“Just look at how this legislative fear of offending religious sensibilities has shaded into a deeper cultural impotence when it comes to standing up to crimes such as female genital mutilation, ‘honour’ abuses and the more ludicrous aspects of Sharia. Look at how it has caused us to pull our punches on issues such as the burka.”
Writing in The Times, Matthew Syed explains why allowing allowing a legal exemption for ritual slaughter rots the foundations of western civilisation.
Christine Tasin is co-leader with Pierre Cassen of the far-right Islamophobic campaign group Riposte Laïque and its front organisation Résistance Républicaine.
Cassen and another Riposte Laïque activist were found guilty of inciting hatred against Muslims in 2012, and earlier year Tasin herself was convicted on the same charge, receiving a 3-month suspended prison sentence and a €3000 fine.
Regrettably, on 18 December Tasin won her appeal against that conviction. According to Breitbart London, her legal costs were covered by Daniel Pipes. They report Tasin as saying:
“Last Thursday was a great day for freedom of expression in France. I said, in Belfort, in 2013, before the mobile Eid abattoir that ‘Islam is sh*t’ to Muslims who had recognized me and attacking me because I claim my Islamophobia.
“I was sentenced to a fine of €3,000 including €1,500 suspended after the Belfort court considered that I had incited hatred against Muslims. The court in Besançon has now acknowledged that one has the right to express opinions and I did not encourage hatred against Muslims, and I can think and say that Islam is a threat to France, that it is a freedom of expression.
“The Resistance to Islam and all those who, in France, fear that freedom of expression is disappearing, and that blasphemy has become a crime again are relieved”.
France’s most famous living novelist, Michel Houellebecq, appears on course for a fresh literary polemic after it emerged his next book predicts a Muslim will beat the far-Right Front National to run the country in 2022.
Few details had previously emerged about the latest work of France’s literary enfant terrible, who shot to global fame with Atomised and recently won France’s top literary award, Le Goncourt, for The Map and the Territory.
But on Tuesday, it was reported that his next book, out on January 7, is called Submission – a reference to Islam and the submission of infidels to Allah through conversion to the religion.
Set in the very near future, the novel reportedly predicts that despite his record unpopularity, François Hollande, the current Socialist president, manages to clinch a second five-year term in 2017.
However, in 2022, he is knocked out in round one by a far-Right Front National candidate and a certain Mohammed Ben Abbes, backed by the fictitious Muslim Fraternity party. The latter goes on to win the presidency after joining forces with the Socialists, centrist UDI group and Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-Right UMP.
Houellebecq apparently dismisses the idea that Mr Sarkozy will make a triumphant presidential comeback, as he currently hopes.
François Bayrou, a centrist who has run in several presidential elections, is chosen as prime minister, in a scenario that, according to Les Inrockuptibles, “totally overturns (French) society”.
A secularism scandal is raging in France, after a mayor in a northwestern town introduced a “pork or nothing” principle at school, even for 27 students who will get no meat substitute.
The rule will apply starting from January 1 in the town of Sargé-lès-Le Mans, and may apply to Jewish pupils as well – though there aren’t any in this particular school.
Mayor Marcel Mortreau bases his decision on the “principle of Republican neutrality.” “The mayor is not required to provide meals that respond to religious requirements. This is the principle of secularism,” Mortreau told Europe1 radio.
The move was backed up by the Town Hall on the grounds that the food providers face extra work if they have to deliver meat substitutes, The Local reported.
The initiative has been supported by some public school officials. “We didn’t open school canteens for partisan, religious, philosophical, cultural reasons,” said Eric Le Moal, director of a public school in Lezignan-Corbieres in the Aude, which also passed the one-dish policy last year.
Muslim parents and pupils expressed their fury at the mayor’s decision, especially due to the fact that a second meal doesn’t cost any extra.
Writing in the Leicester Mercury, Professor Jill Marshall of the School of Law at the University of Leicester, author of Human Rights Law and Personal Identity, takes issue with the French ban on the face veil:
In 2011 it became a criminal offence to wear face coverings, including the burqa and niqab, in any public place in France. This summer the European Court of Human Rights decided this law did not violate human rights. It interferes with rights to religious freedom of expression and our private life, “personality” or “identity” rights. However, these interferences are justified by the “rights and freedoms of others”: “living together” argued by the French government.
As the two dissenting judges say this is notion is “far-fetched and vague”. It makes a mockery of rights to freedom of expression, religious or otherwise, identity or personality.
A university has been accused of censorship after scrapping the launch of a report into alleged Islamic extremism in schools and campuses across the UK.
The University of West London was criticised following the decision to cancel the event staged by Sharia Watch UK – set up to monitor the radicalisation of young British Muslims – on safety and procedural grounds. It follows claims in the past that universities have failed to crackdown on extremist speakers and turned a blind eye to gender segregation for religious reasons.
The report was due to be launched at one of West London’s lecture theatres on Wednesday, detailing the number of speeches given by hard-line Islamists in schools, universities and even Scout groups.
The Financial Times has published a profile by Roula Khalaf of Fabien Engelmann, a leading figure in the Front National who in March this year was elected mayor of Hayange in northeastern France.
Engelmann is described as a “one-time leftist union activist”. But that isn’t the half of it.
He is a former longtime militant in the revolutionary socialist organisation Lutte Ouvrière, which he joined in 2001 and remained a member of until 2008, when he contested the municipal elections as an LO candidate. Engelmann then left LO and joined another far-left organisation, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste. He broke from the NPA in 2010 in protest at its decision to stand a hijab-wearing Muslim woman candidate, Ilham Moussaïd, in that year’s regional elections.
Having gravitated to the far-right “secularist” organisation Riposte Laïque – led by another ex-Trotskyist, Pierre Cassen – Engelmann joined the FN later in 2010, becoming a member of its political committee and an adviser to Marine Le Pen.
Roula Khalaf writes:
As you would expect, Mr Engelmann has strong views about immigration and the supposedly menacing Islamisation of French society. His problem is the Kosovar and Albanian migrants housed in the town and living on benefits. They are, he says, a “new immigration”, families that produce five to seven children, feed off the French state and want to impose a “middle ages dogma and a religion that is not ours”.
Saphir News has reported that Caroline Fourest – the French “left-wing” Islamophobe who wrote Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan – has been successfully sued for defamation over comments she made in June last year on the radio station France Culture.
Fourest was responding to the attacks on two Muslim women in Argenteuil, one of whom lost her baby after being kicked in the stomach by her assailants. This followed an earlier incident in which a 17-year-old woman named Rabia Bentot (pictured) was punched and kicked by racists, who also tore off her headscarf while shouting “dirty Arab” and “dirty Muslim”
Instead of Fourest declaring her outrage at the assaults, and her solidarity with the victims, this self-styled feminist expressed scepticism about the women’s accounts.
Fourest claimed that Rabia Bentot was being manipulated by her father and by the Coordination contre le Racisme et l’Islamophobie, assisted by what Fourest described as the “communalist” website Oumma.com, and she suggested that the story of an attack might well have been fabricated. Even if an assault did take place, Fourest asserted, the police had not excluded the possibility that Rabia was the victim of violence by her own family, who could have beaten her up as punishment for living too free a lifestyle.
Needless to say, Fourest offered no evidence whatsoever to back up these disgraceful slurs.
France’s government is drawing up a new set of rules for theatres after the Paris Opera ejected a woman for wearing a veil during a performance, the institution’s deputy director said Sunday.
The incident took place when a veiled woman was spotted on the front row of a performance of La Traviata at the Opera Bastille, Jean-Philippe Thiellay told AFP, confirming a media report.
France brought in a law in 2011 banning anyone from wearing clothing that conceals the face in a public space, or face a 150 euro ($190) fine.
The woman was sitting just behind the conductor, visible to monitors, wearing a scarf covering her hair and a veil over her mouth and nose during the performance on October 3.
“I was alerted in the second act,” said Thiellay, adding that “some performers said they did not want to sing” if something was not done.
France’s ministry of culture said a bill was currently being drafted to remind theatres, museums and other public institutions under its supervision of the rules regarding veils.
Ben Affleck challenges Sam Harris’s Islamophobia on Bill Maher’s TV show
The prominent Islamophobe Sam Harris has revealed that he is writing a book with Maajid Nawaz and that he’s giving money to the Quilliam Foundation.
5Pillarz has the details.