Despite the recent hostage taking of French journalists in Iraq and the demand that the ban on the hijab be lifted as the price of their return, the French government is unsurprisingly still planning on implementing the law when school reopens this week. Killing French journalists in order to attack a French law - [...]

According to Abu Aardvark, Tariq Ramadan - a francophone Swiss Muslim who is usually cited as a particularly modernist and moderate European Muslim scholar - has been denied a visa to enter the US to take up a teaching posiiton at Notre Dame University. As I understand it, the visa had earlier been [...]

I’m not sure how much the international press is covering the recent racist violence in Lyon. A Google News search shows only the New York Times offering coverage in English.
The salient facts: Late Saturday night, a 24 year old man surrendered to police in Paris, claiming responsability for the cemetery desacration in Lyon [...]

Yesterday’s Le Monde has a distrubing piece on the profanation of a Jewish cemetery in Lyon, blogged here a few days ago. According to the Lyon police, evidence at the scene links this crime to the murder of a young North African man last week.
Le lien entre la profanation du cimeti?re juif de Lyon [...]

I note that today’s New York Times has an article on the recent upsurge in Neonazi attacks in France, focusing on Alsace-Lorraine and the simultaneously anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant character of these movements. This was covered a couple days ago here on AFOE.
Does someone at the Times read us? Probably not. I suspect [...]

Yesterday’s profanation of a Jewish cemetery in Lyon has, once again, put French race relations into the news in bad light. There’s a good reason for that. French race relations aren’t much to brag about. I notice, however, that for all the bloggers - not to mention Ariel Sharon - who think [...]

I note somewhat belatedly, via The Head Heeb, a series of articles in Ha’aretz on the condition of Israeli Arabs. As Jonathan Edelstein notes, there’s good news and bad news and while I disagree with the concept of national minorities and ethnic states in general, I agree entirely with Jonathan, the editors of Ha’aretz, [...]

One of the things I looked for during the recent discussion about anti-semitism in France was some statistics about anti-Islamic and anti-Arab violence for comparison. I was shocked that I couldn’t find any. The French government went out of its way to disagregate data about antisemitic attacks, but could not even be bothered [...]

Randy MacDonald has dropped a line pointing to an excellent and well-researched post on the demographics of Islam in France. You can read it at his livejournal site. In particular, he does something interesting in this debate - actually goes to INSEE (the French census and statistics office) and gets figures. I [...]

Asks John Rossant.
He writes that this incident
On Jan. 31, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited a Paris shopping mall to win support for the center-right in upcoming elections. Within minutes, a group of youths — most of North African background — began hurling insults. Sarkozy, a potential presidential candidate, was chased until he reached a police [...]