EXCLUSIVE: French President Emmanuel Macron told Brut what he really thinks about Islam in an exclusive interview.
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00:00France has no problem with Islam.
00:02France was attacked because we defended freedom of expression.
00:06You can answer me, contest me, bring your truth,
00:09but at no time will I forbid you this freedom,
00:12and I will not justify violence in the name of the fact that I shock you.
00:16I was struck by the Anglo-Saxon press.
00:18They even said, these French are strange,
00:21they insulted the Prophet, they do not like Islam.
00:24This Islamist ideology, and not Islamic, Islamist,
00:28that is, those who, using the religion that is Islam,
00:31make an ideology that consists of saying,
00:34the values ​​of the Republic are no longer mine.
00:36I no longer believe in equality between men and women.
00:40I'm going to take my little girl out of school.
00:44I'm going to veil her entirely.
00:47I'm going to have more rigorous practices.
00:50I'm going to justify acts of violence.
00:53And there is, at one point, if I can say,
00:56a whole series of factors that come to the fore.
00:58Samuel Paty was not someone who did not want to understand Islam.
01:03He had forged a relationship with the Institute of the Arab World
01:06to understand things, to bring his students.
01:09So he knew that, and he was asking himself, I think, the same questions.
01:14But it is that those who have this ideology,
01:18prosper on what?
01:20On our failures.
01:22On our failures, it is the resentment that is born in a part of the population.
01:26For cultural, historical reasons.
01:28That is, the failure of integration with France.
01:31We can go back to it, but it is an imaginary construction
01:35which is, basically, what it is to be French.
01:37And we left a lot of our young and less young people with the idea
01:40that they were not a part of France.
01:42There is then the economic and social resentment.
01:45It is these discriminations,
01:47the hiring, the housing, they feed this resentment.
01:50None of these factors justifies or allows to excuse terrorism.
01:56But it allows to explain it for parties and to deconstruct it.
02:00It means that we have gone crazy.
02:02That's the subject.
02:04And that people do not respect a fundamental principle of the Republic
02:08which is what is called secularism.
02:10That is, the fact that you can, in France,
02:13believe or not believe, freely.
02:16That the only thing I ask you
02:18is to fully respect the laws of the Republic.
02:21And that in France, we can indeed criticize absolutely everything.
02:24President of the Republic, government, journalists, a religion.
02:27But we can criticize any religion.
02:29We can criticize any philosophical current.
02:31And we must not tolerate any violence in the name of this criticism.
02:34We have the right to criticize a religion in France, whatever it is.
02:37But we have criticized much more in France the Catholic religion
02:40than we have criticized Islam.
02:42But because we are protected in a free debate.
02:46And that does not mean that we do not respect this religion.