After nearly six months of deliberation, a French parliamentary committee recently proposed a ban on Islamic face veils in government spaces, including hospitals, schools, public transportation and, theoretically, even the Champs-Élysées. This decision is only the most recent iteration of what Le Monde has dubbed a “national psychodrama” that has spanned decades of government wrangling, produced volumes of national press coverage, and spawned ma...
...ps like the Songhai, Fulani, and Bella. Of the three, Ansar Dine has been most successful at integrating different ethnic groups. Though MNLA has recently been able to gain territory and influence by capturing towns where the French military has driven out the Islamists, the organization’s makeup is mostly homogenous. AQIM is structured through a brittle hierarchy, with foreign leaders, Tuaregs as foot soldiers, and Malian Arabs as middlemen. Unt...
Sharia don’t like it In mid-January, something very promising happened for President Obama and the United States’ relationship with its European allies. France launched Operation Serval in Mali. In this operation, French armed forces intervened in the country’s deteriorating civil war to restore power to the incumbent government against the rapidly advancing rebel and jihadist forces from the north of the country. The French intervention...
In April of last year, France became the first European country to implement a ban on face veils. In keeping with the French tradition of using legislation to regulate the display of religious paraphernalia, the law subjects Muslim women who wear the burqa in public spaces to a fine of €150 or lessons in French Citizenship. Of course, the ban is divisive by nature and has flared domestic and international passions alike, causing a paroxysm of de...
It has been a rough month for French politicians: Jerome Cahuzac, the Minister for the Budget has abdicated over a scandal involving an alleged undisclosed account at UBS, a Swiss bank UBS. Francois Hollande, the president, after less than a year in office, has seen his approval ratings drop radically to a meager 30%. But perhaps, the worst week award goes to ex-President Sarkozy, who is formally under examination for “abuse of weakness.” Mr. Sa...
...York Times editorial put it, “Historical truths must be established through dispassionate research and debate, not legislation.” In other words, history, like religion, is not something the state should be institutionalizing. French President Nicholas Sarkozy would seem to disagree. He has vociferously supported France’s own law that not only recognizes Armenian genocide but makes it a criminal offense to deny that it occurred. More recently, Sar...
...nt Nicolas Sarkozy, often seen at the stadium sitting next to Crown Prince Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, is close to the Qatari royal family and participated in selling them the Parisian club. Qatar also owns stakes in many major French companies, Parisian buildings, the equestrian Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the sports channels “beIN Sport” and many others. Qatar was even a major partner in France’s intervention of Libya in 2011. The change of presid...
The international community has warmly welcomed the French intervention in Mali, of which the stated goal is to save the country from collapse. There has been a lot of talk and questions about whether France has found its Afghanistan, and certain commentators have started to dub northern Mali the new “Afrighanistan.” Though the war is for now strictly a French matter, the absence of a concrete EU policy on the question offers three crucial lesso...
...city of the Holocaust), leads incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in polling for next year’s presidential race. Recent photo ops for Marine have included a visit to a repatriation center to lecture soon-to-be deported North Africans on French values. Le Pen’s action cuts to the core of the issue: the belief that these immigrants are not only illegal but also un-European. As such, they must be instructed in “French” values to assimilate into French society...
...er side seems hopelessly low, the prospects of revealing any historical “truth” decisively grim. Yet in the 90-year history of this debate, this is perhaps the worst time to lose interest. Last October, the lower house of the French parliament passed a law that would criminalize denying that the massacres of 1915 amounted to genocide. The approval of the bill by the French cabinet seems unlikely but the attempt strained Turkish-French relations a...
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