Category Archives: France

French Muslim graves desecrated

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Arras cemetery desecratedNazi slogans and swastikas have been daubed on about 50 graves in the Muslim section of a French WWI cemetery.

The military cemetery, near Arras in the north of France, is one of the country’s biggest and is on the site of some of the war’s early battles.

French President Jacques Chirac said the desecration “was an unspeakable act that scars the conscience”.

About 78,000 colonial subjects of France, including many Muslims from North Africa, died in the war.

Rival presidential candidates Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy also condemned the vandalism.

“This desecration is all the more shocking because it affects the graves of fighters who gave their lives for France,” Mr Chirac said in a statement.

The official prosecutor’s office said none of the graves had been destroyed.

BBC News, 19 April 2007

Reuters adds: “SOS Racism, a rights organisation, blamed the vandalism on comments made in the presidential election campaign, without pointing to any particular candidate. ‘The increase in the xenophobic and stigmatising comments throughout this presidential election campaign is responsible for racist individuals taking action’, it said in a statement.”

Arras cemetery desecrated (2)

French far-right groups block Great Mosque plans

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A French court Tuesday ordered construction work on a mosque in the Mediterranean port of Marseille to be suspended in response to legal action by far-right groups.

The court found in favor of the National Front (FN), the Movement for France (MPF), and the National Republican Movement (MNR), who accused the city of granting a veiled subsidy for the mosque’s construction, violating French law on the separation of Church and state.

Marseille city hall decided last July to break a decades-long deadlock over the future mosque by allocating a plot of land for its construction, on a 99-year lease, for a charge of €300 per year. The Marseille administrative court overturned the city’s decision, ruling that the generous conditions amounted to a subsidy in disguise, demanding that the mosque renegotiate the terms of the lease in the next two months.

Jean-Claude Gondard, secretary-general of Marseille city hall, said that the court decision would cause a delay of three to four months at most, and that a new lease would be submitted to the city council in June. He said that the city was committed to file for planning permission in the autumn, but that “the mosque’s opponents are very political, and liable to try to block the project every step of the way.”

Moulay Abderrahmane Ghoul, regional head of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, denounced the far-right lawsuit as a “xenophobic and racist political act,” but said “the city’s will to build the mosque” was not in question.

But the MNR hailed the decision as a “judicial and political victory … against the Islamization of France.” And Philippe de Villiers, presidential candidate for the Catholic nationalist MPF, welcomed the ruling, calling for a moratorium on all mosque constructions and a charter “imposing respect for the laws of the republic on Islam.”

Middle East Times, 18 April 2007

French cartoons editor acquitted

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The editor of a satirical French magazine accused of insulting Muslims by reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad has been acquitted. A French court has ruled in favour of weekly Charlie Hebdo, rejecting accusations by Islamic groups who said it incited hatred against Muslims. The cartoons were covered by freedom of expression laws and were not an attack on Islam, but fundamentalists, it said.

BBC News, 22 March 2007

Representing Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Naima Bouteldja“Timothy Garton-Ash is obviously right in his assertion that ‘what has characterised the Muslim world throughout history is the great diversity of what Muslims say and do under the banner of Islam’. One could even afford a smile, if it was not so worrying, that this idea, considered self-evident for any other ethnic or religious group, is proclaimed as if a groundbreaking discovery. What it shows, yet again, is that when it comes to issues related to Islam and Muslims, the world has gone slightly mad.

“Take the word ‘Islamism’, which represents a political momentum that emerged in the Muslim world within the context of western colonial expansion during the 19th and 20th centuries. Islamism, when used by politicians or media pundits, is rarely defined and is often rashly substituted for terrorism. Yet, most in-depth research on political Islam illustrates that Islamism is not a monolithic, static, insular movement but one with multiple threads and tendencies that varies from country to country, depending on internal political and economic characteristics, as well as the wider, regional and international geopolitical environment….

“The question of who represents the true version of Islam is not as interesting as the answers indirectly supplied by the mass media and what they reveal about the ‘us’, as opposed to the ‘them’. For instance, it would be naive to attribute the dizzying ascension of a figure like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in politics and the media solely to her talent or the popularity of her struggle. Today, like yesterday, the ruling elites choose from the side of the Other the pawns best-positioned to support their own visions of the world and their interests.”

Naima Bouteldja at Comment is Free, 16 March 2007

Europe muzzles Muslim intellectuals

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Several prominent Muslim intellectuals are increasingly being barred from addressing international gatherings and delivering lectures across Europe on the grounds of extremism or anti-Semitism.

“We face many hurdles while planning for our annual Bourget conference,” Lhaj Thami Breze, Chairman of the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), told IslamOnline.net. “We want to invite prominent Muslim scholars from around the world but are always confronted with a long blacklist of people we can not invite.”

The four-day Bourget conference, the biggest Muslim convention in Europe, attracted last year more than 150,000 Muslims from across the continent. “Many moderate Muslims from the East and West, including prominent European thinkers, are banned from attending,” Breze said.

He cited Swiss-based prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and his brother Hany, the director of the Islamic Center in Geneva.

Islam Online, 28 February 2007

Sarkozy defends Muhammad cartoons

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French interior minister and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has defended a weekly sued for printing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Two French Muslim groups are suing Charlie Hebdo magazine for defamation over the cartoons, printed a year ago. Mr Sarkozy noted he was often a target of the magazine but said he would prefer “too many caricatures to an absence of caricature”.

Mr Sarkozy’s letter drew concern from one of the Muslim groups behind the legal action. “He should remain neutral,” Abdullah Zekri of the Paris Grand Mosque was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. The official French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM) voiced anger at what it said was government interference and convened an emergency meeting.

Editor Philippe Val told the court the cartoons critiqued “ideas, not men”. Speaking at the opening of the hearing, Mr Val asked: “If we no longer have the right to laugh at terrorists, what arms are citizens left with? How is making fun of those who commit terrorist acts throwing oil on the fire?”

The illustrations originally appeared in the best-selling Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005 to accompany an editorial criticising self-censorship in the Danish media. One image shows the Prophet Muhammad carrying a lit bomb in the shape of a turban on his head decorated with the Islamic creed.

Muslim groups said Charlie Hebdo‘s decision to publish the cartoons “was part of a considered plan of provocation aimed against the Islamic community in its most intimate faith”. It was “born out of a simplistic Islamophobia as well as purely commercial interests”.

“This is an attack on Muslims,” UOIF President Lhaj Thami Breze told the court according to Reuters. “It is as if the Prophet taught terrorism to Muslims, and so all Muslims are terrorists.”

BBC News, 7 February 2007

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Anger as papers reprint cartoons of Muhammad

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Newspapers in France, Germany, Spain and Italy yesterday reprinted caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, escalating a row over freedom of expression which has caused protest across the Middle East. France Soir and Germany’s Die Welt published cartoons which first appeared in a Danish newspaper, although the French paper later apologised and apparently sacked its managing editor. The cartoons include one showing a bearded Muhammad with a bomb fizzing out of his turban.

Guardian, 2 February 2006

The Guardian includes an excerpt from an article in France Soir defending the decision to publish the cartoons, on the basis of exercising “freedom of expression in a secular country”. In this connection, the IRR website has an interesting article from the forthcoming issue of Race & Class which demolishes the rosy view of French secularism held by some people on the Left:

“Some of the roots of the recent unrest in France unquestionably lie in the country’s hysterical obsession with secularism and an associated state-sanctioned Islamophobia. The separation of religion and state is one of those valeurs républicaines (Republican values) which everyone has been referring to since ‘les émeutes‘. But secularism in France seems to be going horribly wrong. Indeed, la laïcité (secularism) seems to have become a form of fundamentalism itself which discriminates against the country’s Muslims. Numerous politicians and intellectuals claim that Islam, France’s second religion, is incompatible with les valeurs républicaines.”

The BNP have also published some of the cartoons on their site, assuring their followers that “we certainly will not be grovelling to anyone who cannot tolerate important western democratic values such as freedom of speech, freedom of expression and those who fail to appreciate a sense of humour”. Ah, the famed BNP sense of humour, manifested in waggish remarks about blowing up Bradford’s mosques with a rocket launcher.

BNP website, 2 February 2006

French judge bars far-right group’s pork soup plan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A top French judge ruled that an extreme-right group cannot serve pork soup to the needy, saying the charitable handouts aim to discriminate against Muslims and Jews who don’t eat pork because of their faith.

Judge Christian Vigouroux of the Council of State, the country’s highest administrative body, said late Friday that such giveaways by the far-right group Solidarity of the French threaten public order. His ruling approved a decision by Paris police to refuse permits to the group on the grounds that such handouts could spark angry reactions.

France is home to more than 5 million Muslims and some 600,000 Jews. Both Islam and Judaism prohibit eating pork, and Vigouroux said the group had shown “a clearly discriminatory goal” with its charity.

Solidarity of the French was just one of several far-right groups that began distributing pork soup across France over the last four years. Critics contend the giveaway of pork soup is a far-right ploy to draw support for their efforts to defend against perceived threats to European culture.

Far-right groups defend the soup as nothing more than an age-old staple of the rural heartland from which all the French, at least in the national imagination, are said to spring. “Pork-fat soup is traditionally the soup of the poor because it provides complete nourishment,” said Bruno Le Griel, a lawyer for the group.

Le Griel argued that no one was forced to consume the pork soup. But the judge said the group’s Web site indicated it was a policy to refuse dessert to anyone who did not eat some soup first.

Associated Press, 6 January 2007

See also Libération, 6 January 2007