About 250 people clashed with police firing tear gas in a Paris suburb on Friday, in apparent protest over enforcement of France’s ban on Islamic face veils. Four police officers were injured and six people were arrested, while a 14-year-old boy suffered a serious eye injury from a projectile, police said.
On Sunday 14 July in Trappes (west of Paris) a 21-year-old Muslim woman wearing the veil was attacked by two men in their 30s who lived in the same area as the young woman.
As she crossed the bridge in Trappes on her way home, accompanied by her two-year-old niece, the two assailants insulted her: “bitch”, “dirty veiled woman”. She didn’t reply and when she turned towards them one of them said “yes, I’m talking to you”.
Oblivious to the presence of the child, he pulled out a knife with a blade of 10 to 15cm while declaring “anyway we’re going to exterminate you Muslims, and you’ll be the first”. As he approached his victim with his knife, a man intervened and blocked his path, putting the two attackers to flight.
Taking the decision to wear hijab after developing a sun allergy, Dennis Queen could not imagine the amount of racist attacks Muslim women face in their daily life.
“People immediately assume I’m Muslim. I don’t mind that but I find the racist comments just disgusting,” Queen told The Express newspaper. “I’ve been called a race traitor and it’s really opened my eyes to the kind of daily racism Muslims have to put up with.”
AFP reports that the prosecutor in Reims said today that he is investigating three separate complaints of assaults and insults against Muslim women.
The prosecutor told AFP that a preliminary investigation had been opened after a veiled young woman was assaulted on Friday while crossing a park in the centre of Reims by a man who was “probably drunk”. The victim was hit in the face and wounded with a sharp object by her attacker, who had previously attempted to snatch her headscarf, according to her testimony.
The prosecutor is investigating two further complaints filed at the Reims police headquarters on Sunday: one for physical assault – a blow with an elbow – and racist insults against a woman wearing a headscarf that took place on Saturday, and another for death threats and insults towards two other veiled women, dating back to July 2.
“Within two weeks there have been three Islamophobic attacks in Reims, the last of which was a very violent one against a young woman of 18, and other cities are experiencing the same upsurge”, Abdallah Zekri, president of the national Observatory against Islamophobic Acts, a component of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, told AFP. He denounced the “repeated attacks against Muslims in France” .
A branch of Russia’s Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by a group of Muslims for the right of schoolgirls to wear traditional religious attire, specifically the hijab, in classrooms.
The appeal was made by a group of citizens of Muslim faith from southern Russia’s Stavropol Region. They complained that a decree by the local administration ordering all schoolchildren to appear in classes only in regular secular clothes, which came into force in January this year, infringes their freedom of faith as guaranteed by the constitution.
The controversy erupted when a group of schoolgirls was barred from classes for two weeks when they insisted on wearing hijabs. The girls then began attending to a local religious school, the parents saying their daughters would receive the mandatory universal secondary education at home. However the administration ruled that a religious school cannot replace a secular one.
The Committee against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) says there has been a steady rise in anti-Muslim acts in France in recent years. The CCIF said in its annual report on Wednesday that the number of anti-Muslim acts jumped to 469 cases in 2012 from 298 in 2011, and 188 in 2010.
The report also denounced France’s civil service as “one of the principal vectors of Islamophobia” as it said bureaucrats often over-interpreted official secularist policies to incorrectly reject to serve Muslim women who wear Islamic headscarves.
According to the law, civil servants and girls who attend state schools are banned from wearing headscarves, but adults using a public service are not. However, some French officials refuse to conduct a civil wedding or issue documents if the woman concerned covers her hair, the report said.
The CCIF report added that anti-Muslim acts have increasingly targeted people, especially women, adding that assaults against mosques had approximately doubled in 2012 compared with the year before.
The Catalan Government has announced plans to control the wearing of burqas and other face-covering attire in public spaces “for reasons of public safety”.
The proposed rule will also control the public wearing of other garments including helmets and masks, Ramon Espadaler, Interior Minister for Catalonia, announced in the autonomous region’s parliament on Wednesday. A full debate will follow the introduction of the public safety motion designed to combat people concealing their faces in public places.
Espadaler argued that it had nothing to do with “religious issues”, according to Catalan daily La Vanguardia. “It is not a general prohibition. That would lead us nowhere and we would be infringing on fundamental rights,” he said. He added: “We want to be sensitive” and urged a “careful, subtle and clear debate” to find a “consensus”.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports that on 14 June three Muslim women were subjected to an unprovoked attack while driving through Saint-Jean-de-Braye near Orléans. When they stopped at a red light a motorist got out of his car and proceeded to beat and kick the women, while shouting racist abuse at them, including “dirty Arab” and “I hate your religion”.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France condemns the media coverage of the recent horrific attack on a Muslim woman in Argenteuil.
Abercrombie & Fitch is having a hard time proving in court that the Muslim headscarf worn by an employee who was fired in 2010 hurt the clothing company’s sales, Law360 reports.
On Tuesday, when a federal judge in California pressed attorney Mark Knueve, who is representing Abercrombie, if he or any of his witnesses had financial records to show the woman’s hijab hurt sales, Knueve said he didn’t.
“A defendant says we’re harmed but provides no real evidence?” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers retorted, according to the report. “And you want me to grant summary judgment [in your favor]?”