From Washington Post
by Griff White
VINCENNES, France — This city’s first Muslim doctor doesn’t look Muslim.
Or at least, he doesn’t look or act how people expect a Muslim should. Fair-skinned and clean-shaven, he goes about his rounds listening to classical music; a copy of Voltaire’s “Treatise on Tolerance” is nestled on his desk.
Sometimes his patients forget who he is.
“I’m disgusted by Muslim people,” a patient of 10 years recently confided. “They shouldn’t be here.”
France, another casually mentioned, is only for “the true French people.”
“You can’t see in my face that I’m Muslim,” said Karim Bessalem, who has been living in this country for half his life, having escaped the strife of his native Algeria 25 years ago. “People don’t have any problems saying such things in front of me.”
That’s especially true now, more than two months after men acting in the name of Islam gunned down 17 people in attacks thattraumatized the nation. For many of France’s 5 million Muslims — the largest Islamic population in Western Europe — the killings have left them feeling trapped in a vortex, battered both by rising Islamophobia and growing radicalism in their own communities.
The twin forces feed on each other, building in tandem. Together they represent a lingering and potentially devastating counterpoint to themillions who marched in cities across France on the Sunday after the attacks in a solemn and powerful defense of the nation’s core ideals — liberty, equality and fraternity.
Neither anti-Muslim bias nor Islamist extremism is obvious here in Vincennes. Although four of the victims from January’s killings died just a short walk from Bessalem’s office in an assault on a popular kosher grocery store, this leafy and affluent city on Paris’s eastern fringe has long been considered a model of peaceful coexistence. In the aftermath of the attack, city residents say, the bonds among Muslims, Jews and Christians have grown ever tighter.
