France Church Attack – Burning Issues – Free PDF Download

What happened in France?

• An attacker armed with a knife killed three people inside a church on Thursday in the southern French city of Nice,
• Prompting the government to raise its security alert status to the maximum level hours before a nationwide coronavirus lockdown.
• The attack took place near the Notre Dame church.
• The Notre Dame Basilica is less than a kilometer from the site in 2016 where
• Another attacker plowed a truck into a Bastille Day crowd, killing dozens of people.

High level security

• French President Emmanuel Macron said he would immediately increase the number of soldiers deployed to protect schools and religious sites
• From around 3,000 currently to 7,000, and France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor opened an investigation.

significance

• It was the third attack in two months in France that authorities have attributed to Muslim extremists,including the beheading of a teacher.
• It comes during a growing furor over caricatures of the Prophet that were republished in recent months by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo –
• Renewing vociferous debate in France and the Muslim world over the depictions that Muslims consider offensive but are protected by French free speech laws.

France & Islam

• France has a long and complex relationship with Islam, and its 5 million Muslim citizens (just under 9% of its population).
• Many of whom live in poorer areas and are often marginalized in politics and media.
• The vast majority of those do not support Islamic extremism, but often face unfair stereotypes, experts say.
• The recent attacks are reminders of the tensions in France’s secular society,
• Which frequently extols the values of free speech and freedom to practice religion.

French definition of secularism

• French secularism, or laicite, sees no place for religion in the public sphere. In this way, it is the opposite of how India has practised its secularism.
• Over the years, laicite has been in confrontation with the religious practices of many immigrant groups in France, including the Sikhs.
• But the biggest confrontations have been to do with its Muslim citizens.
• Most French Muslims of today were born in France, descendants of first-generation immigrants from former French colonies in north Africa.
• The French constitution demands that those seeking citizenship must commit themselves to integration.
• But this has proved elusive.
• Macron acknowledged in his speech that there have been shortcomings in how France has dealt with this challenge.
• He acknowledged that the country had not dealt with the legacy of its problematic Algerian war.
• He also said French governments had to take the blame for ghettoising Muslim communities across the country and creating conditions for radicalisation.
• Only a few thousands may be radicalised Islamists, but France’s troubled relationship with Islam has manifested itself in many ways —
• In the 2005 rioting in the Paris banlieus, suburban ghettos where immigrants were confined; in the refusal, on the grounds of laicite, to allow Muslim women to wear the hijab in public spaces; the 2010, burqa ban.
• In 2011, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons triggered angry reactions in the Islamic world,
• But the French hold the right to blaspheme as an absolute individual freedom,
• Equally available to those who want to insult Jesus Christ as those who will blaspheme Islam.
• This is considered the French “way of life”

Turning point in 2015

• The killings at the Charlie Hebdo office in January 2015,
• Apparently to avenge the publication of the Prophet Mohammed cartoons, were a turning point for France.

Q) With respect to the Indian Constitution, a community can be declared a minority community on the basis of?

1. Either religion or Race
2. Either caste or Language
3. Either Religion or Language
4. Only Relgion

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