SOURCE: TNN BLOG
In a significant foreign policy statement India has expressed solidarity with France in light of recent Islamist terror attacks there: a woman was beheaded and two others killed in a church in Nice within two weeks of a teacher having been decapitated in Paris.
Pakistan’s Imran Khan, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad have taken a diametrically opposite position to India’s, which is hypocritical as they have little to say about China’s radical mistreatment of Muslims (or their own mistreatment of minorities in their countries).
For France, the principle of laicite, a form of secularism from which the rights to offend and caricature also derive, is officially at the core of national identity. That is how lessons in free speech are part of the national curriculum. But evidently many schools have a big challenge with such lessons, particularly when some parents and students receive them as Islamophobia. Finding a way through these contestations will not be an easy task for the nation. But it has to begin with uniting to condemn the violence. Any equivocation on this adds fuel to the fire.
