The French "Mediapart" website revealed in a special investigation that the number of documented and announced attacks against mosques in France since 2019 has reached dozens, highlighting that the state's official policy of dissolving and marginalizing official Islamic institutions further complicates the situation.
The website emphasized that the announced numbers are necessarily very low numbers, and do not reflect reality, due to the absence of complete official data, noting that many victims decide not to report what is happening to them, in addition to the failure of the judiciary to deal with discrimination files in general.
The site quoted the head of the Observatory of Islamophobia in the French Council for the Islamic Religion, Abdullah Zakari, as saying that they do not file complaints against the attacks they are subjected to, highlighting that in 2021, for example, they were subjected to about 70 threats, but they preferred not to report these threats because they know that what they will gain from their movements is Fatigue, and the case will eventually be filed and classified against an unknown person.
dissolution and marginalization
What complicates the situation – the site adds – is the insistence of official French policy – especially after the advent of President Emmanuel Macron – to exclude official Islamic institutions that were working to document crimes of assault against Muslims.
The "Collectif contre l'islamophobie en France" was dissolved in 2020, and the "Coordination contre le racisme et l'islamophobia" was dissolved in 2021, and the role of the French Council of Religion was marginalized. Islamic.
Mediapart revealed that the French Ministry of the Interior, as well as the relevant security services, refused to provide him with the exact list of the number of mosques that were attacked, as well as the dates and types of those attacks.
The attacks did not stop
The site quoted MPs Isabel Florin of the "Mouvement démocrate" and Ludovic Mendez of the "Renaissance Movement" as saying that the incidents of attacks on Muslim places of worship have not stopped since 2018.
The investigation stated that the analysis of the documented numbers and data proves the existence of a close correlation between the high frequency of attacks against Muslims and Islamic places of worship, and the media campaigns launched against Muslims in the French media, especially after any criminal incident committed by a Muslim extremist.
In a remarkable reference, Mediapart explained that Interior Minister Gerald Darmanan had only interacted with 12 incidents of attacks against Muslims, and that was on his Twitter page, and he moved only once in the field, and that was after the attack on the Ibn Rushd Cultural Center in Rennes in April 11, 2021.
