Donald Trump Takes Us To The Clash Of Civilizations.

Donald Trump takes us to the "clash of civilizations"

  The new American president kept his promise of candidate: attacking Muslims. On the advice of Islamophobic ideologues, the head of state also runs counter to the interests of the United States.

  In the conflict with radical Islamic jihad followers, Westerners have always been careful to distinguish between an extremist minority and Islam as the religion of more than a billion people on this planet. With Donald Trump, this important precaution disappears, at the risk of making the "shock of civilizations" of the late American political scientist Samuel Huntington a self-fulfilling prophecy, posing Europe, placed in the front line, a serious challenge.

  The frontal attack on the Muslims was indeed present in the campaign of the Republican candidate, but many observers expected that once settled in the White House, Donald Trump attenuates his globalizing discourse and adopts an attitude More reasoned, taking into account the complexity of the Islam-West relations.

  As was shown by the decree prohibiting the entry of citizens and natives of seven Muslim-majority countries, it was necessary to discredit an exclusionary measure based solely on religious criteria, even if the White House Is subsequently forbidden.

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  Of course, the measure is met with fierce resistance from part of the American civil society, and is the subject of an arm wrestling with the federal justice, but the evil is done.

  The "Executive Order" signed by Donald Trump sets the tone for an administration that breaks with the previous one, that of Barack Obama who, since his speech in Cairo in 2009, had tried to reach out to the world Arabo-Muslim, while pursuing an endless war against the jihadists, those of Al-Qaeda and then of the Islamic State.

Surrounded by islamophobes

  European, French and German leaders in particular, who are far more exposed to Jihadist terrorism than the Americans, carefully maintain this distinction between a religion and those of its followers who have chosen a violent path, resisting the extreme right-wing radical which tries to practice An amalgam with ideological motivations.

  They have been reinforced in this approach by the fact that although natives of European countries are present in large numbers among foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq and are the cause of numerous terrorist acts in Europe, Not found among the millions of Muslims in Europe the sounding board they were hoping for. They believe that the battle against the extremists will be waged, and won, with the majority of Muslims, and not against them.

  These precautions are no longer used in Washington, where the new president is surrounded by men who have expressed unashamed Islamophobia, beginning with his "Rasputin", Steve Bannon, the special adviser and now a member of the National Council for Security (NSC) of the White House. The NSC is chaired by another Islam slave, General Michael T. Flynn, who tweeted, before his appointment, that "the fear of Muslims is RATIONAL [capital letters are from him, NDLA]". - fear of Muslims in general, not fundamentalists or jihadists.

  Steve Bannon, the former alt-right journalist, who was asked by the New York Times a few days ago in an editorial if he was not "President Bannon "As its influence is great, appears as worked through apocalyptic visions of history. To be convinced, it is enough to see the film "Torchbearer" which he wrote and realized in 2016, just before the electoral campaign, and in which images of the Nazism and the macabre executions of the Islamic State alternate with a Message repeated end to end: there is salvation only with God.

The challenge for Europeans

  The attitude of the small nucleus of ideologues around Donald Trump poses a double challenge: to the republican establishment in the United States, on the one hand, which has a more refined understanding of the complexity of situations, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, who last week estimated that the nuclear deal with Tehran was there to stay; Europeans, who are increasingly worried about the Islamophobic drift of the new administration, and must find ways to dissociate themselves from it before being dragged in spite of themselves into the "clash of civilizations" desired by some.

  The European Union has so far chosen a soft approach, but this may not be possible for very long. When he published his famous article in the magazine "Foreign Affairs" in 1993, Samuel P. Huntington had accompanied the expression "clash of civilizations" with a question mark. The book which followed removed this precaution, and aroused a great many

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