Too much in a hurry? Too eager to demonstrate its determination in the fight against radical Islamism? At the beginning of January, Gérald Darmanin declared on a TV stage: “We are closing one of the mosques in Cannes because we accuse it of anti-Semitic statements, support for CCIF (Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France) and BarakaCity”. No conditional, no future tense. Two months later, however, after the conclusion of the adversarial procedure required by law, the prefecture backed down and refrained from closing the mosque in question because the mosque’s leaders had given guarantees.
Another place, another case. On March 14, the prefecture of the Gironde department issued a decision to close the mosque in Pessac, near Bordeaux, for six months. Their reasoning is clear: the mosque “spreads hateful publications against Israel. It calls for identitarian closure and […] supports terrorist organisations or institutions or persons promoting radical Islam.” A week later, the prefecture was dismissed by the Administrative Court of Bordeaux: “Despite their condemnable content, the publications that justified this closure were not of such an extremist nature that they would incite the perpetration of acts of terrorism through hatred and violence”. The prefecture appealed, but the mosque remains open for the time being.
On January 23, Gérald Darmanin announced that the website La Voie droite would be closed down “in the next few hours or days” because it spread “Salafist content” that incited “hatred and jihad”. However, the site was still accessible at the end of March. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the procedure has not yet been completed.www.lexpress.fr