The Comité 15 Mars et Libertés reports that a mosque in Pont-de-Beauvois, in Isère in eastern France, has been targeted in a graffiti attack by fascists.
Swastikas were sprayed on the wall, along with the slogans “Death to Algeria”, “Fuck the Arabs” and “Vive la France”.
Via the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France.
See also “Tags injurieux et croix gammées sur la mosquée de Pont-de-Beauvoisin en Isère”, France 3, 5 May 2014
French international footballer who plays in the English Premier League and the France national team has expressed concerns over growing Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments in France, warning that it has become more difficult to be a Muslim in France.
“Nowadays, it is more difficult in France [being Muslim]. In the last three or four years people who come from a [Muslim] community feel like they are not being treated like they deserve. It is now about the extreme Right,’’ Samir Nasri, who plays for Manchester City was quoted by Morocco News as saying to The Telegraph.
Nasri, of Algerian origin, referred the phenomenon to the rise of the “extreme right” and the National Front of Marine Le Pen. “French people turned against the Muslims. That is a little bit scary,” Nasri added. “Ten to fifteen years ago, it wasn’t like this. I don’t like the way the mentality is in France now.”
France’s new sports minister Thierry Braillard has backed the French Football Federation’s decision to uphold their ban on headscarves for players despite pressure from FIFA.
Last Sunday on beIN SPORTS, FIFA president Sepp Blatter declared the FFF had no choice other than to follow his organisation’s directive that women players should be allowed to wear head coverings during official games.
The FIFA ruling is contrary to French law, however, with all signs of religious affiliation, regardless of the denomination, banned in official state-connected institutions.
“The position taken by the FFF and its president Noel Le Graet has our wholehearted support, because it would be necessary to remind Mr Blatter that the French state has declared its attachment to the values of the Republic and that Republican principles, notably the principle of an entirely secular state, are in force in sporting arenas,” the freshly appointed Braillard told RTL.
A mosque in the Paris suburbs said on Friday it had filed a complaint with police after slices of pork paté and a threatening letter were stuffed into its mailbox.
Authorities at the mosque in Mantes-la-Ville, a town of 19,000 in the western suburbs of Paris, said the incidents reflected a “worrying climate” after the town last month elected a mayor from the far-right National Front.
The far right is fixated on pork and is using it as an excuse to target yet another aspect of Muslim life, Gavin Titley writes.
Christophe Lavigne, the French airforce sergeant with far-right links who was recently acquitted on a technicality of planning to shoot Muslims, is still to stand trial in June on a charge of desecration of a place of worship in connection with a terrorist enterprise, in connection with an arson attack on a mosque in Libourne in August 2012.
Despite his having reportedly admitted to that crime, Lavigne has been released on bail, according to his lawyer, because the court accepted that he poses “no risk of reoffending”. The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France wants to know how an individual with such a record, charged with a violent terrorist offence, could possibly have been allowed out.
Far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen said on Friday it would prevent schools from offering special lunches to Muslim pupils in the 11 towns it won in local elections, saying such arrangements were contrary to France’s secular values.
France’s republic has a strict secular tradition enforceable by law, but faith-related demands have risen in recent years, especially from the country’s five-million-strong Muslim minority, the largest in Europe.
“We will not accept any religious demands in school menus,” Le Pen told RTL radio. “There is no reason for religion to enter the public sphere, that’s the law.”
The anti-immigrant National Front has consistently bemoaned the rising influence of Islam in French pubic life.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France draws our attention to reports that Christophe Lavigne, a sergeant in the French airforce with far-right links, will not now be prosecuted.
Lavigne was arrested last August and charged with planning an armed attack on worshippers at the Al Forqane mosque in the Lyon suburb of Vénissieux to coincide with the end of Ramadan.
Judges had already dismissed the charge against Lavigne of possessing ammunition in connection with a terrorist enterprise, on the grounds that the bullets were of a grade permitted for collectors of historical weapons and so were not illegal. This ruling has now been confirmed by the court of appeal in Paris.
Lavigne will stand trial in June on a charge of desecration of a place of worship in connection with a terrorist enterprise, having reportedly confessed to an earlier firebomb attack on a mosque in Libourne.
The CCIF comments: “There is no doubt that he represents a real terrorist threat, as he has already shown in practice by throwing a Molotov cocktail at the mosque in Libourne in August 2012. So how could this armed, dangerous and recidivist Islamophobe have been able to escape conviction and not be expelled from the French armed forces either?”
(Photo of demonstration outside Al Forqane mosque in August 2013 following Lavigne’s arrest: Abdel Malik)
Des Dômes Et Des Minarets gives further details of a court judgement, reported earlier by the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France, on a fascist convicted of a graffiti attack on a mosque in Alsace last May.
The 29-year-old man from Saint-Louis had sprayed the slogans “100% pig” and “France for the French” along with Nazi symbols on the wall of a mosque in Illzach. He expressed no regret for his actions and told the court: “To be white in France is to be a target.”
He was given a 6-month suspended prison sentence and a €500 fine.
On Saturday the Coordination contre le Racisme et l’Islamophobie organised a demonstration against Islamophobia in Lyon, to mark the tenth anniversary of the introduction of the hijab ban in French state schools.
The CRI points out that the law was the first in a series of legal restrictions on, and judicial and administrative rulings against Muslims, including the 2011 ban on the niqab, a 2013 court decision upholding the sacking of a childcare assistant who wore a headscarf to work, the adoption this year by the Senate of a bill that would extend the hijab ban to childcare workers who work at their own homes, and the prevention of hijab-wearing mothers from joining their children on school trips.
The demonstrators called for the cancellation of all Islamophobic laws.