French Minister warns aggressive Islamists – there is no place for you in our country

Posted: Fri, 28th Sep 2012

French Interior Minister Manuel Valls has warned foreign Islamists who do not respect the country's secular traditions or who threaten security at home or abroad that they will be expelled.

France will be "intransigent... and I will not hesitate to expel those who claim to follow Islam and represent a serious threat to public order and as foreigners in our country do not respect our laws and values," he said at a ceremony to inaugurate a grand mosque in Strasbourg.

"The preachers of hatred, those espousing obscurantism and fundamentalists ... do not have a place in France," he said. "Racism, fundamentalism is not part of Islam." "Those who are on our soil to defy our laws and want to attack the foundations of our society cannot remain here," he said.

The mosque, which can hold 1,500 worshippers, is the biggest in France, which with four million Muslims has the largest Islamic population in western Europe.