PARIS (Reuters) - A French imam active in Muslim dialogue with Jews has backed a law against full face veils, parting ways with most Muslim leaders in France urging parliamentarians not to vote for a planned "burqa ban".
Hassen Chalghoumi, whose mosque stands in a northern Paris suburb where many Muslims live, said women who wanted to cover their faces should move to Saudi Arabia or other Muslim countries where that was a tradition.
France's National Assembly is likely to pass a resolution soon denouncing full veils and to try in coming months to hammer out a law forbidding them, deputies say.
A parliamentary commission studying the issue, which has been discussed alongside a wider public debate about national identity, is due to publish its recommendations next Tuesday.
Le Figaro said on Friday that parliamentary deputies have decided against a general ban on the burqa, but it would not be allowed in public buildings such as hospitals and schools or on public transport services, citing the text of a decision by the commission obtained in advance by the French daily.
"This measure would oblige people not only to show their face at the entry to public buildings and services but also to keep their face uncovered for the whole time they are in the public space," Le Figaro quoted the document as saying.
President Nicolas Sarkozy calls the veils an affront to women's dignity unwelcome in France, home to about five million Muslims. Fewer than 2,000 women wear the veils, known here as burqas although most are Middle Eastern niqabs showing the eyes.
"Yes, I am for a legal ban of the burqa, which has no place in France, a country where women have been voting since 1945," Hassen Chalghoumi, 36, told the daily Le Parisien.
Chalghoumi, who has received death threats for his promotion of dialogue with Jews, said that full face veils had no basis in Islam and "belong to a tiny minority tradition reflecting an ideology that scuttles the Muslim religion."
"The burqa is a prison for women, a tool of sexist domination and Islamist indoctrination," said Chalghoumi, whose mosque stands in Drancy, site of a wartime camp where Jews were detained before transport to Nazi concentration camps.
Chalghoumi criticised some of the tougher measures proposed by conservative politicians, such as imposing fines or cutting off child support payments for veiled women.
But the Tunisian-born imam, who is a naturalised French citizen, agreed France should not grant citizenship to immigrant women who cover their faces.
"Having French nationality means wanting to take part in society, at school, at work," he said.
"But with a bit of cloth over their faces, what can these women share with us? If they want to wear the veil, they can go to a country where it's the tradition, like Saudi Arabia."
French Muslim leaders and many opposition politicians oppose any ban, saying it would alienate Muslims and possibly violate civil rights laws.
A 66-YEAR-OLD Frenchman has been jailed in Abu Dhabi after making a bomb joke on a plane, the French foreign ministry said today.
Pensioner Jean-Louis Lioret, who was flying to Bangkok from Paris on Etihad Airways, was arrested after cabin crew overheard him using the word bomb in an exchange with his co-passenger, his brother Michel Lioret said.
During a stopover at Abu Dhabi, Lioret's neighbour asked him to keep a packet on the other seat next to him as it was empty.
Lioret's jocular "I hope it's not a bomb" was overheard and sent off alarm bells.
He was taken off the plane and grilled by police and then jailed. He was also informed that the packet contained cigarettes and not a bomb.
The French foreign ministry said it was informed of the arrest and was following the case closely.
This is very smart. Yes indeed. Because Muslims will not want to pay this fine. Collecting these fines will be interesting to watch as well. There will be social unrest for sure BUT, if given a choice, Muslims will migrate elsewhere. They like easy pickins.
They will choose to go to dhimmified infidel countries like the UK that quiver in fear of their Muslim population and acquiesce to their every demand.
Good on Sarkozy but his enthusiasm for the Euromed project (and the resulting tsunami of Muslim immigrants) is uh .....
Women who wear burkhas in public face a fine of £700 under new laws being drafted in France.
(Metro UK hat tip Steven Gash)
The penalty will be doubled for men who force wives or other female relatives to dress in the Islamic veils.
The proposal aims to protect the ‘dignity’ and ‘security’ of women, said Jean-Francois Cope, president of the ruling Union for Popular Movement party.
The fine will apply to ‘all people on the public street whose face is entirely covered’ and also include people in public buildings, he added.
French presidentNicolas Sarkozy has said before that the veils are ‘not welcome’ in secular countries such as France because they intimidate and alienate non-Muslim people.
He also described them as ‘a sign of subservience and debasement that imprison women’.
However, Mr Cope conceded that a complete ban on burkhas in France faced legal obstacles, including a possible challenge before the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that it would limit religious freedom.
France has more than 5 million Muslims – the highest number of any European country – and in 2004 passed a law forbidding veils and other religious symbols in schools.
However, a recent police report said only about 400 women in the country dress in Muslim veils.
They are worn widely in countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia but not in north African nations, where many of France’s Muslim immigrants are originally from.
A draft law on the proposal to ban the veils in public is due to go before France’s National Assembly.
The French are enjoying a debate about their cultural identity. Obviously the word “enjoying” is a euphemism, since the focus of the debate, whether or not to ban the burqa — full female coverage with an eye screen — in public, has riven the population of France, and by no means along the obvious fault line of Muslim vs. non-Muslim.
Algerian-born Fadela Amara, France’s cities minister, reinforced her view in an interview with the Financial Times: “The vast majority of Muslims are against the burqa. It is obvious why. Those who have struggled for women’s rights back home in their own countries — I’m thinking particularly of Algeria — we know what it represents and what the obscurantist political project is that lies behind it, to confiscate the most fundamental liberties.”
President Nicolas Sarkozy had called for a ban on the public wearing of the burqa altogether. But as of this writing, apparently a compromise has been struck and the burqa will be banned in public buildings only.
A partial ban is better than nothing, though, and may hopefully serve to inject some steel into the spine of other European nations who feel threatened by the rise of anti-Western radicalization amongst their own growing Muslim populations.
Some pundits argue that the numbers of women in France in full coverage are small — in the low hundreds. But more recent estimates run much higher. A report by the minister of the interior conservatively estimates there are at least 2,000, not a nugatory figure, considering that 15 years ago there were virtually no niqabs or burqas in France. If they are not banned now, it may be impossible to do so when there are critical masses of them, as there surely will be as radicalization rates trend upward, if not checked.
Critics will claim that these garments do no harm to others and nobody has the right to interfere with women’s religious choices in a free society. But President Sarkozy got it right last June in explaining to Parliament why the burqa is “not welcome in the French Republic”: “The burqa is not a sign of religion; it is a sign of subservience.”
Sarkozy understands what most people refuse to acknowledge. Full coverage is not about religion; it is about ideology. Full face coverage is an ideological symbol of hatred for democracy, particularly the democratic value of gender equality. While some converts wear full cover as a badge of religious commitment and some educated Muslim young women wear it as a political gesture, by and large full cover goes hand in hand with women leading lives of grim physical and mental deprivation, and often routine, unchallenged, lifelong abuse.
Most women wearing the niqab or burqa can never aspire to a Western model of citizenship. They have not been provided with the kind of education or upbringing that would allow them to understand the meaning of freedom as we know it. It is insulting to the intellect to speak of women in these “walking coffins” in the same breath with the words “choice” or “rights.”
But to hold such rational views is to beat against a strong current of political correctness. As is now the norm whenever hypersensitive Muslim nerves are brushed by political decisions involving perceived insults to Islam, the French debate on cover as well as the recent referendum-driven ban on the further construction of minarets in Switzerland have provoked a great deal of hand-wringing anxiety amongst Islamophobia-phobic liberals.
Unwillingness to criticize the burqa, implying a corollary willingness to abandon these imprisoned women to their fate, even within Western borders, is morally tantamount to depraved indifference to voiceless suffering. Liberals hide behind the iron rubric of non-judgmentalism of other “cultures,” but that strain of logic would have absolved slave owners in the “culture” of pre-Civil War America.
Yet even conservatives who agree that fully covered women are chattel and a walking insult to American values struggle with the issue of legislative bans against what is misleadingly considered a garment. It seems draconian to prescribe what any individual can or cannot wear in public.
They must first understand that the burqa and niqab are not articles of clothing. They are tents thrown over clothing. In their intention and their effect, they perform the function of a ball and chain.
Full cover is worn as a reminder to the wearer that she is not free and to remind the observer that the wearer is a possession, something less than a full human being.
Al-Zawahiri sounds a good bit like Hitler here. It plays well with his audience. "Al-Qaeda: Al-Zawahiri calls to 'disinfect the Maghreb of Spanish and French nationals,'" a translation of a Spanish news story by Claudia at Tea and Politics, January 1:
Al-Qaeda retakes its offensive against the West threatening.
This time the message comes from Al-Zawahiri, AQ's No.2. In a video, he addresses the members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, those who have kidnapped three Spanish volunteers (and another French national).
Al-Zawahiri assures that they will never be able to reconquest Al-Andalus without cleaning, "disinfecting" he says literally, the Maghreb of the "Infidels", those who for Bin Laden's No.2 are represented by Spanish and French nationals in the area.The video message is subtitled in English and Al-Zawahiri asks Muslims to be with his sons, the mujahidienes.
He shows the territory they must reconquer, a map of the Iberian Peninsula, which in this occassion goes beyond the Pyrenees.
In the video there are images of Cordoba's mosque or Granada's Alhambra in which Bin Laden and Co. appear with the black flag of Islam....
SUSPECTED Taliban militants have kidnapped two French journalists working for France's public television broadcaster and three Afghan companions in the east of the war-torn country, a colleague says.
Gunmen snatched the group as they were travelling about 60km from the Afghan capital, a French journalist working with them said.
Criminal groups and Taliban insurgents have kidnapped several dozen foreigners, many of them journalists, since the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the Taliban regime in Kabul, sparking a nine-year insurgency.
"The two journalists, accompanied by their Afghan translator, and the translator's brother and cousin, were kidnapped on the road between Surobi and Tagab," their French colleague said.
She blamed the kidnapping on the Taliban, saying they had laid an ambush for the group in Kapisa province.
French defence minister Herve Morin, who was visiting French troops in Afghanistan to mark the New Year, confirmed only that the journalists had been missing since Wednesday.
"We have no news of the two French journalists, who said yesterday they were leaving on reportage in Kapisa," he said, adding there had been no claim for their disappearance from any group.
"We can't rule out any hypothesis and are doing everything to make contact with them."
The journalists' employer, public broadcaster France Televisions, did not formally confirm their abduction.
"We have had no news of them for 48 hours," said Paul Nahon, director of documentaries. The journalist and cameraman had been working on a documentary for about two weeks, he said.
French troops deployed in Kapisa have launched a manhunt for the five.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in a rare speech to lawmakers of both Houses on June 22, 2009, kicked up a controversy by declaring the head-to-toe burka “not a sign of religion” but of “subservience,” which would not be welcome in France.
Ignoring criticism, which divided the French, the Sarkozy administration pursued its intended burqa ban by forming a parliamentary committee consisting of 32 lawmakers to investigate whether wearing a burqa trampled Muslim women’s liberty and how the ban could be enacted.
The committee, after a protracted investigation involving Muslim community leaders and intellectuals (including Tariq Ramadan), is about to deliver its verdict; recent statements by leading French politicians suggest that a recommendation banning the burqa in public spaces in France is on its way.
Islam subjugated both non-Muslims (dhimmis) and the Muslim women. The West, including the French, spearheaded the liberation of dhimmis of the Islamic world in the so-called age of colonialism by direct intervention or through diplomatic pressure (e.g. Iran and Turkey). But the fate of oppressed Muslim women remained largely unchanged as colonial powers avoided intervening in the private affairs of Muslims.
Ironically, Muslim women experienced bits of liberation, under the indirect influence of liberal thoughts brought to the Muslim world by the colonists and under their protection. But in the post-colonial world, it is being taken away from them.
It should by now be obvious that Muslim societies will not liberate their women, despite the passive influence flowing in from the liberal West. A direct intervention from without remains to be tried.
Whether it works or not, the pending French ban on the burqa would constitute the first substantial effort in liberating Muslim women.
But this time the French would not be doing it not as a discredited colonial power, but to uphold the Human Rights of its citizens as demanded by both the United Nations and its own Constitution.
The move was led by France in 2004, when it banned the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls in schools (also Christian Crosses, Jewish skullcaps and Sikh Turbans) to keep secular institutions free from religious symbols.
The Islamic veil, called the hijab, the niqab or the burqa, and seen by critics as a sign of religious fundamentalism and a tool of suppression of Muslim women, has been banned by various institutions in the European countries of France, Denmark, Netherlands and Belgium.
Sarkozy’s comment ignited condemnations from Muslims, as well as non-Muslim leaders and intellectuals, all over the world. Muslims claimed the comment ‘stigmatized’ Islam. Even President Barack Obama, weeks earlier on June 4, 2009, indirectly condemned the limited ban on Muslim headscarves in his Cairo Speech: “
…it is important for western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practising religion as they see fit, for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.”
President Sarkozy reaffirmed his commitment to banning the burqa on November 12, saying: “France is a country where there is no place for the burqa, where there is no place for the subservience of women.”
The French immigration minister, Eric Besson, said on December16, 2009, that he would like the head-to-toe Muslim veils to be legal grounds for denying citizenship and long-term residence in France.
“I want the wearing of the full veil to be systematically considered as proof of insufficient integration into French society,” he said, “creating an obstacle to gaining (French) nationality.”
A French parliamentarian said Tuesday he would file legislation to bar Muslim women from wearing veils that hide their faces in public.
President Nicolas Sarkozy has said that burqa-like veils are "not welcome" in France, and a parliamentary panel has been gathering information on the subject to release in a nonbinding report expected next month.
Lawmaker Jean-Francois Cope, who heads the president's UMP party in the National Assembly, the lower chamber, suggested Tuesday that he would submit his bill before the panel issues its report. He said he wants the veil banned not just from public buildings but also in the streets of France.
"We want a ban in public areas," Cope said.
Only a tiny minority of Muslim women in France wear the extreme covering — not required by Islam. Authorities worry such dress may be a gateway to extremism, and say it amounts to an insult to women while also going against the deeply secular nature of France.
However, the speaker of the lower chamber, Bernard Accoyer, said he felt his UMP party colleague's plan risks "appearing premature" before the parliamentary panel issues its report.
"On such a societal question that (concerns) the fundamental principles of our Republic, the search for a large consensus is a priority," Accoyer said.
Muslim leaders and secular experts have told the panel that a full ban could stigmatize all Muslims and would pose enforcement problems.
Cope said after a meeting of Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement that he planned to file two distinct texts in January, one of which would ensconce the ban in a larger bill forbidding people from covering their faces on security grounds.
The other text would be a resolution regarding respect for women's rights. A resolution approved by lawmakers does not carry the weight of law, but solemnly affirms a principle.
Cope suggested a fine could be levied against anyone breaking the ban. However, he also suggested a period of mediation lasting several months "with the women in question and their husbands ... to explain" and discuss the issue.
Such a mediation period was put in place after France banned Muslim headscarves from classrooms in 2004 after a marathon parliamentary debate. Other "ostentatious" religious symbols were included in the ban but it targeted headscarves.
In a discussion in the French parliament on French identity, Carl Pincemin, human resources consultant for CAC 40 companies, described how employees get religious menus, refusing to have halal meat offerend next to 'normal' meat dishes, which are considered impure.
Clearly they want separate dining halls and do not want to sit anymore next to people who are eating pork, said Jacques Myard UMP deputy. Others create the eqivalent of a religious union: they demand recognition of Muslim holidays, places of worship at work, and want the serving women to cover their arms.
These demands in the name of Islam, from the most simple to the most extravagant, put the management in an awkward situation. Anthropologist Dounia Bouzar says that some are afraid of being called Islamophobes if they refuse, and so they yield to intolerable practices.
For example, accepting that male employees don't go through an assessment interview anymore with their female boss. While others, on the other hand, suppress all manifestations of faith, even if they don't disturb the smooth operation of the company.
There are 4-5 incidents a week in the obstetrics department, says Gerin. In October a midwife called in to help during a difficult birth was beaten up by the husband, said a hospital official. CPR had to be administrated before they could go ahead with the birth.
The entire department is traumatized and in more and more cases they need to find their way between religious requirements and violence from some people. Husbands insist that their wives be seen by female doctors. Many refuse anesthesia for fear it that a man would show up, says the staff.
The mayors of the suburbs are concerned about the increase of religious demands. After the pork-free meals in school, the requests for menus without meat or halal, there are demands for special hours reserved for women in swimming pools and gyms.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy handed his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak a stolen ancient relic on Monday, ending a row between France and Egypt over artifacts taken from a Luxor tomb.
"Thank you very much," Mubarak said as Sarkozy presented the painted wall fragment to him, following a formal lunch at the Elysee presidential palace.
The small relic is one of five "steles" that were chipped off a wall painting in the ancient Egyptian tomb of Tetiky, dating back some 3,000 years to the Nile kingdom's 18th dynasty.
Louvre curators purchased the artifacts in 2000 and 2003 and kept them in storage at the museum.
Egypt demanded the return of the stolen fragments in October and broke off relations with the Louvre.
Afterwards, France agreed to hand back the works, which are from Luxor's Valley of the Kings.
"France is particularly committed to fighting the illegal trafficking of works of art," Sarkozy said, in a statement.
The other four artifacts were to be given to the Egyptian embassy in Paris during Mubarak's visit to Paris, French officials said.
The French president emphasized that the Louvre museum had acted in good faith when it purchased the artifacts and said that doubts were only raised in November during archaeological work at the site.
Egypt had produced photographs from the mid-1970s showing the fragments in place on the tomb's wall.
A 1972 UNESCO convention states that artifacts are the property of their country of origin and pieces smuggled out of a country must be returned.
Cairo's antiquities department, which controls access to all of Egypt's archaeological sites, had broken off ties with the Louvre and said they would be restored once the relics were returned.
Egypt is stepping up demands for the restitution of many relics including the Rosetta Stone on display in the British Museum and the bust of Queen Nefertiti in Berlin's Neues museum.
"Everything which was stolen from us should be given back," said Zawi Hawass, the current head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, in January.
Museum curators purchased four of the five fragments in 2000 from the collection of French archaeologist Gaston Maspero and a fifth piece was bought in 2003 during a public sale at the Drouot auction house.
But Hawass had said that he believed the Paris museum bought the antiquities even though its curators knew they were stolen.
"The purchase of stolen steles is a sign that some museums are prepared to encourage the destruction and theft of Egyptian antiquities," he said.
Egypt had put on hold a series of conferences organized with the museum and suspended work carried out by the Louvre on the Pharaonic necropolis of Saqqara, south of the capital Cairo.
Sarkozy said the restitution of the relics reflected the "quality of relations between the two countries and the excellent cooperation in the field of archaeology."
In 2007, France returned hairs from an ancient pharaoh that were nearly sold on the Internet by a French postal worker whose father had acquired them during the scientific examination of the royal mummy 30 years previously.
The case prompted Egyptian authorities to bar foreign scientists from examining royal mummies.
There may be a consequence to a couple of important events. 1. The large scale refusal of Muslim immigrants to integrate into western traditions and values, and perhaps a lack of volume on the part of those who have, and the Swiss referendum of late, which ban the building of new minarets.
Itself a sort of goofy law as constitutional amendments go, but one which certainly showed the rest of Europe that some sort of fight against Islamic cultural imperialism is possible.
While the law against the minaret is clearly a totem, (pun fully intended) the sentiment is real. I could not help but notice that in all the straw polls done around Europe immediately after the Swiss Referendum, all the nations polled came out much more strongly than Switzerland in favor of a similar ban. This makes me wonder if the Swiss vote had not been tampered with in some way to give a result more likely to allow the minarets.
After all, it was 57% against in Switzerland, a country famous for its tolerance and all the straw polls showed something more like 80% and more in favour of a similar ban in Germany, France, Spain and so on. Here is a short interview with a man who is a mayor of a small town in Northern France.
Muslim men who force their wives to wear the full Islamic veil should not be granted French citizenship, Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said Thursday.
Wading into the debate over whether to ban the burqa, Alliot-Marie said the government would await the recommendations of a parliamentary panel considering possible legislation to bar Muslim women from wearing the full veil.
But the minister went on to say that "there are a certain number of basics on which we must stand firm."
"For instance, someone who would be seeking French citizenship and whose wife wears the full veil is someone who would not appear to be sharing the values of our country," she told LCI television.
"Therefore in a case like that one, we would reject his request," she said.
It would indeed be confronting - almost a challenge - to have your city streets taken over by an imported faith in such an exclusionary way, especially when traffic regulation is left to that faith’s marshals:
So I’m not surprised that some Parisien locals have now written to their President demanding the return of their streets.
Nor am I surprised that this debate is getting ugly, much as I regret it.
Nicolas Sarkozy stoked the debate over immigration today with a warning to Muslims to practise their religion discreetly or face rejection by moderate Islam in France.
The President voiced sympathy for Swiss voters who opted last week to ban minarets as he tried to reassert himself in a debate over national identity which he launched last month but that has since spiralled out of his control.
Over the past week, Mr Sarkozy had appeared to retreat from his original comments following a backlash over the way that they were being used against immigrants, particularly Muslims.
But in a column for Le Monde, Mr Sarkozy returned to his theme and said that the result of the Swiss referendum showed how important it was for France to define its identity.
"Instead of condemning the Swiss out of hand, we should try to understand what they meant to express and what so many people in Europe feel, including people in France," he wrote. "Nothing would be worse than denial."
Mr Sarkozy called for tolerance and underlined France's respect for all faiths, but his message was intended primarily to reassure those who are unhappy about what they see as a threatening Muslim presence in the country.
"Christians, Jews, Muslims, all believers regardless of their faith, must refrain from ostentation and provocation and ... practice their religion in humble discretion," Mr Sarkozy wrote.
Addressing himself to Muslims, he wrote that anything that could appear as a challenge to France's Christian heritage and republican values would "doom to failure" a moderate Islam in France.
A spokesman claiming to represent al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has claimed responsibility for the kidnappings last month of four Europeans in Mali and Mauritania.
The claim was made in an audiotape obtained by Al Jazeera on Tuesday.
"Two units of the valiant mujahedeen managed to kidnap four Europeans in two distinct operations:
the first in Mali where Frenchman Pierre Camatte was seized on November 25, and the second in Mauritania where three Spaniards were held on November 29," the spokesman, who identified himself as Saleh Abu Mohammad, said on the tape.
He added that "France and Spain will be informed later of the legitimate demands of the mujahedeen", but did not go into detail about the demands.
Camatte, the kidnapped Frenchman, was snatched from a hotel in the Sahel region of northern Mali on the night of November 25.
The three kidnapped Spaniards were working as volunteers in Mauritania delivering humanitarian aid when they were kidnapped on November 29.
They have been named as Albert Vilalta, 35, Alicia Gamez, 35, and Roque Pascual, 50.
Earlier this year a US-based monitoring group reported that AQIM had claimed responsibility for killing Briton Edwin Dyer, one of a group of six Westerners kidnapped in Niger in January.
The group had said threatened to kill Dyer unless the British government released Abu Qatada, a Muslim cleric, from a UK prison.
France will not follow Switzerland's lead and ban the construction of minarets as long as the towers blend in with the surroundings, Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Friday.
"There are very few minarets in France and they must necessarily blend in with the urban and social environment, in a harmonious and reasonable manner," Fillon said in a speech delivered as part of France's national identity debate.
Switzerland's referendum vote to ban minarets reverberated in France, which is home to Europe's largest Muslim minority and is building big mosques in Marseille, Strasbourg and in Paris.
Fillon said the issue would be left to mayors to decide, based on urban planning regulations.
France's five million Muslims have fewer than 2,000 mosques or prayer houses, most of which are housed in small, modest halls, dubbed "basement mosques".
"I prefer mosques that are open, rather than dark basements," Fillon said.
"What we must fight is fundamentalism, but certainly not Muslims. We mustn't confuse everything."
The prime minister made the case that new mosques would allow a moderate Islam to emerge, one that is compatible with staunchly secular France.
"We must strive to develop a French Islam instead of having Islam imposed on France," he said.
The polls appear to have contradictory results, but I think the numbers actually match. The BVA poll shows 55% against a minaret ban and 45% supporting it. The Ifop poll shows 40% opposing a minaret ban, but 14% with no opinion, and 46% supporting it.
An important point to note is that most of those who oppose minarets, oppose mosques as well.
It seems that it's not the minarets that people are really objecting to, but the mosques themselves.
Most of those who think they can decide what a house of prayer should look like also think they can can decide whether it should be built at all.
If the Swiss would have had a referendum on banning mosques, would they have gotten the same result?
Meanwhile, a survey in London shows that 75% want a ban on minarets. (h/t EuropeNews) and a poll in Sweden shows that about 25% want to ban minarets, 44% want to allow them and 30% are undecided.
A BVA poll for Canal+ shows that 54% think that a referendum on banning minarets would be a bad thing. 61% of right-wingers support the idea, compared with 31% among left-wingers.
If such a referendum was held, 55% of respondents would vote against the ban. Among the 45% who would vote for the ban, 51% are right-wingers, 32% are left-wingers.
Among the respondents who said a referendum would be a good thing, 82% would vote to ban minarets. Asked whether Islam is more worrying than other religions, less worrying or just the same, 44% answered it was 'more worrying', 1% 'less worrying', and 55% that it's not more nor less worrying than other religions.
Among those who think Islam is more disturbing, 62% were right-wingers and 32% left-wingers. The pollsters note that putting these themes forward tend to crystallize the opinions of those who have a rather hostile attitude towards Islam.
According to an Ifop poll, 41% of respondents oppose building places of Muslim worship, compared to 22% in 2001.
If the Swiss weren't preoccupied with minarets, France would probably have ignored it. But once the subject was brought up, opinions have gotten inflamed.
It's not only minarets that they're upset about. Just 19% of the French accept that a mosque should be built if the Muslims request it. It's the lowest ratio in the past twenty years. While the number of opponents has returned to the level of the 1980s. 41% oppose building mosques, 36% said they were indifferent and 4% have no opinion.
Jerome Fourquet says that at the time, the Front National emerged as well as SOS-Racisme and the big protests. In 1989, 38% of the French didn't want to see a mosque built next to them. In the following decades the rejection weakened. In 2001, even after the 9/11 attacks, the core of opposition remained at 22%, others having joined the camp of the indifferent (46%).
Ifop says that it's as if the twenty years of the right to be different and positive secularism advocated by Nicolas Sarkozy have only been talk on the surface, without getting a toehold in the country.
The president even thought to alter the 1905 law to permit public financing of the Muslim religion, while mayors were asked to get involved to order to get Islam to leave squalid places of worship.
However, this 'normalization' of Islam wished for by the government and the political elites turned against the tide of public opinion. The gap is particularly noticeable among the voters of Nicolas Sarkozy. 48% of them reject building mosques (13% support), and 55% are against minarets. 48% of Olivier Besancenot voters object to minarets.
Besides the liberal professions, the younger people and more elderly, everybody shows reluctance. The workers are most mobilized. 65% disagree with building mosques, followed by middle managements, craftsmen and merchants. Whether they live in the cities or in the countryside, the French are concerned. And particularly in the North-Est and the South-East. Ile-de-France is less tense.
On the Le Figaro internet site, 49,000 readers answered the question "should the construction of new minarets be banned in France?" with a majority of 73% favoring such a ban. In Germany, Der Spiegel got 78% opposition in answer to a similar question. Though immigration is more accepted in France than in other European countries, Ifop says that according to recent surveys, Islam is worrying.
It's still perceived as a religion of conquest. "Its expansion and collective rites clash with the Catholic background of our society." The minarets, even without a muezzin, seems to be a "too loud" symbol of the Muslim presence in France.
AUSTRALIA'S most notorious terrorist Willie Brigitte will be free from jail next year, having served less than half his sentence for conspiring to blow up the nation's only nuclear reactor and the power grid.
Caribbean-born Muslim convert Brigitte made headlines in 2007 when he was sentenced in France, following his arrest in Sydney, to a maximum nine years in jail for joining an al-Qaeda-backed Pakistani terror cell out to bomb Lucas Heights nuclear plant, the national electricity grid and/or a military base.
But The Daily Telegraph can reveal that the French Justice Ministry is considering releasing the 41-year-old on an early release good behaviour plan - possibly in the new year.
He is expected to immediately leave France for the Middle East, with Australia definitely off his itinerary.
Authorities close to his case in Paris said the decision would no doubt cause some diplomatic ructions in Australia but that the judiciary was a separate arm of the state.
The French national's lawyer Jean Claude Durimel last night confirmed the expected early release of his client.
"He will be free next year, it was nine years but with good behaviour," Mr Durimel said.
"Of course he is happy. He had no problem in prison, he had good behaviour and when people are of good behaviour they may leave early."
Mr Durimel visited Brigitte in his maximum security cell in a complex outside Paris in the past couple of months to break the news.
"He is very angry because he thinks that the Australian authorities pursued him for a political purpose. He always said he was not a terrorist and that the file was empty but for him it was a political decision and not a judicial decision," Mr Durimel said.
Brigitte was born on the Caribbean island of Guadaloupe, a French territory, to affluent parents. He joined the navy in 1989 but quit four years later and moved to Paris.
There he embraced a radical form of Islam and began associating with members of Algeria's Islamist extremist Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. He ran survival training lessons in the forests outside Paris for those wishing to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Twice divorced, he moved to Pakistan in 2001 following the September 11 bombings. It was there he began to train in earnest for jihad with other foreigners at a base run by the al-Qaeda-backed Lashkar-e-Toiba, as they all awaited for their instructions to attack the West.
He later moved back to Paris but in May 2003 was given money and instructions to move to Sydney and make contact with an established terror cell and await further instructions. Ten days after he arrived in Sydney he married his third wife, unsuspecting army reservist and recent Muslim convert Melanie Brown.
She said she only became suspicious of her husband when he continuously questioned her about her time as a signaller in East Timor, the military equipment she used and her knowledge of army bases. She later sought to downplay the admission.
He moved about in Lakemba in Sydney's southwest, with authorities oblivious to his background or intent. He worked at a takeaway shop and attended a local mosque.
Then he made contact with Sydney architect Faheem Khalid Lodhi. The Pakistan-born architect was central to the plot to bomb a major icon such as the nuclear plant, Pine Gap spy base in central Australia, the national electricity grid or Holsworthy barracks.
The plot was in its infancy when the French authorities discovered Brigitte had travelled to Australia and requested from the Australian Embassy any details of his travel. The request was initially ignored so the French sent ASIO a message, but it was a public holiday and the fax for urgent assistance was left on a machine in Canberra. About 10 days later Brigitte was arrested on immigration irregularities and was detained - and his full background revealed.
Brigitte was deported in October and during interrogation said he was trained as a bombmaker and dispatched to cause death and destruction.
Russia and China, countries which have heretofore supported Iran's nuclear program, have joined up with the United States, Britain, France, and Germany in preparing a resolution critical of it.
The resolution to be presented at the next International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting, is meant to confront Iran's approach to global concerns about their nuclear program.
It will likely call on Iran to be more transparent in the building and use of nuclear reactors, and to desist from enriching uranium, in accordance with the orders of the UN Security Council.
Under a new UN plan, Iran would not enrich its own uranium, but rather export it to Russia and France, where it would be made into fuel rods (which can not be turned into weapons-grade material) and returned to Iran. This would deplete Iran of its uranium stockpile and decrease the ability of the nation to build a nuclear warhead.
Iran has rejected the plan. It insists that the uranium exchange take place on its own soil.
Iran says it distrusts the West, believing countries will not hold up their end of an agreement or provide Iran with technology.
On its end, the United States and European countries accuse Iran of lying about its enrichment of uranium for military purposes. Reportedly, Iran currently has enough low-enriched uranium for up to two nuclear weapons.
Click here for my latest Pajamas Media article. This is an update on the Iraq-Syria crisis. The Al-Maliki government continues to accuse Syria of helping Al-Qaeda and other terrorists and insurgents carrying out attacks in Iraq.
Their push for a U.N. tribunal to prosecute those in Syria assisting them has caused a steep drop in violence in Iraq, proving how critical outside support is to the survival of non-state actors.
Update: France is supporting Iraq’s call for a UN tribunal.
That’s right–France is now tougher than the U.S. on Syria.
In related news, the Iraqi Foreign Minister is expressing frustration that the U.S. can’t accept that Baathists and radical Islamic terrorists cooperate on a regularly basis. It is simply incredible to me that the belief that terrorists of different ideological or religious stripes won’t cooperate is still prevalent in the U.S. government. Read MEMRI’s article below:
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zibari has told the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that there is cooperation between the Iraqi Ba’th party and Islamist elements in carrying out the deadly bombings in Iraq, and that the Americans fail to understand such cooperation between a secular political party and religious elements.
He said that Syria is turning a blind eye to activity by Iraqi terror elements on its soil, and France is supporting Iraq’s intent to establish an international investigation committee on the bombings in Iraq.
Source: Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, London, November 19, 2009
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PARIS (Reuters) - A French imam active in Muslim dialogue with Jews has backed a law against full face veils, parting ways with most Muslim leaders in France urging parliamentarians not to vote for a planned "burqa ban".
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