ENGAGE has the details. In a short piece for the Daily Mail MacKenzie hailed the French veil ban as a “great success”. He described the report that three veiled women were turned back at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport and refused entry into France as “excellent news”. He urged David Cameron to include a proposal for a veil ban in the UK in the 2015 Tory Party manifesto.
Category Archives: France
Marseille ‘mega-mosque’ gets go-ahead
A French appeals court granted permission Tuesday for the building of a mega-mosque in the southern city of Marseille that has been touted as a symbol of Islam’s growing place in France.
The court overturned an October ruling by Marseille’s administrative tribunal that cancelled the project’s construction permit for supposed failures to meet urban-planning requirements.
Justice for Nouredine Rachedi
The victim of a vicious Islamophobic attack awaits the verdict of a Versailles appeal court after his alleged attackers, one a known violent racist, were acquitted.
Nouredine Rachedi and his supporters in the campaign group Justice for Nouredine were in court on 12 June and now anxiously await the verdict.
The case concerns the acquittal of two young men accused by the 34-year-old Frenchman of assaulting him late one night in July 2008. Nouredine Rachedi was walking home through a public park in Yvelines when he was beaten up by two men who stopped him, asked for a cigarette and then asked him if he was a Muslim, how long he had lived in France (he was born there) and what he thought of Radovan Karadzic, who had just been arrested. Then, telling him they were nazis, they set upon him with fists and feet, kicking him all over his body and in the head. The statistician was off work for three weeks with a collapsed lung and head injuries.
Police at Paris airport bar three Saudi women wearing face veil from entering France, citing ban
A police union says three Saudi women who refused to remove their face veils at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport have been barred entry to France.
A 2011 French law bans people from wearing Islamic face-covering veils anywhere in public.
An official with the SGP-FO police union said Tuesday that border police asked the women to remove their veils after they arrived Monday on a flight from Doha, Qatar. The official says the women refused, border police refused them entry in France, and they returned to Doha Monday night.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly for the police.
Sarkozy’s racist legacy
Graham Murray reports on the ‘normalisation’ of extreme Right politics in France.
Mayor of Nice bans ‘noisy’ weddings
The Right-wing mayor of Nice has been accused of “stigmatising” the southern French town’s Muslim population after passing a decree on “noisy” town hall weddings, in particular cheering, whistling and foreign flag-waving, which he says disturb the peace.
French Muslim group denounces mosque vandalism
A leading French Muslim group says three mosques have been vandalized over the past week and is urging authorities to punish the perpetrators.
The French Council of the Muslim Faith, or CFCM, said racist insults and Nazi slogans were scrawled on a mosque in the southeastern town of Tarascon and another in the eastern city of Strasbourg on Tuesday and Wednesday. It said the mosque in the southern town of Draguignan was vandalized May 17.
Swastikas and racist graffiti on Strasbourg mosque
Racist graffiti was found on Wednesday 23 May on the wall of a Muslim place of worship in Strasbourg, which the mayor had made available to the Muslim community in 2009 to build a small mosque in the neighbourhood.
The graffiti included swastikas and the slogans “dirty Arab”, “Islam out”, “no mosque”, and “Ries collaborator”, a reference to the Socialist mayor of Strasbourg, Roland Ries.
Nazi graffiti on mosque in south-west France
On Monday night a swastika and Nazi symbols were sprayed the mosque of the El Mouhsinine Muslim association in Tarascon-sur-Ariège. Police have launched an investigation. Local councillors visited the site to express their support for the association, and the mayor has called for a firm stand to be taken against racism and xenophobia.
See also La Gazette Ariégeoise, 22 May 2012
Via Islam in Europe
Liberty intervenes in European Court case over French ‘burqa ban’
Today Liberty announced it is intervening in the European Court of Human Rights case concerning the criminalisation of face coverings in France.