France’s Muslims See No Reason to Honour Charlie

Guardian Weekly (from the Washington Post) 23 January, Gennevilliers, France:

Rather than fall quiet as requested during a national minute of silence after the Charlie Hebdo killings, three boys in Hamid Abdelaali’s high school class in this heavily Muslim suburb of Paris staged an informal protest, speaking loudly through all 60 seconds.
Across France they were not alone. In one school in Normandy, some Muslim students yelled…during that same moment. In a Paris middle school another group of young Muslims politely asked not to respect the minute, arguing to their teacher: “You reap what you sow.”
Abdelaali, a 17-year-old high school senior…said he feels disgusted by a magazine whose provocative cartoons had used the image of Muhammad for satire….Within France’s Muslim community of some 5 million — the largest in Europe — many are viewing the tragedy in starkly different terms from their non-Muslim compatriots. They…[are] arguing that, no, they are not Charlie at all.
Many of France’s Muslims…abhor the violence that struck…earlier this month. But they are also revolted by the notion that they should defend the magazine. By putting the publication on a pedestal, they insist, the French are once again sidelining the Muslim community, feeding into a general sense of discrimination that, they argue, helped create the conditions for radicalization in the first place.
Unemployment and poverty remain far higher among France’s Muslims than in the nation overall. Joblessness and poverty are particularly high in the heavily Muslim Paris suburbs such as Gennevilliers, an area of sprawling, dense apartment blocks….
On the streets here, Charlie Hebdol remains something different, a symbol of what some, such as Mohamed Binakdan, 32, describe as everyday humiliation of Muslims in France.
“You go to a nightclub, and they don’t let you in,” said Binakdan, a transit worker in Paris. “You go to a party, they look at your beard and say, ‘Oh, when are you going to Syria to join the jihad?’ Charlie Hebdo is part of that, too. Those who are stronger than us are mocking us. We have high unemployment, high poverty. Religion is all we have left….And, yes, we have a hard time laughing about it.”
Some insisted there is a double standard in freedom of speech and expression that is biased against Islam. They cite the 2010 so-called burqa ban in France that forbade “concealment of the face” in public, and that Muslim critics say was clearly aimed at devout Muslim women.