Secularism in France was weaponized against Muslims as legal violence

Evidence

The Hijab Ban was not enough. The French commitment to laïcité, that long-contested concept that commits the state to secularism in public life, was no longer an idea open to debate but a bludgeon used to injure. A weapon, manipulated and maneuvered in the direction of Muslims in France, in the same way that police guns and maces and batons were wielded against those African and Arab and Amazigh youth in the streets of Parisian banlieues. This time, the blows were legal and more lethal. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 710

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines laïcité and reframes how its meaning was contorted into an instrument of harm.