Category Archives: France

France: Socialist deputy mayor refused to marry Muslim woman who wore hijab

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Florence CyrulnikThe Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports that on Thursday 6 September a young Muslim couple, Saad and Myriam, arrived at the town hall at La Seyne-sur-Mer in southeastern France to get married.

However when Florence Cyrulnik (pictured left), the Socialist Party deputy mayor who was to preside over their wedding, arrived she told Myriam abruptly that she would not proceed with the marriage unless the bride immediately removed her headscarf. Although Myriam was not wearing a face veil, which is of course illegal in France, she was informed that religious symbols were banned in public spaces according to a local secularist statute.

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Call for cameras at every mosque in France after new attack

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Limoges mosque graffitiA Muslim leader called Wednesday for surveillance cameras to be installed at every mosque in France following the latest in a series of attacks on Islamic places of worship.

A mosque in Limoges in the centre of the country had excrement smeared on its doors overnight in an incident that reflects a growing trend, according to Abdallah Zekri, who chairs an Islamophobia Observatory set up by France’s Muslim Council.

“It is time that town councils took this problem seriously and started putting cameras in front of mosques, as is already the case for synagogues,” Zekri said.

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Limoges mosque smeared with excrement

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The outside of a mosque in a French city has been smeared with excrement, the latest in a series of vandalism incidents involving Muslim places of worship in the country.

The Interior Ministry said Wednesday that police are seeking the culprit or culprits, adding in a statement that “to attack a religion is to attack the (French) Republic.”

The Limoges mosque in central France was vandalized in July with Nazi symbols scrawled on its doors. In the latest incident, excrement was smeared on the doors and elsewhere before dawn.

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Third graffiti attack on Muslim prayer hall in south-west France

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Le Barp racist graffiti

Sud Ouest reports that a building at Le Barp in Val de l’Eyre in south-west France which is used by the local Moroccan community as a prayer hall has suffered the third graffiti attack since July.

Swastikas and other Nazi symbols were accompanied by racist and xenophobic slogans such as “dirty rats out” and “France belongs to us”.

The words “maire = collabo” were also found – a reference to the mayor of Le Barp, Christiane Dornon, who organised a demonstration in support of the Moroccan community following the previous two attacks.

Fascist graffiti on French mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Agen mosque swastikaThe Collectif contre L’Islamophobie en France has reported that a swastika and Celtic cross were sprayed on the entrance to a mosque at Agen, in southwestern France, last week.

CcIF notes that gunshots were fired at the same mosque in 2005 and that last year a mosque in nearby Villeneuve-sur-Lot was the target of an arson attack. In 2010 a mosque at Marmande, also in southwestern France, was sprayed with fascist graffiti.

See also La Dépêche and Europe 1.

French actor’s anti-Muslim tweets

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Véronique Genest tweet

Véronique Genest, star of the long-running French television police series Julie Lescaut, has come under attack over a series of Islamophobic comments on Twitter, in which she claimed that Islam is a threat to democracy and aims to impose sharia law on France, declared her admiration for the racist journalist Éric Zemmour and described it as a “historical fact” that Muslims are allies of the Nazis.

See Oumma.com, Huffington Post and CcIF.

French writer Richard Millet says Anders Breivik gave Norway ‘what it deserved’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A French essayist, who claims to have read mass-murderer Anders Breivik’s 1,500 page manifesto, has said he believes Norway “got what it deserved.”

Richard Millet, a respected figure in French literature and journalism, made his claims in new 17-page attack on multiculturalism, entitled “The Literary Elegy of Anders Breivik”, described by French newspaper L’Express as a “vindictive text.”

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Death threat to rector of Lyon mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Kamel KabtaneKamel Kabtane has been threatened with death. The rector of the Great Mosque in Lyon announced on Thursday 23 August, that he had today received a letter containing death threats.

“This four-page handwritten letter with the words ‘personal’ and ‘confidential’ was sent to me at the mosque”, Kamel Kabtane told AFP, adding that he had already received another threatening letter from the same person at his home the day before.

In this letter, the author wrote in red: “A bomb will go ‘boom’ and it is not a pig’s head that you will find outside your mosque but your own…. Sod off quickly to Dubai and die there if you don’t want to die here.”

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