Category Archives: France

Arson attack damages Lyon mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Saint Priest mosque arsonA mosque near the southeast city of Lyon was slightly damaged by fire early Saturday in an attack that the French interior ministry in Paris said was arson.

The fire broke out at the entrance to the mosque in the suburb of Saint Priest but did not spread and the only damage to the interior was caused by smoke, police said. However, an AFP photographer saw a number of burned books from a bookcase which had been standing next to the door.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie had written to the president of the French council of Muslims, Mohammed Moussaoui, to convey her concern at the arson attack on the mosque, the ministry in Paris said.

The ministry added that police forensics experts were working to “find who was responsible for this intolerable and cowardly attack as soon as possible.”

The mosque rector, Kamal Kabtane, condemned “the rise in racism and Islamophobia” and called for a demonstration on Sunday outside the mosque when he visited the scene with the local mayor.

He referred to recent anti-Islamic incidents in France, including an attack on another mosque in the Lyon area in August and the desecration of 500 Muslim soldiers’ tombs in a war cemetery in the north of the country earlier this month.

Police said they had found a number of clues which were expected to aid them in their inquiries.

AFP, 22 December 2008

See also “Lyons: Arson at mosque”, Islam in Europe, 21 December 2008

And “Sarkozy condemns racist arson attack on mosque”, Expatica, 22 December 2008

Saint-Priest demonstration

Vandals hit French Muslim graves

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim graves defacedThe graves of as many as 500 Muslim war veterans have been vandalised in northern France, in an attack President Nicolas Sarkozy said was “repugnant”.

Gravestones were daubed with swastikas and letters spelling out anti-Islamic slogans at France’s biggest military graveyard near Arras in the north-east.

The attack took place on the eve of Islam’s Eid al-Adha festival, when Muslims visit the graves of loved ones. Dozens of police searched the graveyard on Monday as an investigation began. It is the third time the Muslim sector of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery has been attacked.

President Sarkozy called the latest incident “abject and revolting” and said it was “the expression of a repugnant racism directed against the Muslim community of France”.

The cemetery holds the graves of tens of thousands of soldiers killed in World War I, including those of 576 Muslims.

The authorities estimated that about 500 graves were damaged. Vandals had sprayed letters on the tombstones which, when linked together, formed anti-Islamic insults, the French news agency AFP said.

The local prosecutor says the damage resembles another act of vandalism in April, for which two young men with neo-Nazi sympathies were later jailed. One of them had already been jailed for a previous attack on Muslim graves at the cemetery.

Police say security has been reinforced but the site remains difficult to guard.

BBC News, 8 December 2008

ECHR backs French headscarf ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Europe’s top rights court ruled Thursday that a French school ban on headscarves was not a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In a case involving two French Muslim girls who had been expelled from school after refusing to remove their scarves during sports classes, the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously that the decision did not discriminate.

The applicants, Belgin Dogru and Esma-Nur Kervanci, are French nationals who were born in 1987 and 1986 respectively and live in the northwestern town of Flers.

Dogru, then aged 11, and Kervanci, aged 12, went to physical education and sports classes wearing their headscarves on numerous occasions in January 1999 and refused to take them off despite repeated requests to do so by their teacher. The teacher had said that wearing a headscarf was incompatible with physical education classes.

A month later the school’s discipline committee decided to expel the two from the school for failing to participate actively in physical education and sports classes.

The court observed that the purpose of the restriction on the applicants’ right to manifest their religious convictions was to adhere to the requirements of secularism in French state schools. The court also said that the penalty of expulsion did not appear disproportionate, and noted that the applicants had been able to continue their schooling by correspondence classes.

“It was clear that the applicants’ religious convictions were fully taken into account in relation to the requirements of protecting the rights and freedoms of others and public order,” the court said in a press release. It was also clear that the decision was based on those requirements and not on any objections to the applicants’ religious beliefs.

AFP, 5 December 2008

See also ECHR press release, 4 December 2008

Muslim twins win discrimination claim against City bosses

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fariad sistersMuslim twin sisters have won a record multi-million pound payout on the eve of a sensational tribunal involving claims of racism and drug abuse in the City.

Moroccan-born Samira and Hanan Fariad, 31, made more than 200 allegations against brokers Tradition Securities and Futures in a 150-page dossier due to be unveiled out at the Central London Employment Tribunal this week.

They included claims the French company stood by as top brokers used cocaine and subjected them to race and religious discrimination. In one case, the firm allegedly transferred the sisters’ Jewish clients to non-Muslim colleagues.

The pair – who were on six-figure salaries – worked as brokers in the company’s London office for two years until they resigned in 2006. They were due to begin giving evidence this week. But last night the case was halted when the twins agreed to accept an out-of-court settlement believed to total £10m. A spokesman for the sisters said: “The parties are pleased to confirm that the matter has now been settled on confidential terms.”

The London Paper, 12 November 2008

Two Muslim women accuse City firm of religious discrimination

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two Muslim women who worked as brokers in the City of London have accused their former employer of religious discrimination by transferring Jewish clients to non-Muslim colleagues. Lawyers for the co-workers will outline a series of allegations, including racial, sexual and religious discrimination, against broker Tradition Securities & Futures at the opening of the employment tribunal on Wednesday.

The women, Muslims of North African descent in their thirties, joined Tradition – a French company – in Paris six years ago. They moved with the trading desk to London in 2004 and quit two years later after deciding they could no longer work in the environment. Documents allege they suffered “complex and multi-faceted” discrimination while working for Tradition.

Daily Telegraph, 29 October 2008

France bans immigrants wearing burqas in state language classes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In secular France, it is illegal for hotel owners to turn away women wearing Muslim headscarves but OK to ban those wearing head-to-toe burqas from state-sponsored French language classes.

Two recent decisions have demonstrated how tough and touchy it is to legislate religious expression in a country that has a long-standing separation between church and state – and an increasingly multicultural society with a growing Muslim population.

“Religious freedom is not absolute,” the head of France’s government anti-discrimination agency, Louis Schweitzer, said in an interview with the Catholic daily La Croix, published Thursday. He said authorities are trying to find “the most reasonable compromise.”

His agency ruled last month that it was acceptable to ban women wearing the burqa and niqab – billowing clothes that cover the body and face worn by pious Muslim women – from state-sponsored French language classes for immigrants.

Earlier this year, a national agency responsible for dealing with new immigrants complained that the presence of the veiled women “hinders the proper functioning” of the language classes and asked the anti-discimination agency, known as Halde, to examine the matter.

In its Sept. 15 decision, Halde called the burqa a symbol of “female submission that goes beyond its religious meaning” and said it is “not unreasonable, for public security requirements … or the protection of civil liberties” to bar it from the publicly funded language classrooms.

USA Today, 9 October 2008

Via Islam in Europe

Reading religious books, growing a beard – how to spot a potential terrorist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Look for inmates growing beards, reading religious books and not wanting to share showers with non-Muslims. That is the advice given by security officials from several European countries in a manual to help prison authorities spot potential terrorists.

The manual, developed by France, Germany and Austria, was released to help prevent prisons from becoming breeding grounds for Muslim extremists. The document was distributed at a two-day closed-door conference of European security experts this week. It will also be given to prison personnel.

Daily Mail, 3 October 2008

Anger at Europe’s far right ‘anti-Islam’ conference

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Nein zur IslamisierungA German far right group has stirred Muslim anger worldwide by holding a three-day “Anti-Islamisation Conference” to protest against the construction of mosques and Muslim immigration.

Prominent members of Europe’s far right, including French “Front National” leader Jean-Marie le Pen and Belgian far-right politician Filip Dewinter, have said they will attend the meeting in Cologne which is aimed at forging a European alliance against “Islamisation.”

The conference will include a rally in the centre of Cologne tomorrow which police say could lead to clashes with left-wing groups that plan a counter-demonstration. Trade unions, churches and other groups have also announced plans to protest against the conference.

The conference organiser is a local protest group called “Pro-Cologne” which campaigned against the city’s recent decision to allow the construction of a large new mosque with two 55-metre tall minarets. Around 330,000 immigrants live in Cologne, about a third of the city’s population.

Mosques are shooting out of the ground like mushrooms, the muezzin call and headscarves are flooding our streets,” Pro-Cologne said on its website. It said 150 “politicians and publicists” from all over Europe and 1,500 other participants will attend the conference at which it plans to launch a petition “against the Islamisation of our cities”.

The meeting has drawn fierce criticism from German politicians and city leaders in Cologne. The premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Juergen Ruettgers, said: “Those who abuse the cosmopolitan and democratic city of Cologne as a meeting place for right-wing radicals are against tolerance, against reconciliation, against humanity.”

Times, 18 September 2008

Anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim attitudes seen rising in Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish feelings are rising in several major European countries, according to a worldwide survey released on Wednesday.

The Washington-based Pew Research Centre’s global attitude survey found 46 percent of Spanish, 36 percent of Poles and 34 percent of Russians view Jews unfavourably, while the same was true for 25 percent of Germans, and 20 percent of French.

The figures are all higher than in comparable Pew surveys done in recent years, the report said, and “in a number of countries the increase has been especially notable between 2006 and 2008.”

Opinions of Muslims are also dimming compared to previous years with 52 percent in Spain, 50 percent in Germany, 46 percent in Poland and 38 percent in France having negative attitudes toward them.

Reuters, 17 September 2008

See Inayat Bunglawala’s analysis at Comment is Free, 18 September 2008