Padamalgam

About

Padamalgam is an internet slang, contraction of the French sentence pas d’amalgame which means no conflation in English. Initially used to convey mockery and criticism of the perceived overly political correctness from the French mainstream media when reporting on acts of violence comitted by people of a specific social background and religious orientation, namely Islam, the term has then been embraced by various islamophobic groups on social networking sites.

Origins

Among the earliest blog posts coining the term is an article from Les enfants de la zone grise^[1], issued on May 5th 2010 and titled “Grande peur des non-pensants”, arguing that the French media are quick on dismissing any argument in favor of a causal relationship between acts of violence comitted by muslims and Islam itself under the pretense of not wanting to promote conflating or denigratory comments against them.

Spread

While the slang didn’t get as much notability online in the years 2010 and 2011, it got a resurgence on March 21th 2012 when it was converted to an hashtag and posted to Twitter, following the Toulouse and Montauban shootings^[2] (shown below).

On that same month, many articles and blog posts^[3]^[4] were made reusing the slang in order to mock the media and the government on how they covered the event by first claiming the attacks were done by a neo-nazi before revealing the real culprit was muslim Mohammed Merah. The Huffington Post also parodied this sentiment of “political correctness”, in a cartoon presenting a spokeperson stating that no conflation should be made between the shooting and Japan because the killer was riding a japanese-made bike^[5] (shown below).

As a matter of fact, many French right-wing groups took this new slang on their own to highlight perceived threats coming from Islam^[6].

The 2015 shootings

The hashtag #padamalgam got a resurgence in popularity following the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting as well as the 2015 Copenhagen shootings^[9]. Many tweets were very critical of the fact muslims were the perpretretors of both attacks. Some users even made parodie images of medicine tablets with the name padamalgam as pills that enable people to be oblivious to a perceived increase in attacks only perpetrated by muslims. Newspaper Le Monde commented on the phenomenon^[7] and its islamophobic tone, highlighting the tweets as well as several facebook pages^[8] made after the name.