Word: frenchness
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...French newsweekly Marianne calls him "the most hated man in France." A Socialist legislator recently compared him to Pierre Laval -the wartime French official who most enthusiastically collaborated with the nation's Nazi occupiers. Such contempt isn't usually directed at someone in a rather anonymous cabinet role. But Eric Besson, the Minister for Immigration, Integration and National Identity, is different: he's currently overseeing a national debate on French identity that detractors on both the left and the right say stigmatizes minorities and immigrants. And yet, despite the fierce criticism and controversy, he's the cabinet member President Nicolas...
...with an anti-Islam platform. The OSI report says the chilling political climate has alienated Muslims, often making them feel unwanted. Several European countries are tightening their immigration laws, imposing citizenship tests and setting strict rules on wearing headscarves and burqas. Last week, reacting to the Swiss minaret vote, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called on religious practitioners to avoid "ostentation" and "provocation" so as not to upset others...
...Europeans have been far more welcoming to Muslims than their critics allow," he says. "The onus of these claims of discrimination always seem to go the same way: to show that Europeans are innately racist. Which is a gross insult." (Read "The Islamic Divide at Work: Advice for French Bosses...
...levels vary. The report says that Muslims may be better integrated in the U.K. than in other parts of the E.U.: an average 78% of Muslims identified themselves as British, compared with 49% of Muslims who consider themselves French and just 23% who feel German. (See more about European politics in "The March to the Far Right...
...Natacha Bouchart, conservative mayor of Calais and a backer of Sarkozy's anti-immigration hard line, says her city and others on the coast are "hostage to the British" asylum laws. She says the U.K. should tighten those rather than shift the responsibility on French authorities to keep illegal aliens from making it to Britain. (Read a TIME postcard from Calais...