Category Archives: France

French interior minister accused of Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French Muslims protest

The interior minister Claude Guéant has been accused of Islamophobia and dishonouring France after saying the growing population of Muslims in the country “poses problems”.

His comments were made on the eve of a debate within his party, the UMP, on Islam and secularism in France. The debate, organised by party leader Jean-François Copé, is itself controversial, with many party figures finding excuses not to attend, including Prime Minister François Fillon.

“The question worries our citizens: there are many who think the rules of secularism are being stretched,” said Guéant on a trip to Nantes. “In 1905 [the year the separation of church and state was brought into law] there were few Muslims in France, today there are between five to 10 million. This growth of believers and certain types of practices pose problems. It is clear that prayers in the street shock a certain number of people and the leaders of major religions know that this type of practice affects them negatively.”

Socialist Party spokesman Benoît Hamon said Guéant “dishonoured” France. “The right is not debating secularism, it’s debating Islam,” he said. “I feel ill when Guéant speaks. He dishonours France and the French. The Socialist Party concerns itself with subjects that focus on people living together, the real issues.”

Green MEP Eva Joly said Nicolas Sarkozy was attempting to outflank Marine Le Pen on the right in advance of the presidential elections of 2012 by launching “an Islamophobic campaign”.

SOS Racisme is suing the minister. Its president Dominique Sopo said the words “stigmatised a population because of their origin” by targeting Muslim Arabs. He added that the speech was worse than anything from Brice Hortefeux, Géant’s predecessor, who was successfully sued for racism while a minister.

The Connexion, 5 April 2011

See also Nabila Ramdani, “Sarkozy’s debate targets Muslims”, Comment is Free, 5 April 2011

French religious leaders warn against divisive Islam debate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The leaders of France’s six main religions warned the government on Wednesday against a planned debate on Islam they say could stigmatise Muslims and fuel prejudice as the country nears national elections next year.

Weighing in on an issue that is tearing apart President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party, the Conference of French Religious Leaders said the discussion about respect for France’s secular system could only spread confusion at a turbulent time.

The UMP plans to hold a public forum on secularism next week that critics decry as veiled Muslim-bashing to win back voters who defected to the far-right National Front at local polls last week and could thwart Sarkozy’s reelection hopes in 2012.

Stressing that faith should foster social harmony, the religous leaders said the debate could “cloud this perspective and incite confusion that can only be prejudicial”. “Is a political party, even if it is in the majority, the right forum to lead this by itself?” they asked in a rare joint statement.

The statement was signed by the leaders of the Roman Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Orthodox Christian and Buddhist faiths. The leaders formed the group last year to coordinate their approach to religious issues in public debate.

The faith leaders said France has held many long and serious debates about its secular system, introduced in 1905 to separate the church and state, and questioned the need for another one. “We are working for a common sense secularism,” they said. “Secularism cannot be separated from our fundamental values, especially the dignity and respect for the human person.”

Individual religious leaders have supported Muslims, who at about five million constitute France’s second-largest religion after Catholicism.

“It’s often difficult to be a Muslim in France,” Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim said last week. “This difficulty is worse today in this unhealthy climate, aggravated by talk that divides rather than unites,” the Jewish leader told the daily Le Monde.

French Protestant Federation head Pastor Claude Baty has joined Muslim leaders in announcing he would boycott the round-table discussions the UMP has scheduled for April 5.

Reuters, 30 March 2011

Sarkozy’s UMP competes with Front National to win anti-Muslim vote, Socialists reject Tariq Ramadan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islam has emerged as a central issue in the campaign for French local elections Sunday that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party hopes to win by taking a tough line on the integration of France’s large Muslim minority.

Sarkozy, who faces an uphill battle for reelection next year, has set the tone by blurring the border between his UMP party and the National Front, the once-shunned anti-immigrant party that recently overtook him in opinion polls.

Interior Minister Claude Gueant, until recently Sarkozy’s chief of staff in the Elysee Palace, has fleshed this out with a series of statements flirting with the anti-Muslim rhetoric that has made National Front leader Marine Le Pen so popular.

“The French don’t feel like they’re at home here anymore,” Gueant said this month in a verbal wink and nod at voters upset by the large numbers of Muslims in the country. “They want France to remain France.” The minister has called the Western-led air strikes against Libya a “crusade,” evoking Christian-Muslim conflict, and suggested that patients in public hospitals must avoid wearing religious symbols – another issue concerning mainly Muslims.

This rhetorical escalation came as France neared a runoff vote Sunday in local council elections. Le Pen’s National Front surged to win 15 percent of votes in the first round on March 20, just two points behind Sarkozy’s UMP party.

Both the centre-right government and Le Pen declare their aim is to defend “laicite” – the aggressive French secularism that strives to keep religion out of the public sector.

But amid debate about offering halal food in school canteens and Muslims praying in the street because their mosques are too small, the term “laicite” is clearly code for the problems France has adjusting to its 5-million strong Muslim minority.

The debate has alienated many Muslims, even such moderate figures as Grand Mosque of Paris Rector Dalil Boubakeur, who announced Wednesday he would not take part in a public debate on secularism that the UMP plans to hold on April 5. He said the debate about Islam “has greatly upset and worried Muslims who feel stigmatised because of their faith.”

The debate has carved deep rifts in the UMP leadership, even pitting Prime Minister Francois Fillon against Sarkozy and the UMP secretary general Jean-Francois Cope.

The debate has also sown confusion on the left because of a petition against the Islam debate launched by Respect Mag, a magazine that aims to promote intercultural understanding. The UMP rounded on opposition Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry and former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius for supporting the text when it emerged that Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born Muslim activist, had also signed it.

Both quickly withdrew their support because of Ramadan, who is vilified here as a covert Islamist out to subvert France. “If these two (parties) had wanted to agree to open the door wide to Marine Le Pen, they would not have done anything differently,” said Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies at Britain’s Oxford University.

Reuters, 25 March 2011

Marine Le Pen: ‘Islamophobia? What Islamophobia?’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

She is setting the agenda on Islam. Desperate to compete, Sarkozy’s party has poached her ideas and will hold its own debate on Islam and secularism next month. But key Muslim voices are complaining that France is rife with an Islamophobia that resembles the antisemitism of France in the 1930s.

Le Pen’s eyes widen. “But there’s no Islamophobia. People are just trying to recreate the conditions of a latent conflict aimed at making French people feel guilty. If you’re in favour of respecting the law, you’re an Islamophobe!

Marine Le Pen is interviewed in the Guardian, 22 March 2011

Prejudice against Muslims is general across Europe, report finds

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Via Islam in Europe here is the section on anti-Muslim prejudice from the new Friedrich Ebert Foundation publication, Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination: A European Report (summary of the study here).

Anti-Muslim Attitudes

After statistical testing, three statements were used to produce the anti-Muslim attitudes mean scale (Table 7, items 18 to 20). These cover the general impression that there are too many Muslims in the country, the charge that Muslims make too many demands, and broad-brush criticism of Islam as a religion of intolerance. Four further statements were surveyed in a random half of the sample. These cover a positive attitude that sees Muslims as an enrichment and the idea that there are great cultural differences between the majority society and Muslims, especially concerning attitudes towards women. We also surveyed the idea that Muslims generally support and condone terrorism.

In most of the countries a majority believe Islam to be a religion of intolerance, with agreement just below 50 percent only in Great Britain and the Netherlands. In almost all the countries more than half of respondents said that Muslims make too many demands; Portugal was the only exception with about one third. The statement that there are too many Muslims in the country is affirmed by just over one quarter in Portugal and by about one third in France. In Germany, Great Britain, Italy and the Netherlands more than 40 percent of respondents complain that there are too many Muslims in their country, in Hungary about 60 percent.

Interviewees were also asked to respond to four further statements covering perceived cultural differences and supposed affinity of Muslims toward terrorism (Table 7, items 22 to 25). Despite correlating closely with anti-Muslim attitudes these items represent separate constructs and were therefore excluded from the scale measure.

FES1

The figures for those who say that Muslim culture is compatible with their own range from 17 percent in Poland and 19 percent in Germany to about half the population in Portugal and France. A majority of more than 70 percent of European respondents find that Muslim attitudes towards women are incompatible with their own values. Overall in the surveyed countries about one third think that Muslims treat Islamist terrorists as heroes, although somewhat fewer believe that terrorism finds moral support in the Muslim community (ranging from under 20 percent in Germany and the Netherlands to nearly 30 percent in Hungary).

The scale created from the first three statements clearly illustrates the extent of anti-Muslim attitudes in the studied countries (Figure 5). It is conspicuous that Europeans are largely united in their rejection of Muslims and Islam. The significantly most widespread anti-Muslim attitudes are found in Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland, closely followed by France, Great Britain and the Netherlands. The extent of anti-Muslim attitudes is least in Portugal. In absolute terms, however, the eight countries differ little in their levels of prejudice towards Muslims.

FES2

Update:  See comments by ENGAGE, 16 March 2011

Sarkozy sacks diversity adviser for calling on Muslims to reject UMP

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Abderrahmane Dahmane and SarkozyFrench President Nicolas Sarkozy has sacked his diversity adviser after he called on Muslims not to support the governing UMP party, reports say.

Abderrahmane Dahmane, a Muslim and former UMP official appointed to his post only in January, was protesting against a planned debate on Islam.

He said Muslim members of the UMP should not renew their party membership unless the debate was cancelled. He condemned UMP leader Jean-Francois Cope as a “plague for Muslims”.

The UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) is planning to hold a public debate on 5 April on “Islam and secularism”. The debate will explore firstly how “the practice of religions may be compatible with the rules of the secular republic”, and secondly “the question of Islam in France”.

Speaking on Thursday, Mr Dahmane compared the situation of French Muslims to that of Jews during World War II and said the debate had been planned by a “handful of neo-Nazis”.

BBC News, 11 March 2011

See also France 24, 11 March 2011

Marine Le Pen receives invitation from Jewish radio station

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Marine Le Pen and fatherA first. On Thursday Marine Le Pen will be invited onto Radio J, the Jewish community station, which would never invite Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father and predecessor in the presidency of the Front National, because of his antisemitic remarks.

For 40 minutes this Thursday the president of the FN will for the first time be the political guest on the Radio J Forum which is broadcast every week early in the afternoon. “I think what she said about the Shoah challenges the whole legacy of Holocaust denial by the Front National and her father,” Frédéric Haziza, head of policy at the station, explained.

Marine Le Pen said early in February in The Point that what “occurred” in the Nazi camps “is the epitome of barbarism”. “Marine Le Pen is not Jean-Marie Le Pen, for whom the gas chambers are a detail of history”, said Haziza, recalling the words of the former president of the FN.

Le Parisien, 8 March 2011

Clearly this represents a major advance in Marine Le Pen’s campaign to “de-demonise” the FN. Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right, has condemned Radio J’s decision as “total communal irresponsibility”, motivated by the urge to boost ratings. He adds that the breakthrough for Marine Le Pen is the acceptability of her language on “immigration and Islam” among a section of the Jewish community.

Update:  See “Jewish radio cancels French far-right interview”, AFP, 9 March 2011

French presidential election: opinion poll gives Marine Le Pen 23 per cent of vote

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Marine Le Pen 1An opinion poll suggesting far-right leader Marine Le Pen could win the first round of next year’s presidential election has caused a shock in France.

The survey for Le Parisien newspaper puts the National Front leader, who took over from her father Jean-Marie in January, ahead of all other candidates. It gives her 23% of the vote, 2% ahead of both President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist leader Martine Aubry.

However, some analysts question the accuracy of the online poll. Online surveys are arguably less reliable than telephone polling, and Le Parisien‘s poll assumes Ms Aubry will be chosen as the Socialists’ candidate, while the party has yet to decide.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was the shock runner-up in the first round of the 2002 election, only to be massively defeated in the second against Jacques Chirac.

Nonetheless, for the new far-right leader to be ahead of both President Sarkozy and Ms Aubry is an astonishing result, the BBC’s Hugh Schofield reports from Paris. A story on the website of the left-of-centre daily Liberation says “politicians are hesitating between prudence and panic after the poll”.

On the basis of this opinion poll of 1,618 people, Ms Le Pen would automatically qualify for the second round run-off with one or other of the two mainstream party leaders.

BBC News, 6 March 2011