Our beloved ones according to Askolovitch Claude:

“This is the story of a vaguely known journalist who has seen others, who finds himself unemployed for having defended halal meat. He decides to make a book of it, to understand what happens to us, in this country where Madame Le Pen is proclaimed "normal" and where socialists want to ban veiled childcare workers.
This is the story of these Muslims of France, whom we do not love with the best intentions in the world, and who are forced to blend in or hide, to lie about themselves or to perish socially. .
It's the story of a banker who prays secretly in a broom cupboard, of a student who takes off her veil to get an internship, of a Salafist who drives buses and visits Disneyland, of a doctor who avenges her university mother who was never able to work - because the Republic didn't want her veil. And that of an ecologist who could have become a minister in Islamist Tunisia, of a rapper married at 15 before the Imam, of a chaste footballer for the love of God, and of a Muslim brother preacher who quotes Camus and writes poems.
They are complaining French people who eat halal tournedos and sometimes find many reasons in Hamas – because nothing is simple, what do you think?
It is the story of a country, ours, which treats a part of itself badly, which lies to itself about the Republic and secularism when it tramples on people and misses what it is becoming: a mixed-race France and also Muslim, unstable and complex, a rich France, if she dared, if she stopped trembling and taking pleasure in her decline. »

Authors biography:

He is like that, Claude Askolovitch: excessive, endearing, self-centered. Courageous too. He has just published, Nos Mal-Aimés, These Muslims whom France does not want (Grasset). And that earned him to be at the heart of a controversy.

We attack him with heavy weapons. He is denounced as "Islamophile" by those he accuses of being "Islamophobe": Caroline Fourest in Le Nouvel Obs, Natacha Polony in Le Figaro, Maurice Szafran and Eric Conan in Marianne or Elisabeth Levy in Le Point - all of them settle his account. And these excessively violent attacks have made the success of the book, despite themselves: the best way to reduce the effect of a book you don't like is not to talk about it, especially not to attack it with vitriol!

What does Askolovitch say in this book that has become a pamphlet? It is first of all an investigation: he met a Muslim who helps the homeless and offers them soup kitchens; a peacemaker imam in Drancy; a bank clerk who prays secretly in a broom cupboard; a Salafist who works at the RATP; a Force Ouvrière trade unionist in Marseille, OM supporter – and a fundamentalist. In short, portraits. Well chiselled.

Beyond the investigation, a thesis underlies Claude Askolovitch's book and it is this that is the subject of debate. According to the author, we have become Islamophobes. And that it is secularism (therefore France) which now oppresses Muslims. He regrets "that Islam [is] an obsession, a French illness, a Gallic passion, a national mood" .

Askolovitch denounces the secular camp which oppresses and oppresses: he has in the crosshairs - even more than the right or the extreme right - the coercive secular left. Who “made this mess”. Trapped debate in which we are engulfed with this book.

For Claude Askolovitch, we would therefore have gone too far. Banning the veil at the university is excessive. He defends veiled women who take care of children in their homes, because secularism applies to the public space, and not to the private space. He also takes up the defense of the veiled employee of the Babyloup crèche, and devotes an entire chapter to the case. (He denounces a "false secularism" because, according to him, it was not normal to sanction this employee in the name of secularism because it was a private school, not public. His position echoes the decision so controversial, and yet so predictable, of the Court of Cassation which ruled in favor of the veiled employee).