Calling Muslims ‘not French’ is intolerable: French justice minister

ANKARA (AA) – Marginalizing Muslims as being somehow “not French” serves to stoke hatred and is “intolerable,” according to France’s justice minister.

“Saying that Muslims are not as French as others is intolerable,” Eric Dupond-Moretti told the media, criticizing remarks by controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq.

“Saying that they are robbers … This stokes hatred and is against all of my values,” Dupond-Moretti added.

The justice minister also lamented that such remarks have become “banal.”

“Fifteen years ago, we would have been on the front line denouncing them,” he said. “We got used to this. This is what (philosopher) Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.”

In a magazine conversation last November, Houellebecq said: “People are arming themselves … I think acts of resistance will occur when entire territories fall under Islamic control. Attacks and shootings will be perpetrated in mosques, coffee shops popular with Muslims.”

Houellebecq is notorious for his outspoken Islamophobic views. In 2002 he was charged with inciting racial hatred, but was acquitted. In the November 2022 magazine piece, he is quoted as advocating “white supremacy” becoming “trendy in the United States.”

France is known to follow the policy of imposing French secular values on its citizens, many of whom come from minority ethnic communities, primarily Muslims from North Africa. Being a French citizen requires shunning all public expression of religious faith — which includes the Muslim headscarf for women.