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They don’t know each other and have never met. Yet the words are the same, the feelings shared, the dismay, the helplessness, the bitterness, the anger, the sadness. Whether they are 30 years old or 70 years old. Investment banker, public service agent, engineer, professor or artist, they are French citizens “well installed”, as they say. Also of Muslim faith and of Arab origin. “And that, in France, is a double punishment,‘all the more since October 7, 2023 (date of the Hamas attack in Israel) »launches Ismail, 59 years old, Parisian painter.
All first names have been changed, none of the witnesses agreed to speak openly. Too many potential problems, they fear. If they are convinced that the public authorities, many media and a part of public opinion are becoming more rigid towards them each year, the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel marks, in their eyes, a new turning point in mistrust. that they think they are arousing.
All denounce political-media speeches “unbearable” towards Muslims, an atmosphere “unbreathable, suffocating”, A “relentlessness of public authorities” towards them. They talk about a “huge waste », evoke a “heartbreak” vis-à-vis a country, theirs, France, which gave them “so much given”who has them “trained”to finally make it “citizens apart”they lament, “scapegoats constantly pointed out”, who come up against a glass ceiling professionally.
“Whatever we do, whatever efforts we make, whatever our skills, we are assigned to our origins and our confessional identity and hindered in our careers”, breathes Haroun, 52, an investment banker from Bordeaux, graduate of a prestigious business school, who believes he did not have the career he should have had.
“Departures number in the thousands”
Some have a faltering voice when they confide their attachment to a “Republic that(they) love but who does not (THE) do not like “is today convinced Youssef, 62 years old, state civil servant and community activist, resident in Maubeuge (North). “Our parents told us that we weren’t in our country, that we were just guests, but we didn’t want to believe them. However, today, we have to admit that we are not legitimate in France”he continues.
To the point of thinking about emigrating. “It is not necessarily a question of going into exile in a Muslim country, but of choosing to live in a country where they will have the same opportunities as any other citizen with equal skills”, observes Hanan Ben Rhouma, editor-in-chief of Saphirnewsa news site about Muslims. “There have always been departures to make their hijra – return to the land of Islam – but that is not what we are witnessing: today, it is a silent emigration of middle managers and Muslim superiors, who, faced with discrimination, the presumption of permanent guilt and the glass ceiling, decided, in pain, to leave France”, describes Abdelghani Benali, imam of the Saint-Ouen mosque (Seine-Saint-Denis) and teacher-researcher at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University.
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