[by Philippe d'Iribarne. We are reproducing the text of the article published in L'Express here]
The supporters of the school of thought Woke present themselves as the defenders of all the oppressed of the earth, women, "racialized", transgender, homosexual and others. They claim that all those who express the slightest reservation about their vision of the world belong to a camp of evil that refuses to recognize the suffering of the victims. The process is clever if it is a question of protecting themselves from any criticism, but it provides a good example of what makes this current so problematic: for its supporters, the end justifies the means when it comes to imposing their vision of society; fake news, data manipulation, specious reasoning, are fair game if they are of a nature to serve the cause. It is this point that offends those, and this is the case of the members of the Observatory of Decolonialism, who remain attached to the rigor of thought. These are the freedoms that the current Woke constantly takes up with the facts that he strives to denounce with the conviction that the university, first and foremost, must remain the high place of rigor of thought, of intellectual probity, of rigorous confrontation of theories with the facts.
It is by confronting the vision that the movement Woke attempts to impose on the observational data that can be shown how false this vision is. Let us consider, to show this, one of the fields concerned: the reactions of Western societies towards Islam and Muslims. The movement woke in its component often described as Islamo-leftist, links all of these reactions to various manifestations of Islamophobia. But it is only at the cost of a set of intellectual manipulations that he manages to ensure the connection between this term and what happens in the concrete of social life.
The heart of the approach is to try to make people believe that the reactions of Western societies towards Islam and the Muslim world are in no way motivated by the reality of this world but are only the expression of fantasies, prejudices, bad feelings which animate Westerners whenever anything affecting the Muslim world is in question.
Let us take a typical use of this rhetoric, which can be found in the publications of the CNCDH (National Consultative Commission on Human Rights). The procedure, when negative reactions provoked by the existence of problematic aspects of the Muslim universe are mentioned, consists of never acknowledging that these reactions are justified, but always putting them down to the liabilities of those who react. Thus, its annual report notes the existence of "a conflict of values, considering the Muslim religion and its practices to be in contradiction with the principle of secularism and with the rights of women and sexual minorities". But it is not a question for it of seeing in this conflict a legitimate source of reservations towards the universe of Islam. It affirms, on the contrary, that a " new islamophobia " is at work and that it is this which targets Islam "in the name of a defense of secularism and republican values (equality, women's rights, rights of sexual minorities)." It would then be a question, she professes, of "reversing causality and rejecting the responsibility for racism on those who are its victims."
A fundamental step in the process is to disqualify those who pay attention to what should not be seen by associating them with disreputable characters. Concerning Muslims, this mode of reasoning leads to saying: some, Drumont and others, have spoken ill of the Jews in the past and they therefore belong to the camp of evil; but others today speak ill of Muslims; therefore they also belong to the camp of evil. For their part, today's Muslims are the equivalent of yesterday's Jews. To affirm this equivalence, it is enough to highlight similarities in the ways of speaking ill and there is no need to go and see what is actually happening with today's Muslims on the one hand and yesterday's Jews on the other. It is out of the question to pay attention to what distinguishes their relationships with Western societies to ask whether what was false concerning some can be true concerning others. The rhetoric used to give credence to this amalgamation is tested. Thus, the existence of a certain unity of style of the polemicists, whatever the value of the cause they defend, will be enough to affirm that those they attack are also victims. The equivalence is thus posed between anti-Semitism, "doctrine of hatred directed against the Jews" and Islamophobia, "doctrine of hatred which attacks Muslims", between the "stigmatization of Jews" and the "stigmatization of Muslims", between "anti-Semitic nationalism" and "Islamophobic nationalism", in a unity of "visions of the world which are invaded by hatred of the other".[1] The reasons for taking a critical look at Islam are delegitimized by claiming that it is only a question of "common sense", this term not being taken as evoking elementary common sense based on knowledge of real facts, but as "what all French people know because they have read it in the newspaper or seen it on television", with "the importance given to news items, crimes, attacks, etc."
We are dealing with a type of "reasoning" analogous to that which would lead to saying, when X shouts "fire", there is no need, in order to know what is really going on, to go and see whether or not there is a fire; it is better to note that one day Y shouted "fire" in a lying manner and to deduce from this that those who shout "fire" are all liars.
More subtly, the very term Islamophobia refers to an indiscriminate Pavlovian reaction to everything that touches on Islam and Muslims, considered as such and not in the variety of their manifestations and ways of being, each being judged for what it is. By using this term, we tend to make people believe that such a blind reaction exists. However, the reality is quite different. This appears as well (as we have been able to show in detail in Islamophobia. Ideological intoxication) in opinion surveys conducted among the majority population, in victimization surveys conducted among Muslims, and in tests on the reactions of companies to Muslim job applicants. Thus, Islam as an approach to faith (the five pillars: profession of faith, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, almsgiving) provokes, on the part of the majority population, extremely different reactions from Islam as a social and political order that is the enemy of freedom of conscience and equality between men and women. The former largely benefits from a positive view, the opposite being true for the latter. This clearly shows that it is not Islam per se that is rejected in an Islamophobic reaction, but simply a social and political order that is contrary to the cardinal values of the West.
It is possible that, within the various fields that the movement addresses woke "gender" studies, decolonial studies and others, what concerns the Muslim world is distinguished by its disregard for facts. But what we can already be sure of is that the representation of the world, specific to this movement, as the theater of a merciless fight, in all areas of existence, between the universe of evil - the dominant, whites at the forefront - and that of good - the dominated, "racialized" at the forefront, and their defenders, is a phantasmagoria that can only acquire some credibility to the extent that it knows how to free itself from facts.
