The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports a graffiti attack on a mosque at Vandoeuvre in north-eastern France. The word “Israel” in Hebrew has been sprayed onto the doors along with a Star of David and “LDJ” – the initials of the Ligue de défense juive (Jewish Defence League), the extreme right-wing Kahanist movement whose UK section is headed by former EDL Jewish Division leader Roberta Moore. No doubt this act of desecration would meet with her enthusiastic approval.
Aurelien Mondon shows how Marine Le Pen is stepping up her anti-Muslim rhetoric, assisted by the mainstreaming of far-right discourse by the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-François Copé.
French Interior Minister Manuel Valls warned Islamists on Thursday that preaching hatred in France would not be tolerated, telling hardliners as he inaugurated a mosque that they would be expelled if they challenged the Republic’s principles.
Valls’ message underscored the tough line that President Francois Hollande’s government has taken towards Islamists who were furious over the publication of cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammad in a French magazine last week.
While Socialist officials criticised Charlie Hebdo magazine over the cartoons, calling them a provocation, they banned protests against the images, denying requests by Muslim groups to hold marches in the name of free speech.
Four Muslim women sightseeing in Paris were arrested by police forces on Saturday for wearing headscarves.
The scene, which was filmed by journalists from Le Parisien, a French daily newspaper covering both international and national news, took place at the Trocadéro, a square that stands across the river from the Eiffel Tower. The four women, including one wearing a headscarf, were checked for IDs before being escorted out of the square by dozens of police officers.
Fiachra Gibbons reponds to Marine Le Pen’s proposal to ban the kippah along with the hijab.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen called Friday for a ban on wearing Muslim veils and Jewish skullcaps in public, adding to religious tensions sparked by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
In an interview with the Le Monde newspaper, Le Pen called for religious headwear to be banned “in stores, on public transport and on the streets”.
Asked if the ban should apply to the Jewish skullcap, known as the kippah or yarmulke, as well as Muslim headwear, she said: “It is obvious that if the veil is banned, the kippah is banned in public as well.”
France banned protests on Friday against cartoons published by a satirical weekly denigrating Islam’s Prophet Mohammad as part of a security clamp-down while prayers took place across the Muslim world.
A French Muslim teenager who was arrested for wearing a full Islamic veil has been sent to prison for two months after being convicted of biting a policewoman.
Louise-Marie Suisse, 18, was stopped by two police officers near a mosque in the centre of Marseille in late July. She was wearing a full-face veil, in breach of a ban introduced last year, and refused to cooperate with the police when asked to produce identity papers, her trial was told.
Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier
A French satirical magazine published nude cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed Wednesday, a move that could further inflame tensions after violent protests in the Muslim world over an anti-Islam film.
The cover of Charlie Hebdo shows a Muslim in a wheelchair being pushed by an Orthodox Jew under the title “Intouchables 2”, referring to an award-winning French film about a poor black man who helps an aristocratic quadriplegic.
Another cartoon on the back page of the weekly magazine show a naked turbaned Mohammed exposing his posterior to a film director, a scene inspired by a 1963 film starring French film star Brigitte Bardot.