Muslim teen’s police shooting ‘sign of institutional Islamophobia, racism’ in France: Expert

LONDON (AA): Last week’s fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old Muslim of North African descent in a Paris suburb should not be seen as an individual, isolated case, says a British social theorist and expert on colonialism.

Salman Sayyid, professor of social theory and decolonial thought at the University of Leeds, says it lays bare the country’s institutional racism and Islamophobia.

Protests have engulfed France since June 27, when a police officer shot dead Nahel M., a Muslim teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent, claiming that he tried to run them over.

Videos of the incident proved otherwise and the officer faces a formal investigation for voluntary homicide.

Hundreds of people have been arrested in the protests, which began in Nanterre, the working-class Paris suburb where Nahel was shot, and spread across the country.

France has been facing fierce criticism over its law enforcement policies, particularly with regards to discrimination against immigrants and minority communities, who have deep grievances and distrust of a police force they accuse of being racist, Islamophobic and excessively violent.

Sayyid says the manner of Nahel’s killing is “not new.”

He says the French state and sections of its society have been “pursuing an Islamophobic orientation for a number of years.”

“I think it (Nahel’s killing) is a sign of institutional Islamophobia and institutional racism in the French law enforcement system, in the French criminal justice system, and in the French state itself,” he says.

He says the French police’s attitude toward people “especially those that are considered to be ethnically marked or marked by Muslimness is institutionally racist and institutionally Islamophobic.”

The French government, he adds, will not admit to that because “they don’t even have the category of racism.”

“This kind of denial is quite common in many systems that are oppressive and which have no capacity for reflection,” says Sayyid.

‘Mainstreaming of Islamophobia’

“I think what is happening in France is dangerous not just for Muslims and other ethnic or marginalized groups, but for society itself because the erosion of civil rights and the erosion of sort of democratic rights will affect everybody,” says Sayyid.

He asserts that combating Islamophobia is essential to protect the rights of all people because “there cannot be civil rights for all if there are no civil rights for Muslims.”

Sayyid says there has been a “mainstreaming of Islamophobia” in the EU, which is “particularly alarming.”