlp1nHTQn
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) November 4, 2020
“I will not allow anybody to claim that France, or its government, is fostering racism against Muslims. Let us not nurture ignorance by distorting the words of a head of state,” he said.
“We know only too well where that can lead,” Macaron added.
An opinion article written by Mehreen Khan, the Financial Times reporter, and published Tuesday alleged that Macron’s condemnation of “Islamic separatism” risked fostering a “hostile environment” for French Muslims.
French Muslims should be Macron's biggest allies against jihadism. But conflating conservatism with Islamism, and targeting thought crimes rather than terrorism and violence is a losing strategy https://t.co/iyUM9FDegz pic.twitter.com/sj0WjRBGbw
— mehreenkhn (@MehreenKhn) November 3, 2020
The article was later removed from the paper’s website, replaced with a notice saying it had “contained factual errors”.
