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France to Shift to High Gear Fighting Islamic Fascism Racism
Amid concerns over mounting xenophobic violence, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin will summon regional leaders in September to draw up measures to combat racism and anti-Semitism, the government said Friday. A day after President Jacques Chirac urged renewed efforts against "the darkest side of human nature," Raffarin decided to assemble all local prefects for a strategy session. The latest sign of concern coincided with the leak of part of an official report noting a sharp rise in religious and ethnic tensions in state schools, mostly from Muslim youths trying to impose Islamist values and reject Western ways. Government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope said the September meeting would toughen the official reaction to racist crimes. Anti-Semitic violence and neo-Nazi profanations of cemeteries -- Jewish, Muslim and Christian -- have risen in recent months. "This will be the occasion for the interior minister to announce a series of very concrete measures," he said without giving details. "In this area, we’ll shift into high gear."

In his speech, Chirac urged police and local officials to crack down harder on hate crime and said state prosecutors should appeal against any lenient sentences handed down for racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic violence. Cope said officials should also register hate crimes more thoroughly and do more to help their victims. September was already shaping up as a tense time in France because an official ban on Muslim headscarves is due to be imposed when schools reopen. Islamic activists have started campaigning to convince schoolgirls to defy the ban. The draft Education Ministry report, leaked to Le Figaro and Le Monde newspapers, said a survey of 61 high schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods showed both Muslim and Jewish pupils increasingly made religious demands at school.

These pupils increasingly refused to eat meat if it was not slaughtered by halal or kosher rules and skipped classes on Fridays or Saturdays for religious services. During the Ramadan fasting month, pious Muslim pupils exerted so much pressure for all Muslims to stop eating that even some non-Muslim pupils joined in to avoid standing out. In one primary school, Muslim children insisted only they could use one sink in the lavatories while "the French" had to use the other, the report said. A local Muslim activist asked another school to build separate locker rooms for Muslims and Christians because "a circumcised boy cannot get undressed next to an impure one." More and more mothers are now so fully veiled they cannot be identified, it said, forcing one school to use a windowless room where they have to uncover their faces to a woman teacher in order to be allowed to pick up their children.
Posted by: TS(vice girl) 2004-07-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=37573