Category Archives: France

French presidential hopeful decries ‘Islamization of France’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MOSQUEES_ROISS_001.5E0MYJ.S.pdfA far-right French politician launched his 2007 presidential campaign on Sunday, April 23, denouncing what he called the “Islamization” of the country and declaring Islam incompatible with France’s secular values.

“I am the only politician who tells the French the truth about the Islamization of France,” Philippe de Villiers, head of the anti-immigrant Movement for France (MPF) party, said in a Europe 1 radio interview, kicking off his campaign for the election next year.

On measures France should take to fight what he called its Islamization, Villiers said Paris should stop all mosque construction, impose a citizen’s charter demanding the strict separation of religion and state and freedom to change religions and demand strict respect for the equality of men and women.

It should also ban all Islamist organizations suspected of links to terrorism and expel any persons threatening the security of the French population, he added.

He further charged that Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport was endangered by Islamist radicals who he said had infiltrated the ground staff there, releasing on Thursday, April 27, a book entitled “The Mosques of Roissy” detailing his charges.

Villiers has stirred up controversy in recent weeks with increasingly tough statements about Muslims, which critics call racist and officials describe as exaggerated.

Islam Online, 24 April 2006

See also Reuters, 23 April 2006

Ilan Halimi’s family boycotts protest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ha’aretz reports that the family of French murder victim, Ilan Halimi, are refusing to attend a demonstration against the murder because of the participation of the racist right. According to Ha’aretz:

“The rally – which is due to be attended by over 100,000 people and numerous public figures, including government ministers – has become controversial due to the planned participation of representatives of two right-wing political movements, the National Front and the Movement for France (known by its French initials MPF).

“On Friday, the anti-racism organization MARP announced that it would refuse to attend the rally for this reason, charging that both movements were using Halimi’s murder to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment and thereby encouraging racism. The National Front, for instance, described the murder as ‘the result of 40 years of uncontrolled immigration’, while the MPF denounced ‘the Islamization of France’.”

Jews sans frontieres, 26 February 2006

Another example of religious extremism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tempers are reaching boiling point in the French Jewish community after the torture and murder of a young Jewish man by a suburban gang calling itself “the barbarians”.

Police had said that the gang kidnapped Ilan Halimi, 23 using a beautiful, young, blonde woman as bait to extort money from his family. However, the victim’s family and many other Parisian Jews are convinced the crime was, at least partially, racially motivated.

A Parisian member of parliament, Claude Goasguen, said yesterday the city could face “extremely serious intra-community violence” unless the authorities abandoned their “persistent silence on the real motives for this murder”.

At the weekend, a mainly peaceful protest march by Parisian Jews was marred by a number of violent actions by radical young Jewish men. A black man was beaten up, allegedly for “smiling” at the protest. An Arab-run grocery was attacked. A motorist who was caught up in the march was assaulted and had to be rescued by demonstration marshals.

Tracts were handed out by Jewish radical groups which claimed that Ilan Halimi, a mobile telephone salesman, was a victim of “Islamo-fascism”.

Independent, 21 February 2006

Which only goes to show that there are extremists and thugs within every ethno-religious community. However, in this case, I rather doubt that “clash of civilisations” rhetoric will be wheeled out to explain the actions of an unrepresentative minority of demonstrators or that liberal and right-wing commentators will produce articles asserting that Judaism is incompatible with western values. Islamophobia is so much more acceptable than anti-semitism.

AWL explains the veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at the Workers’ Liberty website, Mark Sandell tells us that the veil is just “the public expression of women and girls being oppressed and owned by ‘their’ men”.

Opposition to the headscarf ban in French schools, according to Sandell, was restricted to a “motley crew of cultural relativists, numskull ‘anti-imperialists’, and assorted religious bigots”.

Solidarity, 26 January 2006

Far-right ‘charity’ that leaves Muslims hungry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Far-right groups in France are distributing ham sandwiches and pork soup to homeless people in an attempt to discriminate against Muslims and Jews, forbidden to eat pork products. Food hand-outs, which have already taken place in Paris, Nice and Nantes, and in Brussels and Charleroi in Belgium, have now spread to the eastern French city of Strasboug.

At the weekend, Strasbourg’s prefect banned the extreme right association Solidarité Alsacienne from distributing its soupe au cochon (pig soup) to poor and homeless people in the city centre. On Saturday, police intervened to close the soup kitchen after Solidarité Alsacienne defied the ban and began distributing food in one of Strasbourg’s main squares.

Chantal Spieler, Solidarité Alsacienne’s president, was escorted to police headquarters and given a formal warning before being joined by her husband, Robert Spieler, a former MP for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front party. Mr Spieler denounced “a totalitarian regime” where soon “they’ll be banning salami”.

However, few accept Solidarité Alsacienne’s protests that it is a victim of the infringement of civil liberties. The association is close to Le Bloc Identitaire, an extreme-right umbrella group led by Fabrice Robert, a former leader of Unité Radicale, a neo-Nazi cell which broke up in 2002 after one its members attempted to assassinate the president, Jacques Chirac.

Soulidarieta, an extreme-right group based in Nice, which is also a Bloc Identitaire member, provoked outrage over Christmas when it began distributing soup made with pork once a week to homeless and poor people in the south-eastern city’s port area. Its operation drew as many protesters as homeless people. They accused the group of blatant discrimination by offering pork soup only, deliberately to exclude poor Muslims.

The philosophy behind Soulidarieta, which means solidarity in the local dialect, is made clear in the association’s literature, in which it claims: “Our people face being submerged by a rising black demographic tide,” and announces “the launch of a voluntary social and political action in favour of our most deprived blood brothers”. The group’s slogans call for “solidarity with our European brothers”, and “Our own kind first before others”.

Pierre Levy of the Council Representing Jewish Institutions in France, who attended the first distribution of pork soup last month, denounced Bloc Identitaire’s operations as “using human misery to establish ethnic separation”.

Scotsman, 17 January 2006

French NGOs blast writer for racism against rioters

Posted on by Bob Pitt

FinkielkrautA number of French NGOs launched on Friday, November 25, into a diatribe against intellectual Alain Finkielkraut for calling rioters a bunch of “rebels” with Muslim identity.

“Finkielkraut will be sued for inciting hatred,” vowed the chairman of Movement against Racism and for Friendship between People (MRAP), Mouloud Aounit. “There will be no dialogue with racists,” he said in a statement, adding that Finkielkraut and his ilk should know their limits.

Finkielkraut said in an interview with Haaretz last week that the problem with rioters is that they are “blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity.”

“Look, in France there are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult – Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese – and they’re not taking part in the riots. Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an ethno-religious character,” he said.

The racist remarks by Finkielkraut further drew vitriol from other French NGOs.

The Audio-Visual Council (Le Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel) urged the France Culture radio to sack Finkielkraut and keep his weekly program from the airwaves.

The Jewish Union for Peace in France also censured the writer, issuing a strongly-worded statement blasting the Finkielkraut’s blatant racism in the interview. The interview’s headline “What Sort of Frenchmen are They?” is a case in point, it said.

SOS Racisme also joined the chorus of condemnation, demanding the intellectual to reconsider his statements hoping that it was just a slip of the tongue.

Senior government officials have frequently said that the recent turmoil has nothing to do with religion. Chief of Interior Intelligence Service Pierre de Bousquet told French RTL channel on Wednesday, November 23, Islam should by no way take the blame for the work of angry youths.

“We must address the roots and real reasons behind the unrest,” he said.

Islam Online, 26 November 2005

Although it was quite clear from Finkielkraut’s Ha’aretz interview that he held deeply racist views, as we’ve already noted his comments on the French riots were significantly milder than the Islamophobic rants we hear from Melanie Phillips.

EU Muslims face challenging conditions: report

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EUMC report 2005The Muslim minorities in Europe has been subject to increasing discrimination and violent attacks, EU’s racism watchdog said Wednesday, November 23, urging the European countries to do more efforts to combat racism and xenophobia.

“Muslim groups face particularly challenging conditions in many member states,” said the Vienna-based European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia in its annual report, reported Agence France Presse (AFP) said.

It said that Muslims in Western Europe have been target of a wave of violent incidents in the wake of the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid and the murder of Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh.

The 104-page report said that Muslims and mosques in the Netherlands have been under a wave of racist attacks after Van Gogh’s killing. Van Gogh was shot and stabbed by a Moroccan-Dutch after he had written his anti-Islam film “Submission.”

Up to 6,000 Dutch people staged a mass rally in the capital Amsterdam in September to say “enough is enough” to the right-wing government for what they called racism and discrimination against minorities.

The report also cited a rise in attacks against the Muslim minority in France in the wake of the Madrid train attacks.

Islam Online, 23 November 2005

For the EUMC report, see (pdf) here.

French Muslims change name to get a ‘chance’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Abdel Rahim” has changed his name to “Peres” and no longer brags about his Arabic roots in public to spare himself police and employers’ discrimination, and dozens have opted for the new lease of life to escape the harsh reality.

“Neither my family in Morocco nor my Muslim colleagues in France knew that I changed my name on official papers,” the 23-year-old French-naturalized Moroccan told IslamOnline.net Monday, November 21. “The new name gave me a job and put me on an equal footing with my work colleagues, who knew nothing about my background.”

He said that his dark complexion further represented a stumbling bloc to his ambitions. “But I found a way out by pretending that I was of Spanish origins,” he said, with a bitter laugh on his face. “When I was Abdel Rahim, I never received any response from five companies for which I had applied,” he added. “But Peres was accepted now in two jobs and has to choose.”

Islam Online, 21 November 2005

‘Moslem’ rioters driven by hatred of indoor plumbing – shock claim

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The rioters in Clichy-sous-Bois are immigrants alright, immigrants (or the children of immigrants) from North Africa – Moslem immigrants driven by the same burning hatred of the West (democracy, tolerance, sanitation, in-door plumbing) seen in the streets of Tehran, Ramallah, Jakarta and Islamabad.”

Don Feder in Front Page Magazine, 21 November 2005