(Photo credit: Vox España/Flickr Commons)
Elham Asaad Buaras
France’s far-right politician Marine Le Pen has called for more mosques to be closed, despite the closure of 24 in the past two years.
“He (Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin) closes a mosque there, a mosque here. He dismisses a preacher once in a while, but he must close all extremist mosques in our lands,” Le Pen said in an interview with French TV channel BFMTV on October 6.
Asked over her condition for the closures, the leader of the National Rally Party (formally known as the National Front) said all Muslims who have “radical rhetoric” should be deported.
Last year in August, France’s highest constitutional authority approved a controversial “anti-separatism” law that has been criticised for singling out Muslims. The bill was passed by the National Assembly last summer, despite strong opposition from both rightist and leftist lawmakers.
During her failed presidential bid earlier this year, Le Pen went on the offensive, promising a referendum on who should stay and who should leave France and condemning what she called “anarchic and massive immigration” that she alleged contributed to a sense of insecurity. She then spoke about another of her key policies, banning the wearing of the headscarf in public, arguing that women had to be liberated from “Islamist pressure.”
Le Pen told RTL radio station that a majority of the French population “supports a ban on the hijab in public”, and compared the introduction of a penalty on the headscarf to fining people for not putting a seat belt on.
“It’s a measure that the French people have been asking for, with 85 per cent of the population wishing to no longer see the wearing of the headscarf in the streets,” she said.
“[French people] have understood that in the last two decades that the headscarf has been used by Islamists as a uniform, as an advanced demonstration of fundamental Islam,” Le Pen claimed.
