The anti-Muslim “Identity Group” has issued a “declaration of war” against “multiculturalism and Islamizations.” Sounds like mini-Breivik’s in the making.:

French Muslims demand group ban after mosque attack

The French Muslim Council (CFCM) urged the government on Monday to ban a far-right group that occupied a mosque on Saturday and issued a “declaration of war” against what it called the Islamization of France.

CFCM President Mohammed Moussaoui said the Council also wanted better protection for mosques and Muslim cemeteries against racist attacks, which he said jumped sharply in 2011 and continued to rise this year.

Some 73 protesters from a movement called Identity Group seized a mosque in the western city of Poitiers on Saturday and unfurled a banner referring to Charles Martel’s historic defeat of advancing Muslim troops there in 732. They stayed for more than six hours before police ejected them.

In a video posted on its website, the movement issued what it called a “declaration of war” on multiculturalism. It also called for a referendum to block further immigration from outside Europe and further construction of mosques in France.

“We demand the dissolution of this group,” Moussaoui said.

The public prosecutor’s office in Poitiers has placed four of the protesters under judicial investigation for spreading racial hate and discrimination.

Moussaoui said the protest, the first time a mosque in France had been occupied like that, represented “a new escalation in violence against Muslims”.

Violent acts and threats against Muslims rose by 34 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, and went up again by 14 percent in the first half of this year, he told reporters.

The protesters had come from as far away as Lyon and Nice, near France’s eastern borders, he said.

Reuters, 22 October 2012

See also “La mosquée de Poitiers envahie”, CCIF, 22 October 2012

(via. Islamophobia-Watch)

French Muslims Protest in Gennevilliers against Islamophobia

Press TV reports from a demonstration in Gennevilliers against the sacking (since withdrawn) of four Muslims workers at a summer camp run by the local authority. They were dismissed on the grounds that their fasting for Ramadan supposedly made them unfit to carry out their duties and they represented a threat to the safety of the young people they were supervising.

Gennevilliers has a Communist mayor, Jacques Bourgoin, who initially supported the sackings, and his position was strongly supported by the far-right Front National who stated: ”Those who oppose this wise decision are making a mockery of the principles of safety and secularism.”

Press TV inteviews Marwan Muhammad of the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France who explains: “We have a hardcore anti-religion front in France. So we have of course on the right wing your traditional racism, anti-Arab anti-Muslim hate, which clearly says that Muslims and Islam don’t belong here. But you also have on the left-wing side of the political game an anti-Muslim front that is coming from a different angle. It is coming from the angle of secularism.”

As the statement by the FN spokesperson indicates, Marine Le Pen’s party is increasingly hiding its ugly racism behind a secularist rhetoric previously associated with the left. A large section of the French left, meanwhile, has been led by its narrow and dogmatic interpretation of secularism to justify the sort of discrimination against the Muslim minority that wins them the applause of the far right.

Marwan adds: “This type of discrimination is happening in every sort of situation, in the working environment, at school, at universities, in restaurants and cities. So Islamophobia as a phenomenon is not stopping because the mayor changed his decision, and that’s why we’re here today.”

Marine Le Pen pushes the idea that their are “no go areas” and that fundamentalists are running whole sections of large French cities.

Marine Le Pen exploits shootings to incite fear of French Muslim communities

French far-right hopeful Marine Le Pen hit out at “Islamic fundamentalism” on Israeli radio Wednesday after commentators initially blamed European anti-Semitism for deadly shootings that killed seven people, four at a Jewish school.

Self-declared Al-Qaeda militant Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, was under police siege in the southwestern city of Toulouse after the triple shootings that sparked a wave of soul-searching in France about attitudes towards immigrant communities.

“The identification of the killer only confirms what I’ve been speaking out against for years – there’s growth of Islamic fundamentalism in our country that the powers-that-be have underestimated,” National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen told Tel Aviv private radio 90 FM in a live interview.

“Whole neighbourhoods of the suburbs (of our big cities) have fallen into the clutches of the fundamentalists, weapons are all over the place and foreign funding is pouring in,” she said, speaking in French on the Israeli station.

AFP, 21 March 2012

A spokesperson for Front de Gauche presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon has denounced Le Pen’s Front National as “vultures” feeding at the scene of the crimes. Alexis Corbière stated: “Throughout this campaign, yesterday as today, Marine Le Pen has had the same goal – to feed a Crusader spirit inspired by religious war under the theory of a clash of civilisations.”

More French loonieness:

French PM calls on Muslims and Jews to renounce halal and kosher slaughter

France’s prime minister urged Muslims and Jews to consider scrapping their halal and kosher slaughter laws on Monday as President Nicolas Sarkozy and his allies stepped up their efforts to woo far-right voters.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon made the suggestion after Sarkozy called at the weekend for butchers to clearly label meat slaughtered according to religious laws and his allies warned immigrants might impose halal meat on French schoolchildren.

Fillon and other conservative leaders linked this tough stand on ritually prepared meat to issues such as immigration and French identity that the far-right National Front uses to tap into resentment against Europe’s largest Muslim minority.

“Religions should think about keeping traditions that don’t have much in common with today’s state of science, technology and health problems,” Fillon told Europe 1 radio while discussing the two-round presidential election ending May 6. The “ancestral traditions” of ritual slaughter were justified for hygienic reasons in the past but were now outdated, he said. “We live in a modern society.”

Mohammad Moussaoui, head of France’s Muslim Council, said ritual slaughter was no more painful than modern methods and labelling meat as being prepared “without stunning” would feed resentment against the two minority religions using it. “It will stigmatise Muslims and Jews as people who don’t respect the interests of animals,” he said. “That will raise tensions in society.”

Reuters, 5 March 2012

European Loonieness keeps marching on. Instead of focusing on combating the anti-Muslim sentiment raging in France they French elite chose to focus on the 500 women who wear Niqab. Go figure!

French far-right star compares praying Muslims to Nazi occupiers

(Reuters)

Marine Le Pen has put paid to the idea she would put a softer face on France’s National Front for elections in 2012 with anti-Muslim comments that have aroused a storm of criticism. Le Pen, the likely next far-right challenger for the French presidency, compared overflowing mosques in France with the Nazi occupation — remarks indicative of a drift to the right in parts of Europe that could let the National Front eat into support for the ruling conservative UMP party in 2012.

Le Pen, the frontrunner to succeed her father Jean-Marie Le Pen as head of the party, made the comments on a television show last Thursday with about 3.4 million viewers watching. On Monday she dismissed any suggestion of a gaffe. “My comments were absolutely not a blunder, but a completely thought-out analysis,” she told a news conference, adding she was merely saying out loud what everyone thought privately.

Given support of 12 to 14 percent in recent opinion polls, Marine Le Pen is regarded as more electable than her father, who was convicted in 1990 for inciting racial hatred. But her remarks suggest that far from moderating the party line, she will go all out to outgun conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to secure the slice of the French electorate that opposes high immigration.

(Photo: Marine Le Pen at National Front headquarters in Nanterre near Paris December 13, 2010/Jacky Naegelen)

“The National Front has changed: it’s more dangerous than before,” said an editorial in the left-leaning Liberation daily after mainstream politicians and Muslim leaders slammed Le Pen’s comments. “Given a lick of paint by Marine, xenophobia is back in the spotlight.”

On Thursday, she told a party meeting that after a steady rise in the number of Islamic veils and burqas worn in France, home to five million Muslims, the crowds praying outside mosques were akin to an occupation.

Her remarks chime with a growing right-wing mood among voters in Europe, where far-right parties are taking up worries that high immigration facilitates Islamic fundamentalist terror cells and makes tight labour markets even tighter. Since France banned burqas, which cloak a woman’s face and body, calls for bans have been heard elsewhere in Europe, most loudly in the Netherlands where populist politician Geert Wilders wants to tighten rules on immigration and ban the Koran.

In France the National Front scored a strong result in regional elections in early 2010, even after Sarkozy offered tough solutions of his own on immigration and crime. The party is enjoying a revival reminiscent of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s surprise showing in the 2002 presidential election when he got through to the second round before losing to conservative Jacques Chirac.

(Photo: German troops march past the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 14 June 1940/German Federal Archive)

Marine Le Pen’s remarks on Muslims provoked angry comment. Several UMP politicians spoke out against them, and government spokesman Francois Baroin called them “one more provocation”. Veteran socialist Laurent Fabius called them shameful and France’s anti-racist group MRAP filed a lawsuit against Marine Le Pen for incitement to racial hatred.

“These remarks constitute a serious attack on the dignity of Muslims in France and are synonymous with an incitement to hate and violence,” France’s Muslim Council (CFCM) said in a statement. CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organisations, also protested: “The Crif is outraged by the comments of Marine Le Pen comparing prayers in the street to the Occupation, which were made only to stigmatise the Muslim community. These remarks amount to a double and dishonest manipulation of history and language.”

Analysts view Le Pen as much closer to Wilders than far-right leaders of her father’s generation, but note that to keep her party faithful from drifting towards the UMP she needs to cling more than ever to hardline principles. “Le Pen has realised the limits of de-demonising the National Front — it works on the outside but less so with her militants,” analyst Sylvain Crepon told Liberation.

(Photo: Jean-Marie Le Pen with a campaign poster that reads “No to Islamism. Youth with Le Pen” and shows a map of France covered by an Algerian flag and minarets, March 7, 2010/Jean-Paul Pelissier)

Analyst Dominique Reynie said that by reinforcing her base, Le Pen would bite into Sarkozy’s first and second-round scores if he seeks reelection in 2012. “If the National Front gets a high score, that means it has taken votes from the left. Those may not necessarily go to the candidate on the right afterwards,” he wrote in a column.

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Pat Robertson

The earthquake in Haiti and its tragic aftermath has been consuming the airwaves and media at large with many rushing to aid Haiti in this time of dire need. Then there are those who are using this situation to mock Haiti and claim that this is just retribution.

In what can only be termed as a racist apology for colonialism and imperialism Pat Robertson essentially stated that the Haitians didn’t fight for their independence and freedom but instead “swore a pact with the devil” in which they would “serve him” if he gets rid of the French. This sounds like the narrative the defeated French would create to explain how they lost their colony to “blacks” and to soothe their hurt honor.

Anti-Muslim graffiti found on French mosque

(AP) – 1 day ago

CASTRES, France — Police say assailants have scrawled a Nazi slogan and hung pig feet on a mosque in southern France.

Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux has denounced the “vile and racist desecration” of the mosque in the town of Castres.

Police say the swastika in black paint and slogans including Hitler salute “Sieg Heil” in German, “France to the French” in French, and “White Power” in English were scrawled on the mosque.

Hortefeux said Sunday any person found responsible for the overnight desecration should be “severely punished.”

Assailants sporadically scrawl anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic graffiti on religious sites, cultural centers and cemeteries in France — home to western Europe’s largest populations of both Muslims and Jews.