About 200 people have protested in Cambridge ahead of the French politician Marine Le Pen's appearance at a university debating society.

The leader of France's far-right party Front National was invited to speak by the Cambridge Union Society. The society's president, Ben Kentish, said: "To silence views we might find extreme or abhorrent is a dangerous step in a bad direction."

The protest has been organised by Unite Against Fascism. Sabby Dhalu, joint secretary from the the anti-fascist group, said it was not against freedom of speech.

"We have to remember the total devastation of the fascist-led World War II, when almost 70m people lost their lives worldwide," she said. "Those people who lost their lives did so in name of freedom – it's the fascists who oppose freedom."

BBC News, 19 February 2013

See also Huffington Post, 19 February 2013

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The Cambridge News reports that Front National leader Marine Le Pen, notorious for her virulently Islamophobic rhetoric, is billed to speak at the Cambridge Union on 19 February.

A spokesman for the Cambridge Union Society is quoted as saying:

"Whether you agree with her politics or not, this event represents one of the very few opportunities a British audience has had to directly engage with Mme Le Pen, who finished third in the last French presidential election, behind Hollande and Sarkozy, and currently sits in the European Parliament as a democratically elected representative.

"The Cambridge Union has a two-hundred year history of promoting the art of debating and free speech and this event is fundamentally in keeping with that tradition."

See also Morning Star, 12 February 2013

Unite Against Fascism is organising a demonstration against Le Pen. Details can be found here.

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Fiachra Gibbons reponds to Marine Le Pen's proposal to ban the kippah along with the hijab:

If you apply the logic of a strictly secular state, Le Pen insists, you cannot discriminate against one without discriminating against all – egalité also means "equality of discrimination". So if the Muslims are to be prevented from challenging the Republic by wearing headscarves or other "religious symbols" in the streets, so must the Jews.

Of course, it is never going to happen – no more so than the CRS being sent out to hunt down bonnes soeurs on the streets of Paris, not even if the appalling Jean-François Copé, the architect of the burqa ban (which in the name of liberté effectively condemned women who wear the niqab to a kind of house arrest), becomes leader of Sarkozy's old UMP.

But it does create the toxic atmosphere the Front thrives in and which France thought it had left behind with Sarkozy, who drove the country half mad with fear and prejudice attempting to cling to power, yet still lost.

Guardian, 26 September 2012

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French far-right leader Marine Le Pen called Friday for a ban on wearing Muslim veils and Jewish skullcaps in public, adding to religious tensions sparked by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

In an interview with the Le Monde newspaper, Le Pen called for religious headwear to be banned "in stores, on public transport and on the streets".

Asked if the ban should apply to the Jewish skullcap, known as the kippah or yarmulke, as well as Muslim headwear, she said: "It is obvious that if the veil is banned, the kippah is banned in public as well."

Le Pen, who shocked the French elite by winning almost 18 percent in the first round of this year's presidential vote, also repeated calls for bans on public prayers, kosher and halal foods in schools and foreign government financing of mosques in France.

President Francois Hollande denounced her comments, saying: "Everything that tears people apart, opposes them and divides them is inappropriate and we must apply the rules, the only rules that we know, the rules of the Republic and secularism."

France was on alert at home and abroad on Friday following the publication of cartoons of the Prophet by satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

Muslim leaders were calling for calm and urging militants not to defy a ban on protests in France over the cartoons.

AFP, 21 September 2012

"Veil" (voile) in this context means hijab – French Muslim women are of course already banned from wearing face-veils in public. Le Pen's call for a ban on the kippah is significant. She had previously tried to distance herself from the aggressive attitude towards the Jewish community that characterised the Front National when her Holocaust-dismissing father Jean-Marie was party leader, but now it looks as though it's back to antisemitism for the FN.

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She calls herself the "voice of the people," the anti-system candidate who will ensure social justice for the have-nots and purify a France she says is losing its voice to Europe and threatened by massive immigration and rampant Islamization.

She wants to drastically reduce the number of immigrants – to 10,000 a year – and, a top theme, to crack down for good on what she claims is the growing footprint of Islamic fundamentalists in France. "They are advancing in the neighborhoods. They are putting pressure on the population. They are recruiting young boys" to train for jihad, she said.

Le Pen insisted that fighting so-called Islamization won't breed a mass killer such as Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-Muslim extremist who is now on trial in Norway after confessing to killing 77 people. The fight must not stop "out of fear of a crazy man," she said.

Le Pen cites as proof of the Islamist threat in France the case of Mohamed Merah, a young Frenchman of Algerian origin who last month killed three French paratroopers, a rabbi and three Jewish schoolchildren before he was shot dead by police trying to capture him.

She also refuses to be categorized as extreme right, saying that her party is populist.

The image Marine Le Pen projects is less linked to the extreme-right than that of her father, said Nonna Meyer, an expert on the extreme-right vote at the prestigious university Sciences Po.

"She's younger, she's a woman, she condemns anti-Semitism. She often says things differently than her father," Meyer said. "She says she is tolerant, it is Islam that is intolerant ... She upends the discourse. But the foundation of the program is the same. If you look at the values her party defends, it is a system at once authoritarian and rejecting of others, rejecting the difference."

Associated Press, 18 April 2012

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Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate for the French presidential election, accused rival President Nicolas Sarkozy of having sent "a simple message" when some Islamists were arrested on French territory, after French forces assaulted Mohamed Merah's house last month. Le Pen was speaking at a press conference with foreign journalists in her campaign headquarters at Nanterre, west of Paris.

Responding to a question from The Jerusalem Post, following the surprising absence of mentions in electoral debates of the shootings in the southern French town of Toulouse, Le Pen criticized Sarkozy, calling his crackdown on Islamists "merely electoral agitation after the Merah affair."

"A few arrested Islamists and that is all... [Sarkozy] is not dealing with the real problem of fundamentalism, although he has been in charge of national security for the past 10 years." For Le Pen, Sarkozy, like his predecessors, "deliberately downplayed the threat from Islamists who want to see France as we know it disappear in favor of Shari'a."

Going further, she accused her main rival for the voice of the right wing to have even "opened the door to the UOIF (militant Muslim organization in France) who called for the murder of Jews". "He provided the first steps to the ladder for the fundamentalists in France and internationally," she said.

Jerusalem Post, 12 April 2012

Marine Le Pen leaflet exploits Merah's killings to accuse Sarkozy and his party
of being soft on 'Islamic fundamentalism'

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