The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France draws our attention to a report that the Mosquée de la Lumière, at Hotoie in Amiens, which was targeted earlier this year by Islamophobes, has suffered a second attack, involving obscene graffiti. It was quickly removed by the City of Amiens anti-graffiti brigade.
The mosque management has called on the authorities to install CCTV cameras as soon as possible, “in view of the acts of vandalism and desecration that have increased in recent years”.
Under Marine Le Pen’s leadership the Front National has been trying to present a more respectable face to French voters. Unfortunately for Le Pen, some of her supporters aren’t entirely on message.
L’Express has revealed that Séverine Amelot, a municipal council candidate for the FN-led Rassemblement Bleu Marine alliance in Nevers, has posted Facebook photos of herself under a swastika flag and wearing a shirt with a Waffen-SS emblem.
Another photo features Amelot in a t-shirt with an Odin Cross, standing next a cannon which she talks about using to “kill all that scum … on Friday when they are at prayer”.
Marine Le Pen, whose party is riding a wave of anti-immigration and anti-Muslim voter sentiment around Europe, says it will cut public funds to religious groups in towns where it wins municipal elections this month.
Le Pen told The Associated Press in an interview Monday that secularism will be strictly applied in towns where her far-right National Front prevails on March 23 and 30, and that referendums will be held on major issues.
Le Pen, 45, praised the recent Swiss decision, in a referendum, to cap immigration, saying countries have an “inalienable right” to control their borders. Le Pen claimed the Swiss decision, passed by a razor-thin 50.3 percent “yes” vote, would have sailed through France with a 65 percent approval rating if such a referendum held here.
Le Pen – who took the helm from her father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2010 – has worked to remove the stigma that has kept the party out of mainstream politics by giving it a kinder, more politically correct face. But the National Front has forged ahead with its anti-immigrant stance, especially regarding Muslims.
Sud Ouest reports that on Saturday night graffiti protesting against a planning application for a Muslim prayer room and community centre was sprayed on a number of buildings in the Dordogne commune Montpon-Ménestérol.
A petition opposing the plan had previously been circulated, while more aggressive critics denounced a Muslim place of worship as an “invasion” and demanded that a church should be built instead.
The graffiti featured the sarcastic slogan “Vive la mosquée, merci Lotterie”. The reference is to the mayor of Montpon-Ménestérol, Jean-Paul Lotterie, who has refused to be intimidated by the Islamophobic campaign, stating: “Nobody will ever say that I am anti-Muslim. I would rather lose an election than my soul.”
Lotterie has lodged a complaint with the police. He condemned the “racist nature” of the graffiti and said that “the immense majority of the people of Montpon” reject such actions.
The mosque of the Moroccan cultural association in Sounna de Blois, a town situated between Orléans and Tours, was desecrated during the night of 11-12 February (see reports by La Nouvelle République and Atlasinfo).
On Wednesday morning worshipers arrived at the mosque to find a pig’s head and several pieces of pork at the site, along with the slogan “MLE France” sprayed on the door of the mosque. The meaning of these initials is unknown, although it may be that ML stands for “mouvement de libération”. Boujama Hannou, the president of the association, has appealed for calm.
A privately-owned French company claims to have become the first in the country to ban the wearing of Muslim headscarves and other prominent religious symbols at work. But critics say the move, which had the backing of employees, is against the law.
From Tuesday onward the 4,000 workers at recycling company Paprec, based in the Parisian suburbs will no longer be allowed to demonstrate their religious faith by wearing items like the Yarmulke/Kippah (the Jewish skullcap), Christian crosses and Muslim head or face covers.
Paprec’s CEO Jean-Luc Petithuguenin said he set the new rules, which he claims are the first of their kind, after four months of negotiations with representatives of the company’s employees. The result was an eight-article agreement that follows closely the principles already laid in French secular laws.
“I am applying the same model that prevails in the public sphere, only I am applying it to a company,” Petithuguenin told AFP. “I am applying the founding principles of the French republic.”
Since they announced the resignation of Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) from the English Defence League at a heavily publicised press conference last October, Quilliam’s relationship with the former EDL leader hasn’t turned out to be quite the success they had anticipated.
Not only has Quilliam’s claim that Lennon had broken with extremism been widely recognised as baseless, but they have suffered the additional embarrassment of being publicly associated with a convicted criminal currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for mortgage fraud. Consequently, Quilliam’s initial expectation that they might win back some of their once generous state funding on the basis of facilitating Lennon’s departure from the EDL has failed to materialise. With Lennon incarcerated and out of public view for most of this year at least, Quilliam would have been well advised to move on, forget the whole sorry business and hope that everyone else did too.
However, while it would be quite understandable if Quilliam were indeed getting cold feet over their links with Lennon and backtracking from the relationship, this is clearly not the case. Showing complete disregard for the first law of holes, Quilliam have in fact been working hard to attract further publicity for their protégé, on the basis of a claim that he has been the victim of physical violence from his fellow prisoners.
Al-Kanz reports that anti-Islam graffiti has been sprayed on the pavement outside the El-Feth mosque at Beauvillé in Amiens.
The slogan reads “732, Poitiers… ils t’en ont pas parlé?” (“732, Poitiers… haven’t they told you about it?”). The reference is to Battle of Poitiers at which the Frankish forces led by Charles Martel defeated the army of the Umayyad Caliphate. Al-Kanz notes that this slogan has been promoted by a section of the far right, specifically by the Bloc Identitaire. Stickers with that slogan have previously been put up in Amiens by the Bloc’s youth wing, Génération Identitaire.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France has reported that two mosques were attacked last week.
On the night of 28-29 January the Al Ihsan mosque and cultural centre in Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy suffered extensive damage – its doors were smashed and the administrative office completely ransacked. (The same mosque was targeted in September 2012, when the building was defaced with Kahanist graffiti.) The following night a mosque in Pontarlier was the victim of a far-right graffiti attack, with a swastika and an “SS” symbol sprayed in white paint on the doors.
La République du Centre has reported that a skinhead supporter of the far-right group Bloc Identitaire was in court this week charged with criminal damage and incitement to racial discrimination.
On 8 August he sprayed the slogan “Fuck Islam” a dozen times, on public buildings as well as halal butchers and other minority-owned enterprises in Orléans-la-Source. He told the court: “Islam is a dangerous religion, which has caused great harm to our country and our secularism”.