Le Pen’s anti-Muslim rhetoric tapped Algerian War post-colonial resentments

Evidence

Ever the political opportunist, Le Pen next began raising “security concerns” with regard to immigration issues, mostly focusing on French Muslims of North African origin. This successfully tapped into unresolved post-colonialist feelings of the white French populace regarding the Algerian War. And to shield herself from charges of outright Islamophobia, Le Pen couched her rhetoric in economic and political terms—and steered away from cultural identity. This was effective, and further broadened her political base away from the racist fringe and into to the bourgeois mainstream. A public opinion poll published in Le Monde newspaper found that 46 percent of French people agreed that Marine Le Pen is “the face of patriotic conservatives, with traditional values,” while a lesser 43 percent believed that she leads the “nationalistic, xenophobic extreme right” fringe party in France. — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 495

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant: the reader’s present-wound machine ties postcolonial grievance to current Islamophobia. — connects to: The Algerian War was anticolonial, not religious, yet seeded later jihad — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 47; French colonial propaganda falsely depicted pre-conquest Algeria as anarchic — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 83; French repression pushed postwar Algerian nationalism toward armed extremism — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 224 (+4 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 495

Related

• French Muslim presence traces to Algeria’s 1830-1962 colonial conquest (similarity 0.84)
• The Algerian War was anticolonial, not religious, yet seeded later jihad (similarity 0.84)
• French colonial propaganda falsely depicted pre-conquest Algeria as anarchic (similarity 0.80)
• The Algerian War politically divided French intellectuals over colonial violence (similarity 0.80)
• Contemporary anti-Western sentiment and Western Islamophobia both stem from the colonial legacy (similarity 0.80)
• France feared a shift from Arabisation to Islamisation of minorities (similarity 0.79)
• French Islamophobia predates the War on Terror and traces to Algerian colonialism (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Colonial prejudices sexualized and dehumanized the Algerian Muslim #expands (0.70)
• French Muslim presence traces to Algeria’s 1830-1962 colonial conquest #expands (0.60)
• Algerians read the retreat of colonialism from settler fear and anger #corroborates (0.55)