Macron launches an international offensive in defense of his plan against radical Islamism

Emmanuel Macron feels misunderstood, or the victim of a campaign fueled by ignorance or bad faith.

After the beheading of a professor for teaching caricatures of Muhammad, it was not all condolences.

Calls for a boycott in some Muslim countries and criticism of French secularism in the English press have led the president to launch a pedagogical offensive to defend his plans against radical Islamism.

Macron usually reserves his persuasive efforts for French domestic politics, where in the three and a half years of his presidency he has dealt with everything from the yellow vest revolt to union mobilizations.

His external image - as a European leader, or an international counterweight to the populist wave that started with Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump four years ago - has given him fewer headaches.

The attack that killed Professor Samuel Paty on October 16 has forced the French president to give explanations to a new audience - this time, an international one - which, in his opinion, misrepresents his words and intentions.

If the Elysee expected signs of international solidarity, it also discovered that, between calls for a boycott of France, some leaders, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, questioned the Frenchman's mental health, or accused him of Islamophobia, as did the Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.

If in Paris they believed that, after the savage murder of Paty, the great international

write editorials proclaiming

- as

after the 9/11 attacks in the United States with the title

-, there it was, again , A disappointment.

Some articles questioned secularism, that French variant - and inscribed in the genes of the modern Republic - of the separation between church and state that serves, among other things, to justify the prohibition of the veil in schools.

Others denounced the discrimination suffered by many Muslims in France.

Or they showed surprise at the displeasure that the French Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, expressed in an interview regarding halal food sections in supermarkets.

Another described the closure of Islamist organizations and a mosque after the attack as "repression against Islam."

While the boycott campaign in the Muslim world was partly a reflection of the geopolitical clash between France and Turkey, criticism in the international press evidenced a cultural fracture: the misunderstanding of French secularism - encoded in the 1905 law, which guarantees the freedom of worship and at the same time the neutrality of the Republic before religions— and all the debates that its interpretation provokes in France itself.

"There are important forces in the United States and the Middle East that, from different points of view, defend models that fragment societies, models that finally incite withdrawal on themselves and the fact of feeling good in their own community," he summarized this week, In a virtual meeting with EL PAÍS and other media, the French Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer.

"They are models that go against the republican idea," he added, referring to North American multiculturalism and systems in Muslim countries.

Last weekend, the president addressed the Muslim world.

He chose, for this, the Qatari chain Al Jazeera.

"We will not renounce cartoons, drawings, even if others back down," he had affirmed days before in the speech paying tribute to Paty at the Sorbonne University.

And there were those who interpreted it as if the State assumed these cartoons, published by a private medium, as their own.

In Al Jazeera, Macron recalled, first, that

has caricatured the other great religions (and also, viciously, Macron and his wife).

And he clarified that the cartoons "are not the official newspapers, it is not the French Government that makes them."

"No," he settled.

But he added: "My role is to preserve the right and I will always preserve it."

Protest letter

Macron then addressed another audience, smaller but, in his opinion, influential in the formation of an international public opinion that until now has been rather favorable to the French president.

They were no longer Muslims, but what in France they call the "Anglo-Saxon press."

An opinion piece in the

titled

, strained the Elysee's patience.

Macron wrote to the London newspaper.

He accused the writer of distorting the facts and manipulating his words.

He recalled that he has never used the expression "Islamic separatism", which would refer to the separatism of an entire religion, but "Islamist separatism", in reference to a political ideology based on this religion, an ideology that the president considers threatens the unity of the country.

France fights 'Islamist separatism', in no case Islam, the letter was titled.

The newspaper removed the article from the website "after it became known that it contained factual errors."

400 incidents in the minute of silence by Professor Paty

The French Government has identified "some 400 violations" of the minute of silence that the 60,000 schools in France observed on Monday, the day of the resumption of classes after the autumn break, by Professor Samuel Paty, beheaded on October 16 by an Islamist terrorist . Of these incidents, a dozen are serious, and may have criminal consequences for students. "A serious incident is, for example, the apology of terrorism," the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, clarified on RTL on Friday. In January 2015, after the attacks against the satirical weekly 'Charlie Hebdo' and against a Jewish supermarket, there were already episodes of response to the tributes. In a meeting with correspondents this week, Minister Blanquer considered that this time "the vast majority" of students had observed the minute of silence "spontaneously", because "they perfectly understood the seriousness of what was at stake." "Now," he added, "the fact that we had warned that we would be intransigent surely also helped a little."