Sud-Ouest reports that a Muslim prayer room in Lesparre-Médoc which was the target of an arson attempt and Nazi graffiti only a few days ago has suffered a second graffiti attack.
Two more swastikas have been sprayed on the front of the building. The cars of two local Muslims, including the president of the prayer room Mohammed Boukourat, were also defaced with fascist symbols. Three further swastikas were sprayed on the wall of another building.
Le Figaro reports that an Ifop poll it commissioned has found that almost eight out of ten people in France are opposed to the wearing of the headscarf or veil in university classrooms. It quotes Jerome Fourquet of Ifop as stating that this represents a similar level of opposition to the hijab that has been found in previous polls on this issue.
Sud-Ouest reports that a Muslim prayer room at Lesparre-Médoc in southwestern France has been victim both of an arson attack and of fascist graffiti.
Petrol was poured on the floor in front of the door in the early hours of Wednesday morning and a piece of burning paper was inserted into the letterbox, but the fire was extinguished before it could cause any serious damage.
When the police arrived they found a swastika had been sprayed on the front of the building.
Momentum is growing in France for a ban on wearing religious symbols in the country’s universities. A new report recommends prohibiting students from wearing religious symbols, such as Christian crucifixes, Jewish Kippah skullcaps and Muslim headscarves.
Due to “escalating tensions in all sectors of university life” the High Council of Integration (HCI), a research institute founded by the French government, has made 12 recommendations to ease religious tensions among students.
The report’s key proposal would prohibit wearing religious symbols in “lecture theaters and [other] places of teaching and research in public areas at universities,” Le Monde reported.
Marwan Muhammad, Elsa Rayand and Michaël Privot argue that “governments urgently need to take action against Islamophobic violence”. They argue:
“There is a tendency to view hostility and violence towards Muslims as normal and acceptable. Prejudice against Muslims does not always carry the same social stigma as prejudice against other ethnic and religious groups.”
A first step would be to “officially recognise Islamophobia as a specific form of racism”.
On Friday 26 July the Orléans criminal court sentenced a man who had carried out a triple racist assault to two years in prison, 18 months of which was suspended.
On 14 June in Saint-Jean-de-Braye near Orléans an individual assaulted three women, a mother wearing a headscarf and her two daughters, severely beating them and abusing them with shouts of “Dirty Arab” , “I hate your religion” , “You are a dirty race” and “You Arab women, you’re good for nothing”. It was an outburst of violence that the perpetrator explained by his hostility towards people of North African origin and the Muslim religion.
The Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (CCIF), which was a civil party in the case, emphasised that it was important that the prejudice against the victim had been recognised. For the association, “the verdict must send a strong signal to all those who incite hatred or are tempted to translate this into action”.
Fait-religieux.com, 27 July 2013
See also Le Monde, 27 July 2013
Valérie Amiraux and Marwan Mohammed on the prevalence of Islamophobia in France:
It shows up in multiple forms: attacks on mosques, desecration of religious sites, the ban on the headscarf in public schools, making it impossible for certain veiled women to access public services, to accompany their children on school outings, the rampant insults, harassment, humiliation, physical and verbal aggression they are subject to, racial and ethnic profiling and discrimination, sometimes culminating in physical attacks, such as the recent one on a veiled woman in Argenteuil, who lost her baby as a result. But the principal characteristic of Islamophobia is that it remains, at least in France, very rarely denounced. It is consistently perceived as an exaggeration, the result of victimised posturing invented by troublemaking Muslims, who are incapable of integrating and bending to the requirements of French citizenship.
Islamophobic incidents in France saw an overall increase of 35% in the first half of 2013 compared with the same period in 2012, the president of the Observatoire contre l’islamophobie told AFP on Tuesday.
Abdallah Zekri stated that 108 Islamophobic acts – violence, assault, arson, vandalism – were officially recorded between 1 January and 30 June 2013, compared with 80 during the same period in 2012, an increase of 41.2%. Islamophobic threats – threatening gestures and abuse – rose from 63 during the first half of 2012 to 84 during the same period this year, an increase of 33.3%. Overall this represents an increase of 35%.
Zekri emphasised that the figures are only for incidents that have been the subject of an official complaint and therefore underestimate the real number of Islamophobic incidents.
He also pointed out that the figures are for the six months to the end of June and therefore “do not take account of a new and worrying phenomenon that arose during the month of July, namely attacks against women whose faces are not covered, who are not wearing the niqab but the simple headscarf”. Zekri told AFP that the Observatoire contre l’islamophobie had counted five such attacks in the Reims region, 3 in the Val d’Oise and one in Trappes.
Angelique Chrisafis reports on the French war against the hijab.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls defended on Monday France’s ban on wearing full-face veils in public places after a police check on a veiled Muslim woman sparked riots in a Paris suburb at the weekend.
The 2010 law was brought in by conservative former president Nicolas Sarkozy and targets burqa and niqab garments that conceal the face rather than the headscarf that is more common among French Muslim women.
A police check on a couple in the southwest suburb of Trappes sparked an angry confrontation that led overnight on Friday to a police station being surrounded by several hundred people, some hurling rocks. Another building was torched in several hours of street violence that led to six arrests.
“Police did their job perfectly,” Valls told RTL radio. “The law banning full-face veils is a law in the interests of women and against those values having nothing to do with our traditions and values. It must be enforced everywhere,” he said.