France has a legacy of plunder, bloodshed and Islamophobia. The french invaded Algeria in 1830 and killed around 825,000 indigenous Algerians from 1830-1875 according to Ben Kiernan. The indigenous population dropped by one third from 1830 to 1873. French Lieutenant Colonel Lucien de Montagnac, an officer in French expeditionary force in Algeria, gave the true picture of “French civilization” in a letter to a friend dated March 15, 1843: “This is how, my dear friend, we must make war against Arabs: kill all men over age of 15... take all their women and children, load them onto naval vessels, send them to the Marquesas Islands or elsewhere. In one word, annihilate all who will not crawl beneath our feet like dogs.” (“Lettres d’un soldat,” Plon, Paris, 1885; republished by Christian Destremeau, 1998). By 1845, the French military was implementing this heinous program. General Aimable Pélissier reported the massacre of a Berber tribe of 1,500 people who had taken refuge in a cave. The French troops commanded by Pélissier burned the Berbers alive including all the children. The French also pioneered death flights. They would fly Algerians in helicopters or planes, seal both their feet in a concrete block then throw them in the Mediterranean or Atlantic sea. They were nicknamed “Crevettes Bigeard" (Bigeard's shrimps). Colonel Marcel Bigeard came up with this technique. In the beginning Algerians were 'simply' dropped into the mountain ranges, but their bodies were found. The second stage was the sea drop, but a few managed to swim back to the coast and escape death. So the next step, suggested by friend General Aussaresses, was to drop them with their feet poured into concrete in the open sea. Former secretary general Paul Teitgen revealed that hundreds of people were executed by this method, without trial--on orders of General Jacques Massu and Colonel Marcel Bigeard. Teitgen estimates that 3,024 Algerians have disappeared.
A little known chapter of the French conquest of Algeria is that almost 18,000 Algerian Muslims were beheaded in the mid-19th century for resisting French colonialism. The skulls of these resistance warriors are still sit in the vaults of the French National Museum in Paris. The demand by Algerian state to handover these skulls for Burial is still pending and not accepted by France. Algeria will insist that France must apologise for France’s crimes committed during the 132 years of harsh colonisation and France always refused for so.
In 1870, France passed the Cremieux Decree in which the Jewish minority in Algeria were granted French citizenship but the majority Muslims were declared second class citizens unless they renounce their culture and religion.
Whatever Islamophobia that exists today in France is a legacy of this same colonialism and it has nothing to do with extremism. Muslims and Black people in France today are concentrated mostly in outlying suburbs, banlieues and slums and face police violence, generational poverty, fake cases and state sponsored suppression. Today, Muslims are portrayed as the ‘enemy within’ in France; a term originally coined by René Gontier for Jews in 1930s. It was imitated by MS Golwalkar who is Narendar Modi's ideological father in his book ‘Bunch of Thoughts’ where he termed Muslims as India's internal threat.
Today Muslims in France are living under threates and fear under President Macron and his divisive policies that ignite deep-rooted Islamophobic sentiment in the country amid reports of stabbings and violent attacks upon Muslims. Recent attacks gain pace after deeply divisive speeches of President Macron targeting the Muslim community through the extended crackdown on mosques, Muslim neighborhoods and Muslim charity organizations. Since Macron's inauguration as president in 2017, France has become a hostile country for Muslims. Although groups such as ISIS, which claimed many attacks in France, are rejected by the France's Muslim community, still the tate sponsored marginalization, suppression and propaganda are imposed upon the Muslims.
