France’s Green presidential hopeful raised heckles across the political spectrum Tuesday by suggesting that France should honour Muslim and Jewish festivals as well as Christian ones, by according them a national holiday.
Speaking in Paris on Wednesday at her first campaign rally, Green presidential candidate Eva Joly argued that national holiday status should be accorded to the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Fitr and the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.
“Each religion should benefit from equal treatment in the public sphere,” she said. “I believe that national holidays should also be accorded to faiths other than the Catholic faith.” Describing religious equality as a “key element” of French identity, she then blamed the policies of President Nicolas Sarkozy for dividing religious communities. “Yes, I’ll say it,” she said. “This [suffering] has been caused by five years of Sarkozy-ism.”
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Suffolk County Police have arrested a Centerport man on charges of criminal mischief as a hate crime after police said he intentionally damaged a Huntington mosque parking lot last month.
A Muslim woman is suing the University of Bridgeport, alleging that the school failed to investigate her claims that a fellow student sexually harassed her and instead retaliated by reporting her to the FBI based on a false claim that she was a terrorist.
Three cars were torched and a mosque wall was spray painted with the sentence “price tag Gal Arye Yosef” in the village of Dir Istiya near Ariel in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The sentence refers to the name of an illegal outpost that was evacuated in the last few days.