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”.
Thus the title to an article by Joan Smith in yesterday’s 
“Denouncing multiculturalism has become a gate to reviving the tradition of cultural essentialism, with its belief in the superiority of European culture and myths of the white man’s burden and his civilising mission.
After the London bombings of 7 July, new anti-terrorist legislation has been brought forward; multiculturalism has come under attack; anti-Muslim racism has increased at every level of British society. Political and public debate are threaded through with the politics of fear.