Category Archives: France

France criticised over discrimination against Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Racial profiling and some politicians exploiting racial and xenophobic stereotypes persist in France despite progress in fighting discrimination, a Council of Europe report said Tuesday.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) issued its fourth report on France with positive comments on the country’s High Authority against Discrimination and for Equality (HALDE) for “its key and growing role in the fight against racism”.

However, “while there had been improvements in certain areas, some issues gave rise for concern, such as minorities’ perception of the police, prejudice against Muslims and the tone of the immigration debate,” said Nils Muiznieks, chair of ECRI, the Council’s independent human rights body.

Many racial acts go unreported and for those that are referred to authorities there is a low conviction rate, the report said. “The police frequently resort to racial profiling and take law enforcement decisions on the basis of racial, ethnic or religious stereotypes” rather than individual behaviour, it said.

In the political arena, the report noted that most politicians condemn openly racial comments and race-related acts, but that there are some who exploit the issue. In relation to immigration, “there is widespread suspicion that non-citizens engage in fraud to obtain residence permits and access to rights,” the report said.

Regarding Muslims, part of French society doubts their willingness and ability to “respect French values”. “The debate on the prohibition of the niqab (the face-covering veil) has increased feelings of discrimination among Muslims and may result in further excluding some Muslim women from society,” the report said about the government’s considering a ban on Muslim women wearing the full veil in public.

Problems of discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, nationality or ethnic origin persists in access to employment, education, housing, and goods and services, the report added.

Middle East Online, 16 June 2010

Paris: ‘pork sausage and booze’ party to go ahead at new venue

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Paris pork sausage partyFrench organizers of a so-called “pork sausage and booze” party in Paris – designed as a deliberate provocation against Muslims – will move it from a heavily Muslim neighborhood to the Arc de Triomphe on Friday.

The group, “Identity Block,” called the new venue “Plan B,” after Paris police banned their bash this week on grounds of maintaining public order.

Advertised on Facebook and receiving some 7,000 RSVPs, the party is billed as a “resistance to the Islamization of France.” It was initially planned to take place next to a mosque in the 18th district after Friday prayers, and on the same day as the English-Algerian World Cup soccer match.

The date holds meaning for the French: On June 18, 1940, Charles DeGaulle issued his famous call for the French to resist Nazi occupation in World War II.

“Identity Block” is an assortment of mostly French right-wing groups.

Today, the group sent out a press release, calling upon “all Parisians … and French” to meet at the Arc de Triomphe Friday to eat ham and drink grape juice, fly French flags, protest the police ban, and listen to speeches against “religious control of public space” in France – a reference to the majority Arab-Muslim Goutte d’Or neighborhood where the sausage and wine party was to be held.

Fadela Amara, a French federal minister of Algerian origin, calls the implicit protest against Muslims “hateful, racist, and xenophobic.”

The idea to gather at the Arc de Triomphe is described by Identity Block as symbolic, since it was where 2,000 schoolboys defied a Nazi ban on protest and marched against the occupying forces some 70 years ago.

Marine Le Pen, deputy leader of the right-wing National Front (FN) party, calls the ban a “capitulation” by authorities to Muslims. The conservative American Thinker website ran a blog notice titled “Creeping Sharia,” suggesting that concern by Paris city hall of a riot or casualties is a bending to Islamic law.

A more authentic comparison might be a neo-Nazi group holding a pork barbecue in front of a synagogue in a Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood on Passover, then, when the city bans the event, calling the response “Creeping Torah.”

Robert Marquand in the Christian Science Monitor, 17 June 2010

Paris police ban pork street party in Muslim area

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French police are banning a street party whose organizers planned to serve alcohol and pork-based sausage in a heavily Muslim Paris neighborhood.

Police said Tuesday that the party, called “Sausage and booze,” was banned because it could have been viewed as a provocation in the Goutte-d’Or neighborhood of northern Paris, where Muslims pray on the streets on Fridays because there are not enough mosques. Alcohol and pork are banned in Islam.

Organizers said they were organizing Friday’s party to protest Islam’s encroachment on traditional French values in the neighborhood. The party was backed by several extreme-right associations. Muslim groups had announced a counterparty serving halal food.

Associated Press, 15 June 2010

See also AFP, 15 June 2012

Update:  See also Reuters, which reports that after the ban was announced supporters of the event wrote on the Facebook page that they would still gather in Goutte d’Or on Friday. “It’s official – Muslims can pray in the street but we don’t have the right to eat pork there. France is now ruled by sharia,” one supporter wrote. The Reuters report adds: “The Paris event page also carried announcements of similar ‘sausage and wine’ parties in Lyon, Toulouse, Brussels and London, where the event is called a ‘bacon and beer‘ party.”

Anti-Islamisation ‘pork and wine’ Paris party slammed

Posted on by Bob Pitt

AperoAnti-racism activists have condemned plans to hold a “pork sausage and wine” party in a multi-ethnic Paris district to protest against what the organisers call the area’s “Islamisation”.

SOS Racisme called for the event scheduled for Friday in the Goutte d’Or area of north Paris to be banned because it sent out a “message of hate and of violence towards groups of people because of their real or supposed origins”.

The opposition Communist Party said in a statement that “this disgusting joke seeks to exacerbate the differences that make for the richness of the 18th arrondissement (district)”.

Sylvie Francois, a local resident, told French radio that she set up a Facebook page for the event to fight against what she saw as the increasing “Islamisation” of her area.

The project has been publicised on internet social networking sites by a small far-Right group that calls itself the Bloc Identitaire.

Paris police said they will meet with the event’s organisers on Tuesday to consider their official request for permission to hold the event.

AFP, 14 June 2010

See also France 24, 14 June 2010

French writer predicts civil war between Christians and Muslim ‘barbarians’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

France has been thwarted in its destiny of greatness by the English and is now doomed to collapse into civil war between Christians and Muslim “barbarians”. You might think that such a prophecy – articulated by one of the country’s top thinkers – would banish its author to the lunatic fringe. Yet Eric Zemmour is earning fame and fortune charting his country’s decline, with his latest gloomy book Mélancolie Française flying off the shelves.

The thesis that lands Zemmour in the hottest water is his belief that France sealed its fate when it abandoned its tradition of assimilating immigrants, and embraced the concept of ethnic diversity. “French culture is not Muhammad,” he says. “It is François, it is Christian.” The result is a new “barbarism”, with the emergence of Muslim ghettos that have broken away from society, he argues in his book. To back his thesis, he quotes Charles de Gaulle as saying that mixing Muslims and French Christians is “like blending oil and vinegar”.

While Zemmour is deemed beyond the pale by much of the Establishment, he enjoys public backing. Two months ago, supporters demonstrated outside Le Figaro, the most conservative newspaper, after Étienne Mougeotte, the Editor, tried to sack him as a staff columnist. His offence had been to claim on television that the majority of French drug dealers were of Arab or African origin. Mougeotte backed down and Zemmour kept his job.

Times, 4 June 2010

Clapham Common is a ‘Muslim ghetto’ claims US TV presenter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

This exchange between right-wing US TV presenter Bill O’Reilly and political commentator Imogen Lloyd Webber would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that a lot of US citizens get their information from Fox News.

Lloyd Webber attacks the proposed French ban on the veil as “a massive mistake”, “an infringement of women’s rights”, “completely counterproductive” and “an act of discrimination” – which is not at all to O’Reilly’s taste. He counters that the French “are really worried about these Muslim ghettos”, which he associates with riots and suicide bombing.

O’ Reilly insists: “The same thing’s going on in London. You have neighbourhoods in London, they’re totally Muslim, they speak Arabic. You walk in those neighbourhoods, you’re not in England – you’re not there, you’re in Kuwait.”

“I can’t actually think of one in London”, Lloyd Webber replies. “Clapham Common”, suggests O’Reilly, bizarrely. Lloyd Webber responds that “Clapham Common is full of posh people with push-chairs”!

 

French veil bill criminalises ‘incitement to hide the face’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French passportA bill to ban Muslim veils covering the face to be presented to France’s Cabinet on Wednesday calls for fines and, in some cases, citizenship classes.

The bill turns on the “dignity of the person,” rather than security issues as many speculated would be the case, according to a copy obtained by The Associated Press. Article 1 of the bill stipulates that “no one can wear a garment intended to hide the face in the public space.” The ban covers streets.

The divisive legislation proposed by the conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy is to go to the lower house of parliament for debate in July and to the Senate in September. There is little doubt the bill will pass despite opposition.

The bill calls for a fine of €150 ($185) for those breaking the law and eventual citizenship classes. The measure creates a new crime – inciting to hide the face – and anyone convicted of forcing a woman to wear such a veil would risk a year in prison and a €15,000 ($18,555) fine.

Associated Press, 18 May 2010

Update:  See also “Women protest as French Cabinet gets veil ban bill”, Associated Press, 19 May 2010

French government adopts veil ban bill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The French government on Wednesday approved a draft law to ban garments which cover the face in public. The bill, which targets the burka and niqab worn by some Muslim women, will now go to parliament.

“On this question, the government is taking, in all conscience, a path which is difficult but just,” President Nicolas Sarkozy told the ministers at the cabinet meeting. “We are an old nation assembled around a certain idea of personal dignity, in particular the dignity of women, and around a certain idea of married life.”

A veil which covers the face contradicts values which are fundamental to the French republic, he said.

RFI, 19 May 2010

French lawyer abuses and attacks veiled Muslim woman

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A 60-year-old lawyer ripped a Muslim woman’s Islamic veil off in a row in a clothing shop in what police say is France’s first case of “burka rage”.

The astonishing scene unfolded during a weekend shopping trip after the woman lawyer took offence at the attire of a fellow shopper resulting in argument during which the pair came to blows before being arrested. It came as racial tensions grow in the country as it prepares to introduce a total ban on burkas and other forms of religious dress which cover the face.

A 26-year-old Muslim convert was walking through the store in Trignac, near Nantes, in the western Loire-Atlantique region, when she overhead the woman lawyer making “snide remarks about her black burka”. A police officer close to the case said: “The lawyer said she was not happy seeing a fellow shopper wearing a veil and wanted the ban introduced as soon as possible.”

At one point the lawyer, who was out with her daughter, is said to have likened the Muslim woman to Belphegor, a horror demon character well known to French TV viewers. Belphegor is said to haunt the Louvre museum in Paris and frequently covers up his hideous features using a mask.

An argument started before the older woman is said to have ripped the other woman’s veil off. As they came to blows, the lawyer’s daughter joined in.

Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2010

France: Muslim graves desecrated

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Vienne cemetery graffitiOffensive racist graffiti were found on graves in the Muslim section of the cemetery at Vienne (Isère) on Friday morning.

The graffiti specifically targeted the Harki community. Written in black felt-tip pen on the gravestones, they were removed after investigations by the police in charge of the inquiry.

In order to condemn these acts, on Monday afternoon a ceremony honouring the families was held in the Muslim section of the cemetery. Government representatives, the mayor of Vienne, army veterans and representatives of different faith communities attended the ceremony.

France 3, 18 May 2010

See also Nouvel Observateur, 16 May 2010

Vienne cemetery ceremony