Following Génération Identitaire’s anti-Muslim stunt in the Lorraine capital of Metz, two other Islamophobic groups held an anti-mosque protest in the city last Saturday. Thankfully, as you can see from the photo, it didn’t attract much of a turnout.
Des Dômes Et Des Minarets has reported that during the night of 23-24 October the door of a prayer room at Lavelanet, in the Ariège department in the Midi-Pyrénées region in southwestern France, was desecrated with red paint.
Des Dômes Et Des Minarets reports on the latest anti-Muslim initiative from the French far-right group Génération Identitaire, who were responsible for a widely publicised occupation of a mosque in Poitiers last year (and presumably also for the anti-Islam banner hung from the same building earlier this month).
Following the recent announcement that the mayor and municipal council have agreed to lease a plot of land to the city’s Muslim association for the construction of a new mosque, Génération Identitaire activists in the Lorraine capital of Metz have been changing street signs, by giving them new names intended to suggest that the city is undergoing a process of Islamification.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports that a mosque at Crépy-en-Valois, in the Oise department in northern France, was desecrated with racist and Islamophobic graffiti last month.
The slogans included “Islam out of Europe”, “get out” and “wog”. Similar slogans were also sprayed elsewhere in the town, on the pavement and on the front of a nearby supermarket.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France draws our attention to reports that two police officers from Trappes, one of who was involved in the alleged harassment of a Muslim woman that led to violent clashes there in July, were taken into custody last month by the IGPN.
Europe’s far-right parties are set to contest next year’s European elections on a common manifesto, according to French National Front leader Marine Le Pen.
At a press conference in the Strasbourg Parliament on Wednesday (23 October), Le Pen, flanked by Franz Obermayr of the Austrian anti-immigration Freedom party, told reporters that she was hopeful of persuading nationalist candidates from across the EU to run on the ticket of the European Alliance for Freedom (EAF).
AFP reports that the mosque at Carpentras in southeastern France has been defaced with racist slogans and swastikas. The graffiti extended for over thirty meters along the exterior walls of the building.
The lawyer acting for French Polynesia’s first imam [Hishan el-Barkani, pictured] says he has been given death threats over last week’s brief opening of Tahiti’s first mosque.
The city administration of Papeete shut the prayer room a day after it opened, saying the premises failed to meet safety standards for public meetings and could only be used as office space.
The news about the mosque caused an uproar, with the A Tia Porinetia political party warning against the risk of extremism while the government restated the constitutional right to freedom of assembly and religion.
This was the front of last week’s edition of the French weekly L’Express. The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France points out that it was just the latest in a series of shock covers about Islam, and not only in l’Express.
It shows a shop window with mannequins with headscarves, accompanied by the headline “Islam, the danger of communalism”, which as the CCIF points out suggests that the mere act of wearing the hijab represents a threat to social cohesion.
A long-standing legal row over France’s laws banning the wearing of religious symbols in public places takes another turn Thursday as the Paris appeals court considers the case of a childcare worker sacked for wearing a headscarf.
In 2008, Fatima Afif was fired from her job at the private Baby-Loup nursery school in Paris suburb Chanteloup-les-Vignes after she refused to remove her veil while at work.
In April 2013, after years of legal wrangles and appeals, the Court of Cassation (France’s highest court) ruled that Afif was unfairly fired and was a victim of “religious discrimination”, arguing that because Baby-Loup was a private institution, France’s strict secularism rules did not apply. It also ordered the nursery school to pay Afif a fine of 2,500 euros.