lawmakers consents on bill to battle Islamist extremism in France

The draft legislation, which has been criticised for stigmatising Muslims and giving the state new powers to limit speech and religious groups, was backed by a clear majority of MPs in the National Assembly.

President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party rallied around the law, with 347 National Assembly lawmakers voting in favour, 151 against and 65 abstaining.

The text will now be submitted to the upper house Senate, where Macron’s party does not hold a majority.

“It’s an extremely strong secular offensive,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told RTL radio ahead of the vote Tuesday. “It’s a tough text… but necessary for the republic.”

Among the more than 70 separate articles, the law expands the ability of the state to close places of worship and religious schools, as well as to ban extremist preachers.

Amid concerns about the funding of mosques by Turkey, Qatar or Saudi Arabia, it requires religious groups to declare large foreign donations and have their accounts certified.

It comes with presidential elections looming next year and with decades-long divisions about the integration of France’s large Muslim population and the threat of Islamists causing fresh tensions.

Macron and Darmanin in particular have been accused of pandering to far-right voters by exaggerating the danger of Islamist groups in the often-marginalised immigrant communities found in French suburbs.

The government counters that the threat is real, pointing to repeated terror attacks and what Macron called the development of a “counter-society” that rejects secularism, equality and other French values and laws.

– Threats –

Over the past week, a school teacher in a tough suburb southwest of Paris has come to national prominence over claims he needed police protection after receiving death threats for denouncing local Islamists.

Right-wing parties see him as a whistleblower warning about the danger of extremist groups, while those on the left have pointed to his provocative statements about Islam and accuse him of overstating the threat.

His case was picked up in the national media because of its echoes of the beheading of a school teacher, Samuel Paty, by a teenage Islamist last October that profoundly shocked the country.

Paty was the subject of an online hate campaign started by a parent of a child at his school who objected to his showing of controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed during a civics class about free speech.

Paty’s killing prompted the inclusion of a new crime in the draft law of disclosing personal information about someone while knowing it will put the person in danger.

Another crime of “separatism” — defined as threatening a public servant in order to gain “a total or partial exemption or different application of the rules” — would be punishable by up to five years in prison.

– ‘Hostile ideology’ –