US Muslim Brotherhood Warns Muslims Against Traveling To France, Aides Turkish Boycott Efforts

Turk­ish state media is report­ing the Coun­cil on Amer­i­can Islam­ic Rela­tions (CAIR) has warned Mus­lims against trav­el­ing to France, say­ing they may face dan­ger and dis­crim­i­na­tion there. Accord­ing to the arti­cle:

The coun­try’s largest Mus­lim civ­il rights and advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion issued a trav­el advi­so­ry on its web­site “amid the French government’s ‘hyp­o­crit­i­cal and dan­ger­ous’ cam­paign of Islam­o­pho­bic big­otry tar­get­ing French Mus­lims, mosques and Islam­ic orga­ni­za­tions.” It cit­ed a racist stab­bing attack on two Mus­lim women in Paris and legal pro­hi­bi­tions on reli­gious attire. In a state­ment, CAIR Nation­al Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Nihad Awad called on the French gov­ern­ment to end its “irra­tional, ille­gal and hyp­o­crit­i­cal cam­paign of big­otry against its own cit­i­zens.” “Every­one in France should have the right to prac­tice their reli­gion, and every­one around the world has the right to decide which prod­ucts they pur­chase,” said Awad. French Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron recent­ly sparked out­rage across the Mus­lim world by accus­ing French Mus­lims of “sep­a­ratism” and describ­ing Islam as “a reli­gion in crisis.”

Read the rest here.

The warn­ing comes as sev­er­al Arab nations and Turkey are con­demn­ing French Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron after he pro­posed leg­is­la­tion to tack­le Islamist sep­a­ratism in the coun­try and also hon­ored a slain his­to­ry teacher who was mur­dered after show­ing car­i­ca­tures of the Prophet Muham­mad in class. In a recent­ly tele­vised speech, Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Erdo­gan urged world lead­ers to pro­tect Mus­lims against poten­tial oppres­sion in France and called for a boy­cott of the country’s goods, accus­ing it of hav­ing an “anti-Islam agen­da”. French prod­ucts have already been removed from some of the shops in Kuwait, Jor­dan, and Qatar.

After the ter­ror­ist attack against the French his­to­ry teacher in mid-Octo­ber, the French gov­ern­ment  ordered a crack­down on groups accused of rad­i­cal­ism, car­ry­ing out dozens of raids and tem­porar­i­ly shut­ting down mosques. The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) has report­ed that, as part of this crack­down, the French inte­ri­or min­is­ter indi­cat­ed he wants to dis­solve the Col­lec­tif Con­tre l’Islamophobie en France, an Islamist influ­ence oper­a­tion with mul­ti­ple rela­tion­ships to orga­ni­za­tions that are part of the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in Europe, a transna­tion­al Islamist net­work cov­ered by the GIOR.

The GIOR has also report­ed that the Coun­cil of Euro­pean Mus­lims (CEM) issued a state­ment crit­i­ciz­ing Pres­i­dent Macron for his speech on com­bat­ing Islamist rad­i­cal­ism held in ear­ly October.

The Coun­cil of Amer­i­can-Islam­ic Rela­tions  describes itself as “a grass­roots civ­il rights and advo­ca­cy group and as “America’s largest Islam­ic civ­il lib­er­ties group.” CAIR was found­ed in 1994 by three offi­cers of the Islam­ic Asso­ci­a­tion of Pales­tine, part of the U.S. Hamas infra­struc­ture at that time.

For more on CAIR, go here.