France’s women’s
rights minister faces growing criticism on Thursday, including calls on
social media to resign, after comparing women who wear the Muslim headscarf
and veil to “negroes who
supported slavery”.
An online petition that collected nearly 18,000 signatures within hours
urged Prime Minister Manuel Valls to punish while a leading French
Muslim group accused her of aiding the Islamic State group.
It was as if she had “set out to help the recruiters of Daesh”, said
Abdallah Zekri, president of the National Observatory against Islamophobia,
using a pejorative Arabic term for IS.
The minister had “stigmatised” thousands of women, he added, and “spat in
the face of the (secular) laws of the Republic by trying to interfere with
the
way women dressed.” The row was also trending on Twitter across France with
a hashtag
#RossignolDemission (#RossignolResign) demanding that she step down.
The League of French Muslim Women also condemned her comments, calling them
“dangerous and irresponsible” and reminding her that women who wear the
veil and headscarf were the main victims of racist attacks in the street.
“It is all the more surprising because the government has just launched an
(advertising) campaign against racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” the
league’s statement added.
Rossignol, who is also minister of family and child matters, tried to row
back on the comments made during a radio interview Wednesday. She told AFP
the n-word was a reference to an abolitionist tract by the French
philosopher Montesquieu, “On the Enslavement of Negroes”.
Her controversial remarks came as she was asked about the wave of big
fashion chains that have followed the Italian designers Dolce & Gabbana in
catering specifically to the Muslim market, creating lines of hajib
headscarves and “burqini” all-body swimming costumes.
The gaff was also pounced on by satirists. Comedian Olivier Perrin joked
that she would make a good campaign director for US presidential hopeful
Donald Trump, who has drawn fire for his comments about women and Muslims.
Perrin had earlier posted a picture on Twitter of a hooded Ku Klux Klan
member giving the Nazi salute with the caption, “Laurence Rossignol wishes
you
a good day.”
The cartoonist of Le Monde daily, Plantu, also came in for criticism on
social media for his take on the row, showing two headscarved women asking
when they could get designer explosives belts.