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At a time when the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood is finally being recognised and taken seriously by the French authorities, the minister for higher education and the minister for national education are finding ways to argue about the existence of Islamo-leftism at university. Clarity of vision is not yet universally shared at the highest levels.
On Monday, July 7th, French Minister of higher education Philippe Baptiste, interviewed on the parliamentary TV channel, calmly stated that “Islamo-leftism” did not exist “as an academic term.” Seeking to reframe the debate within “reasonable” limits, he argued that too much was being made of the issue, despite the existence of a few isolated cases. He was taking a stand in a debate that has been rocking French universities for many months over the existence of a clearly identified trend in French academia in favour of Islamist propaganda, supported by left-wing teachers and researchers, and thriving against a backdrop of wokeism.
Several scandals have proven that this Islamo-leftist trend in French universities is not a fantasy. Professor Fabrice Balanche at Lyon II University recently paid the price for this when he became the target of a well-orchestrated smear campaign for expressing his disapproval of the organisation of iftar banquets—communal meals to break the daily Islamic Ramadan fast—on his faculty premises.
On the Right, Baptiste’s statements sparked outrage over the minister’s apparent blindness. “How long are you going to deny this Islamist offensive that keeps testing our limits?” protested Senator Agnès Evren, spokesman for Les Républicains. Jean-Michel Blanquer, former minister of national education, said he was shocked by Baptiste’s naivety: “To say that Islamo-leftism does not exist is a bit like saying that the Earth is not round,” he thundered.
Élisabeth Borne, minister of national education and former prime minister, intervened in the media to rebuke her minister. “This trend exists in society, so it necessarily exists in universities,” she replied on the radio on Sunday, July 13th, in a dig clearly aimed at the minister under her authority. Borne took advantage of her rebuke to recall the harmful alliance that has formed between Islamists and the far Left: “These are people on the far Left who consider Muslims to be an electoral force, who court them by encouraging communitarianism and trivialising radical Islamism,” she said. She then explicitly targeted the far-left party La France Insoumise (LFI) for its harmful tactics: “This is part of the battle being waged by LFI, particularly to bring these ideologies into universities, and they make no secret of it.”
Baptiste attempted to defend himself by pointing out that, as he himself was from the academic world, his remark was intended solely as an intellectual debate. He hid behind a 2021 statement by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the French public agency that supports research, which claimed that Islamo-leftism did not exist in universities. This was the same CNRS that refused to protect researcher Florence Bergeaud-Blackler when she received death threats following her research on the Muslim Brotherhood.
This dispute between two members of the same government on such a crucial issue speaks volumes about the inability of those currently in power to make a clear diagnosis of the situation regarding the Islamist infiltration of French society. The debates surrounding the publication of the report on the Muslim Brotherhood corroborate this observation: the problem is only just beginning to be identified, albeit painfully, while solutions will certainly take months or even years to be developed and implemented.
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