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| Europe |
| France Struggles Against Foreign Moslem Clerics Who Foster Terrorists |
| 2004-04-30 |
| ... France has long maintained one of the strictest antiterrorism programs in Europe, in part because the country was hit early by Islamist terror and because it has the largest Muslim population on the Continent. Many other countries in Europe have been far more tolerant in allowing radical discourse to flourish in their mosques. But making such a hard-line stance stick is difficult, even here in a country that has been more willing than most of its European neighbors to limit free speech in the interest of a calm and cohesive society.... Part of the problem is a dearth of domestically trained clerics to lead congregations of European-born Muslims. As a result, mosques like that in Vénissieux often have to rely on imported imams or self-proclaimed clerics who espouse fundamentalist beliefs that grate against Europe’s more tolerant societies. .... Only about 10 percent of the imams preaching in France’s mosques and prayer rooms are citizens, and half do not speak French, according to the Interior Ministry. The issue has become more pressing in the 10 years since a wave of Islamist terrorism swept France and has continued to spread around the world. The fundamentalist clerics provided inspiration and support for Islamists returning from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe jihads .... They have also helped prepare fresh recruits from among Europe’s frustrated, disenfranchised second-generation immigrant youths now rediscovering their religious roots. .... In September 1995, the police killed an Algerian Islamist in a shootout near Lyon after recovering his fingerprints from an unexploded bomb found on the tracks of the high-speed rail line between Lyon and Paris. The man, believed to have been behind a spate of bombings that terrorized Paris earlier that year, had attended a fundamentalist mosque in Vaulx-en-Velin, Lyon’s other principal working-class suburb with a concentration of Muslims. In January this year, the police arrested six men from Vénissieux who were alleged to be part of a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda that had planned a chemical weapons attack in Paris in 2002. One of the men taken into custody ran a small radical prayer room in town, and another was leading an effort to expand the mosque at which the now-expelled Mr. Bouziane preached. Two Vénissieux men are among people taken prisoner two years ago in Afghanistan and are now detained at the United States naval station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. France has tried to regulate its five million Muslims by creating a national advisory body to address issues like the training of clerics and to act as the Muslim representative in dealing with the government. But the country’s most extreme fundamentalists have refused to take part. .... Mr. Bouziane has preached at several mosques in and around Lyon since arriving in France from Algeria in 1979. After a six-month stint in Saudi Arabia, he began preaching at the Vénissieux mosque, an unassuming gray concrete box a block from the town’s largest housing development. The imam’s extreme views were well known among Muslims in the region and drew the attention of the local authorities last year after he reportedly issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling for jihad against American interests in France. The Interior Ministry issued an expulsion order in February, but did not immediately execute it. Then, in early April, a local publication, Lyon Mag, published an interview with Mr. Bouziane in which he spoke about his support for the Koran’s teaching that adulterous women should be stoned and that it was a man’s right to strike his wife if she was unfaithful. .... France’s national press picked up the article, and within days the Interior Ministry executed the expulsion order. Mr. Bouziane was put on a plane to Algiers, where he was apparently detained for questioning. But the expulsion drew sharp criticism from many Muslims across France, who saw it as part of a broader attack on Muslims by the French state. .... In the housing projects near Mr. Bouziane’s mosque, a young man with a closely cropped beard said he thought that the cleric had done nothing wrong. "If my wife cheats on me, I have the right to correct her," he said, "and not just with a slap on the bottom, but with a gunshot." |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #1 France Struggles Against Foreign Moslem Clerics Who Foster Terrorists Seeya Jacques. Oh, and have fun. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-04-30 11:28:17 AM |