Facts and figures reveal that even their high quality of living is unsuccessful in bringing elements of happiness and joy to them.

The people of France today are suffering from un air somber (gloom) syndrome instead of joie de vivre (joy of living), in which they were before enriched. There is no one from outside who could be blamed from their misery and distraught as revealed in a research by a French scholar, and going to be presented to the Royal Economic Society in London next month. The study declares French culture as the root cause of depression and sadness prevailing among its people and says that the culture teaches them so.

According to Paris School of Economics’ professor Claudia Senik, the culture is the biggest hindrance in the way of French to enjoy happy living in accordance to their material well being.

French are lucky to have an affluent life style, Senik says. It is a welfare state with free availability of amenities of life including healthcare and education. With a working week of 35-hour, it is a great source of attraction for foreigners who dream to get the French nationality.

Even with so many blessings, French appear solemn. According to a recent WIN-Gallup poll, they are least interested in life than the people of Afghanistan or Iraq.

Excluding Finland, France is the only old European country where people are more inclined towards suicide – World Health Organization states. After road accidents, suicide is the second major death cause in France among the 15-44 year age group, and the first one among 30-39 years age group.

“French Paradox” reflecting riches can’t bring happiness can be best described by “psychological belief being taught in schools or social gatherings etc, especially at teenage”, Senik remarks.

Her deep factual study over this life satisfaction issue ends up saying that on average French is less happy from his living than any of his European fellow. Senik’s critical analysis also reveals that the people of France residing outside the country are less joyous than their native fellows; however, foreign residents are enjoying much happier living than the natives. Those foreigners who are residing in the country since long are also not as happy as the new immigrants.

Senik believes that there is something wrong within the French people, which is adversely affecting the
French people’s living ideologies and making them undergo depressive tendencies.

In 1970′s, the same low level satisfaction issue was raised. The theory that language could be a major reason for all this go is discredited and discarded by Senik; on the ground that French-speakers in Canada or Switzerland are not suffering anything like this and are happy like others.

Senik is sure that the French educational system can play an active role in bringing a positive attitude change in the thinking patterns of people from childhood if French people are really sincere to get their happiness back. Senik suggests that happiness policies should be properly applied to cut down the over influence of cultural setups. Implementing this ideology through education will be the best idea.

However, Senik’s study has led to a turbulent debate over the blogging world where unavoidably her own country fellows are left with question marks after the work got published in the country’s official language. Majority of the French national found it as a further proof of their country’s downfall with one blogger commenting that he is much aware about various less enriched countries and their unhappy natives, but they don’t bother it at all, and the other one commented that in the majority of the underdeveloped countries, people are still living quite joyously. The habitual complaining attitude is indeed not an admired philosophy to live.

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The Collectif contre l'Islamophobie en France reports that there has been yet another fascist graffiti attack on a French mosque, this time at Provins in the Île-de-France region in north-central France. On Saturday morning worshippers found six red swastikas sprayed on the walls and doors of the building. The CCIF points out that this follows a similar attack only a week ago at Ozoir-La-Ferrière.

French interior minister Manuel Valls has issued a statement condemning the incident and declaring his support for the Muslim community, but the CCIF dismisses this as just words, when what is needed is action. They add that Valls himself, with his expulsion of preachers, his talk of the Republic's "essential struggle" against the veil, and his treatment of French Muslims as the enemy within, has helped to legitimise Islamophobic acts.

See also "Swastikas daubed on mosque in latest attack", The Local, 11 February 2013

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Vandals have targeted a French mosque in a graffiti attack, tagging the worship centre with swastikas and anti-Islam slogans, officials said Sunday.

The attack was discovered by worshippers arriving for morning prayer at the mosque in Ozoir-La-Ferrière, a small town 35 kilometres (20 miles) east of Paris.

Photographs of the mosque show at least two swastikas painted on the facade, as well as an explicit anti-Islam slogan and "Long Live Gaul," the ancient Roman-era name for France.

Police were investigating the incident.

In the eastern city of Besançon, two mosques were also vandalised, where the Star of David had been painted on the walls.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls condemned the attacks "with the utmost severity" and called them "foul and hateful."

According to statistics from an Islamic monitoring organisation, 201 anti-Islam attacks were recorded in France last year, up 28 percent on 2011.

AFP, 3 February 2013

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A new survey by Paris-based Ipsos research company on Thursday showed 74% of French respondents believe the Muslim religion is ''intolerant'' and incompatible with their social values.

The survey, published on the Le Monde newspaper website, also showed eight out of 10 French people believe the Islamic religion tries to impose its views on others, 10% believe a majority of Muslims are fundamentalists, and another 44% believe a many but not all Muslims are fundamentalists. Most respondents did not know how to define fundamentalism, however.

The data varied across age groups and political affiliations, but represents a majority in each category of respondents.

ANSAmed, 24 January 2013

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A mosque at Val-de-Reuil in Normandy in north-western France was sprayed with far-right graffiti last Wednesday night. Slogans included "Anti-Islam", "Long live the FN" and "France, love it or leave it". As the Collectif contre l'Islamophobie en France points out, these days every week brings new acts of Islamophobic vandalism.

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The Collectif contre l'Islamophobie en France reports that on Thursday-Friday night four swastikas along with racist slogans riddled with misspellings were sprayed on the wall of the As-Salam de Tomblaine mosque in the Lorraine region of north-east France. (The slogan "Bougnoulle de mourt" would appear to mean something like "death to wogs".)

The CCIF notes that only a few months ago the mosque at Vandœuvre, five kilometres from Tomblaine, was also the target of a graffiti attack, although in that case the graffiti were of Kahanist rather than Nazi inspiration.

See also ICI-C-NANCY, 21 December 2012

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On Tuesday 11 December six swastikas were found on the walls of the mosque in the Penhars neighbourhood of Quimper, in the Finistère department of Brittany in north-west France, the Collectif contre l'Islamophobie en France reports.

The CCIF points out that this is not the first time that the mosque has suffered such acts of vandalism. In September 2006 similar graffiti were found, and the mosque was the victim of an attempted arson attack.

See also Ouest-France, 13 December 2012

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Liberty, Equality and Islamophobia

By Bob Pitt

Labour Briefing, December 2012-January 2013

On 10 November hundreds of self-styled patriots took to the streets of Paris to denounce "Islamist fascism". Chanting that the mainstream Muslim federation, the Union des organisations islamiques de France, are fascists who should be treated as garbage, they brandished placards with slogans such as "Islam out of the Louvre" (a new exhibition of Islamic art had just opened at the Louvre Museum) and "No to the Islamisation of Alsace-Lorraine".

The march attracted support from a range of far-right groups. However, in contrast to similar protests organised by the English Defence League (EDL) in the UK, the outfit behind this demonstration, Résistance Républicaine, claims that most of its founding members have their roots in the French left. Its leader, Christine Tasin, was once a member of Jean-Pierre Chevènement's Mouvement républicain et citoyen, a left-wing split from the Socialist Party.

Résistance Républicaine is an initiative of Riposte Laïque, a fiercely Islamophobic website whose founder, Pierre Cassen, was convicted by a Paris court in March this year of inciting hatred against Muslims. Hailed as a hero of free speech by the extreme right, he was a platform speaker at a "counter-jihad" conference at the European Parliament in July, along with EDL leader Stephen Lennon. Cassen is a former member of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, a Trotskyist organisation that is now part of the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA).

Résistance Républicaine gained a notable recruit a couple of years ago in the person of Fabien Engelmann, a trade unionist with a long record of political activism, first in the far-left group Lutte Ouvrière and then in the NPA. Engelmann broke from the NPA in disgust at its decision to stand a hijab-wearing candidate, Ilham Moussaïd, in the 2010 regional elections. He went on to join Marine Le Pen's Front National, expressing admiration for its stand against Muslims and migrants, and is now a member of its political bureau while also remaining a supporter of Résistance Républicaine.

Engelmann was not the only NPA member to condemn Ilham Moussaïd's candidacy. The party was split down the middle over the issue, with a substantial section arguing that standing a Muslim woman in a headscarf for public office was an attack on secular and feminist principles. Some even accused Moussaïd of seeking to Islamise the party.

As a result she and her supporters resigned from the NPA, stating that they could not remain in an organisation to which many of their so-called comrades clearly believed they had no right to belong. The 2011 NPA conference subsequently rejected a motion calling for the prohibition of any further candidates wearing headscarves by a majority of just two votes.

The French left generally has a problem with "le voile" (a term that includes both the headscarf and face veil). Nicolas Sarkozy took credit for pushing through the "burqa ban" that came into force last year, and it was undoubtedly the political right, not least Marine Le Pen, who gained from this manufactured controversy over the issue of veiled Muslim women. However, the initiator of the legislation was a Communist Party politician, André Gerin, who claimed to be acting in the name of secular values and gender equality. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Front de gauche candidate in this year's presidential election, also backed the ban.

Underpinning the left's attitude to Islam is their support for a distinctively French interpretation of secularism (laïcité) that requires not merely the separation of church and state but the effective exclusion of religion from the public sphere. However, this secularist culture hasn't prevented systematic official discrimination in favour of the Catholic faith of the white majority.

In 2005 the same French government that had just banned the hijab from state schools, on the grounds that it was necessary to uphold neutrality in matters of religion, ordered all public buildings to fly their flags at half mast following the death of the Pope. Sarkozy engaged in the same double talk, justifying the veil ban as a defence of the nation's secular traditions while at the same time giving speeches about the "Christian heritage of France".

Their disorientation over the issue of Islam has disarmed much of the French left in the face of the current wave of hatred directed against their country's Muslim population (see Richard Price's article in the November Labour Briefing). It is difficult for socialists to attack the racist right for whipping up this poisonous atmosphere of anti-Muslim bigotry when the left has made its own significant contribution to the rise of Islamophobia in France.

Speaking at a meeting in London earlier this year, Marwan Mohamed of the Collectif contre l'Islamophobie en France observed that things are much better here in the UK, where the left established a close relationship with Muslim communities during a common struggle against the Iraq war. Yet there are hardline secularists in Britain too, some of them active in the labour movement, whose claim to oppose all forms of religious belief doesn't prevent them from aligning themselves with the right in portraying Islam as a particular threat to civilisation.

The French experience should stand as a warning of the disastrous consequences that follow when the left adapts to the prevailing mood of Islamophobia.

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To their bewilderment and bitterness, on the morning of Saturday, November 24, Muslim worshippers at Villefontaine in northern Isère discovered racist graffiti on the walls of their mosque.

When they arrived at the mosque for their morning prayer, the Muslim faithful of Villefontaine found that the walls of their religious enclosure were covered with graffiti. The clearly Islamic slogans "Islam out of Europe" and "This is our home" had been written in black spray paint.

The public prosecutor in Vienne has just ordered an inquiry to be opened into criminal damage aggravated by its anti-Muslim character. This was assigned to the police force at Bourgoin-Jallieu.

In parallel, other slogans were discovered on the walls of the Sainte Marie Catholic boarding school, opposite the train station at Verpillière. These similarly involved Celtic crosses, which are often used by far-right movements.

France 3, 24 November 2012

The French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) has issued a statement condemning the attack. Pointing out that this is just the latest in a long list of such attacks that have taken place since the beginning of 2012, the CFCM calls on the government to devote more resources to finding the perpetrators.

AFP reports that on Sunday afternoon some 300 people gathered in front of the Villefontaine mosque to express their support for the Muslim community. They included representatives of other faiths and political leaders. In his speech the rector of the Lyon Mosque, Kamel Kabtane, repeated the call made by the CFCM for a parliamentary inquiry into the rise of anti-Muslim hatred in France.

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French Muslim leaders have appealed to President François Hollande come out as strongly against Islamophobia as he has against anti-Semitism. They estimate that the number of anti-Muslim acts in France rose 34 per cent last year.

Leaders of the Muslim umbrella body, the CFCM, which was set up by former president Nicolas Sarkozy when he was interior minister, met Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault on

Thursday to call for action against what they claim is a rise in Islamophobia. 

They called on Hollande to condemn it in a "solemn declaration", similar to his call for the fight against anti-Semitism to become a "national cause".

Islamophobic incidents rose 34 per cent in 2011 and 14 per cent in the first quarter of 2012, according to Abdellah Zekri of the CFCM's Observatory of Islamophobia.

Zekri blamed a number of factors for the rise, among them:

RFI, 9 November 2012

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LOURDES — Leading bishops have voiced alarm at a rise in anti-Islamic sentiment in France and admitted that hardening attitudes within the Roman Catholic church are fuelling the trend.

In comments that will add to pressure on President François Hollande to respond to demands from France's large Muslim community to speak out on the issue, the Bishop of Angoulême, Claude Dagens, said he was profoundly concerned by recent developments.

"It is with much pain that I notice the emergence of a Catholic Islamophobia, in the same way that there has been a Catholic anti-semitism for centuries," Dagens told AFP in an interview on the sidelines of an assembly of French bishops here.

Dagens said his concerns had been heightened by the controversial "Muslim demographics" presentation made at the Vatican last month in which Cardinal Peter Turkson predicted that Islam would eventually become the dominant religion in Europe.

The Vatican subsequently distanced itself from a film which included a claim that France could have a majority of Muslims within four decades, but Dagens acknowledged that the episode reflected a worrying shift in attitudes. "We are living in a society where fear is seeping into every corner. That's true for Muslims but also for Catholics."

Dagens comments, echoed by a number of his colleagues here, came in the wake of a call by France's Muslim Council, the main representative body for the country's estimated five million Muslims, for the President to publicly condemn Islamophobia.

Behind the call lies resentment based on a perception that Hollande and his ministers have given greater priority to combatting a recent rise in anti-semitism than they have to defending the Muslim community in the face of a parallel trend.

Earlier this month, Hollande vowed that France would wage a relentless fight to eradicate anti-semitism from society, describing it as a "national cause."

Abdellah Zekri, one of the leaders of the Muslim Council, called for France's Islamic community to be offered similar support.

"Given the rise in the number of Islamophobic acts and anti-Muslim racism, we want a formal declaration from the President of the Republic that includes the Muslims of France in this national cause," Zekri said.

Government ministers have issued strong condemnations of high-profile anti-Islamic acts such as the desecration of mosques and pledged to do more to address the economic and social problems that afflict the country's Muslims more than the rest of the population.

But government pronouncements on the subject have almost invariably been qualified by warnings that the Islamic community must be vigilant about the development of radicalism within its ranks, which it has linked to both an emerging threat from homegrown terrorism and to the resurgence of anti-semitism.

Fears that a militant minority of young French Muslims represent a security threat have been fuelled by Islamist gunman Mohammed Merah's killing of seven people in Toulouse in March and by last month's dismantling of what the authorities described as an Islamist terrorist cell.

These episodes are seen as having hardened the attitudes of many French people towards their Muslim compatriots while exacerbating the minority community's sense of their culture and religion being under siege from the authorities and the rest of society.

Many Muslims have been angered by legislation which bans women from wearing full veils, arguing that it has led to increased hostility to any public display of their faith, while this year elections were marked by a divisive debate over the use of halal methods of animal slaughter.

AFP, 9 November 2012

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When last week's cover of normally stern French magazine Le Point appeared online, the consensus on social networks said it was a hoax. Le Point is no tabloid. It is a serious and well respected conservative magazine.

Running the headline: "Brazen Islam...in school cafeterias, hospitals, and swimming pools" the cover featured a niqab-clad woman arguing with a French policewoman. It had to be a joke, but sadly it wasn't.

Le Point's cover was widely condemned on social networks, and parodies of it quickly appeared. "Brazen Judaism and its garlic humus", "Brazen gays and their trimmed eyebrows," "The brazenly disabled and their parking spaces," illustrated how French Muslims probably felt when they passed the newsagent last week.

When Socialist Interior Minister Manuel Valls was asked during a popular TV talk-show whether he found the cover shocking, he brushed it off, saying "It expresses a reality." He went on to say: "What I find shocking, and what I will always find shocking, is a fully-veiled woman."

That was it. The second religion in France gets insulted on the front cover of one of the country's most popular magazines – something that could never have happened with any other religion or community, as pointed out by the numerous parodies – and the Interior Minister, supposedly in charge of security of all French citizens, claims on a widely-watched TV show that it’s fine, and no one contradicts him.

It doesn't matter that at the time of its public ban in 2011, the niqab was estimated to be worn by less than 2,000 out of 65 million French people. It doesn't matter that – as was later revealed – the infamous picture was taken during a protest in September involving no more than ten women. To Manuel Valls, to Le Point, the terror of ten women protesting is "a reality" that deserves to be on the front page of a national magazine.

This might be because stigmatising Islam has become extremely common in France.

Independent, 7 November 2012

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France 3 reports that on Sunday morning a family at Pont-du-Château in Auvergne in central France found the walls of their house covered in Nazi graffiti. Of Algerian origin, the family has lived in the area for fifteen years.

An unpleasant suprise awaited the Charef family when they woke up on Sunday morning. They found Nazi graffiti on the walls of their house at Pont-du-Château, in the Puy-de-Dôme department. Swastikas and Celtic crosses had been drawn on the wall. These are signs regularly used by far-right and Islamophobic groups.

Settled in Auvergne for almost 30 years, Bouzid Charef is a biologist at the National Institute for Agricultural Research. On Monday morning he was still in shock and immediately registered a complaint. The Pont-du-Château police have taken up the case and are following all leads.

Signs recalling Nazi ideology are an aggravating factor in the offence of criminal damage and those responsible face up to two years in prison.

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Discrimination, abuse and Islamophobia. France's Muslim population reveal their experiences of bearing the brunt of anti-Muslim hate crimes in a new book published by the Islamic Human Rights Commission. The study looks into how France's institutions, political culture and attitudes towards Islam have created a hostile and dangerous environment against Muslims.

In London, an event was held to address the growing concerns of Muslim demonization in Europe. Communities were encouraged to foster better understanding in order to counter the inflammatory propaganda against Islam.

In the current political climate Muslims have been the target of attack after attack in the Western media. The panel here are discussing whether this virulent form of Islamophobia is being passed off as freedom of speech in Western discourse, speech which if targeted against any other community would be seen as unacceptable.

The main speaker at the event was Marwan Muhammad, a French Muslim rights activist who set up the Collective against Islamophobia in 2003, an organization fighting anti-Muslim hate crimes and discrimination. He sees a direct link between Islamophobia in the media and psychological and physical assaults against Muslims.

Experts warn that offensive and insulting media propaganda against Islam is now being seen as normal in a growing number of circles within Europe. They argue that this allows far right groups, such as the English Defence League in the UK and the National Front in France, to openly promote their hatred against Islam, resulting in far more serious attacks on Muslims in the West.

Press TV, 23 October 2012

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Last month stickers produced by the far-right movements Terre et Peuple and Oeuvre Française were stuck on the walls of the mosque at Muret on the outskirts of Toulouse. One of them featured the slogan "In the face of invasion, resistance and reconquest" and another "France for the French", while a third sticker warned that the white race faces extinction because only two per cent of white women are of childbearing age. Over the following days individuals drove at full speed past the mosque shouting "France for the French. Go home."

See CCIF, 3 October 2012 and Al-Kanz, 3 October 2012

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The Collectif contre l'Islamophobie en France reports that last night vandals sprayed Nazi graffiti on a halal butcher's shop in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in north-central France. The CCIF notes that last year the municipal council broke off negotiations over the sale of public land to an association that planned to build an Islamic cultural centre there, following an Islamophobic campaign.

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Around 50 women gathered Saturday afternoon outside the city hall at Rennes to denounce the Islamophobic discrimination faced by veiled women. The collective, made up of Muslims and non-Muslims, women veiled and non-veiled, sought by this action to call on public opinion to combat prejudice.

On their placards were slogans such as "How can we claim to defend women by excluding some women?" or "No to a ban on the veil. No to the imposition of the veil. Freedom of choice for all women". They also denounced the draft law to ban the wearing of the veil by child minders, or the circular which prohibits veiled women from accompanying their children on school trips.

These demands echo the campaign by CCIF for the repeal of the Luc Chatel circular, which has been found to be discriminatory: follow this link to send a letter to Vincent Peillon, the new minister of national education.

CCIF, 1 October 2012

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A French Muslim teenager who was arrested for wearing a full Islamic veil has been sent to prison for two months after being convicted of biting a policewoman.

Louise-Marie Suisse, 18, was stopped by two police officers near a mosque in the centre of Marseille in late July. She was wearing a full-face veil, in breach of a ban introduced last year, and refused to cooperate with the police when asked to produce identity papers, her trial was told.

The teenager, who admitted biting one of the officers in the ensuing altercation, was given a six-month jail sentence with four suspended. The judge went further than the prosecutor who had demanded a six-month suspended sentence.

Suisse turned up for the hearing in a full-body black niqab but with her face uncovered.

France has outraged many Muslims with its law against full veils, which came into force in April 2011 and bans covering one's face in public.

Violations are punishable by a fine of up to 150 euros ($187) or mandatory citizenship training.

AFP, 20 September 2012

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The Collectif contre L'Islamophobie en France has reported that a swastika and Celtic cross were sprayed on the entrance to a mosque at Agen, in southwestern France, last week.

CcIF notes that gunshots were fired at the same mosque in 2005 and that last year a mosque in nearby Villeneuve-sur-Lot was the target of an arson attack. In 2010 a mosque at Marmande, also in southwestern France, was sprayed with fascist graffiti.

See also La Dépêche and Europe 1.

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Véronique Genest, star of the long-running French television police series Julie Lescaut, has come under attack over a series of Islamophobic comments on Twitter, in which she claimed that Islam is a threat to democracy and aims to impose sharia law on France, declared her admiration for the racist journalist Éric Zemmour and described it as a "historical fact" that Muslims are allies of the Nazis.

See Oumma.com, Huffington Post and CcIF.

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