French President Emmanuel Macron’s political party has called for a ban on young girls wearing Islamic veils in public and a new law against “Islamist entryism” after a bombshell government report found that the Muslim Brotherhood has waged a multi-generational campaign to infiltrate institutions and control Islamic communities in service of instituing Sharia law to the West.
Former French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who leads President Macron’s Renaissance party in the National Assembly, proposed on Wednesday that the ban on wearing veils in public be extended to girls under the age of 15. France became the first European country to impose such a ban for adults in 2011.
However, Attal argued that the government must go further in the wake of the publication of a government report, which found that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has sought for at least seven decades to subvert France and other European nations through clandestinely entering institutions and taking control over various facets of Muslim communities to promote Sharia practices to Islamise the West.
According to the report, the movement has seized upon supposed social justice campaigns through its various Muslim association proxies against “Islamophobia” — a term coined by the Muslim Brotherhood — and the veil ban to create a veneer of legitimacy in public discourse and to rally Muslim communities to their cause.
Meanwhile, local arms of the Brotherhood, in which trained Islamist activists are installed as managers at community shops, sports groups, private education, financial services, dating sites and elsewhere, have been established to control all aspects of life within Islamic communities and enforce strict Muslim practices, such as forcing the veil on women and girls.
The report found that this has resulted in a “massive and visible increase in little girls wearing the veil”, including girls as young as five or six years old, who are described as the “baby lion cubs” of radical Islam in France.
Thus, the Macronist party has called for fresh legislation to make “an offence of coercion to wear the veil against parents who force their minor daughters to wear the veil,” which they argue contravenes gender equality and child protection principles, Le Figaro reports.
Former Prime Minister Attal has also called for the government to enact a “law against Islamist entryism” on top of the 2021 legislation banning “separatism” within the country in response to the subversive threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its proxies, which the government report found have effectively inflitrated EU and French institutions and have turned Western liberalism against itself through campaigns against “Islamophobia” and supposed victimisation of Muslims.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau warned that “there is a very clear threat to the Republic, a threat to national cohesion and a threat of submersion,” adding that “the ultimate objective is to tip all of French society into Sharia law.”
In the wake of the report, the government’s National Defence Council plans to intensify efforts to target the finances of groups tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, through freezing assets and creating more robust schemes to prevent public money being directed to Islamist causes. However, given that the report found that EU programmes often fund the Brotherhood, it is unclear how much France can do unilaterally without Brussels.
The report also noted that efforts to disentangle the vast network of Islamist subversion have been put on the backburner of government priorities as a result of the understandable focus on preventing jihadi terrorism, which has plagued the country over the past decade. Additionally, the paper also found that there is often a hesitancy to target Muslim Brotherhood-tied groups for fear of appearing “Islamophobic”.
The use of the victim narrative has been critical to the Muslim Brotherhood’s success in spreading its influence in Islamic communities and public institutions, the report said.
Campaigns against Islamophobia have been a key link between Islamist factions and the French far-left, including socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical La France Insoumise (France in Revolt) party, which has often joined and helped organise demonstrations against Islamophobia, including a rally in Paris just last month.
Mélenchon claimed that the report on the Muslim Brotherhood demonstrated that “Islamophobia has crossed a threshold” in France and that it merely represented the “delusional theories” of figures like populist National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and Interior Minister Retailleau.
Le Pen deputy Jordan Bardella accused the Mélenchonist party of providing an “institutional echo” for the Muslim Brotherhood, citing their opposition to the veil ban as evidence of the far left’s role as the standard bearer of the Islamist movement in French politics.
On Wednesday, Bardella doubled down on his party’s demand that the Muslim Brotherhood be banned outright in the country to “protect French people from Islamist threat.”
