(AP) When a far-right French official disrupted a regional council meeting to demand that a Muslim woman accompanying a group of schoolchildren be ordered to remove her headscarf, “in the name of our secular principles,” her own child buried his head in her shoulder and cried.
The scene has triggered a venomous national debate that is scrambling questions over the headscarf, Islam, immigration and radicalization.
The clamor reached a crescendo with the shooting and wounding Monday of two Muslims outside a mosque in southwest France by a suspect with past links to the anti-immigration National Rally party. The 84-year-old alleged gunman told investigators he attacked “to avenge the destruction of Notre Dame,” Paris’ grand cathedral ravaged by fire in April — which he blamed, inexplicably, on Muslims.
