Presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen's hijab obsession is merely a symptom of the country's deeply rooted Islamophobia

To paraphrase philosopher Antonio Gramsci, we are witnessing not an event, but an epoch. The eventual rise to power of the National Rally would be one of its chapters.

This epoch began with the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the forces at play today are the mature offspring of that “war on terror”. While these movements refuse to hide their supremacist nature and authoritarian intent behind a veneer of political decorum, they do not fundamentally differ at their core from the governments that preceded them; they merely call for draconian Islamophobic measures to be adopted faster, with the backing of entire societies.

The proposed hijab referendum in France should not be understood only as the move of an obsessively Islamophobic party, nostalgic for its colonial past. More broadly, it offers a perfect opportunity for an obsessively Islamophobic nation, nostalgic for its colonial past, to adopt legislation that could drive the last nail into the coffin of Muslims’ freedom of religion.

    • dreamkeeper@lemmy.world
      9·
      6 days ago

      We didn’t even have a landslide. The GOP barely won control of the house and Senate and still managed to destroy our country.

    • pipes@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      6 days ago

      They really don’t :( Local TV news always tone down (and professional translation helps a lot with this too) the degenerate things said by authoritarian figures, heck they basically give them a platform everyday. Report by copy-pasting, no critique whatsoever. They don’t report acts of violence by police or erosion of citizen rights, they just repeat what’s said on media panels, twitter, truth social