France, defamation and Muslims: The French secularist-feminist journalist and LGBT activist Caroline Fourest has been convicted of slander against a 17-year old French Muslim abduction victim and her family for an item broadcast by the public broadcaster France Culture. Those who like me are members of the long-term memory club will recall one Caroline Fourest and her partner Fionetta Venner in their capacities as editors of the French secularist-feminist mangazine Pro-Choix as the original source of a fabricated genealogy of the term Islamophobia long peddled by one Hege Storhaug of Human Rights Service (HRS) in Norway as well as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, which on entirely spurious and fabricated grounds asserted that it was a term invented by Khomeinist mullahs after the Iranian revolution of 1979 in order to harass non-chador-wearing Iranian feminists. For the hitherto best work on the genealogy of the term Islamophobia, which traces it back to the work of two French West Africanists Maurice Delafosse and Alain Quillien c. 1910, I readily refer to Fernando Bravo Lopez Towards a Definition of Islamophobia: approximations of the early twentieth century, Ethnic and Racial Studies 34 (4): 556-573. As for Fourest as well as Storhaugh, the French LGBT activist Didier Lestrade asks the right question: How does a lesbian, well aware of the simplistic coverage and stigmatisation of her own minority in the media, end up reproducing exactly the same stigmatising treatment of Muslims? lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/11/18/valeria-costa-kostritsky/the-world-according-to-caroline-fourest/
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 07:32:12 +0000
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