French Presidential Candidate, Marine Le Pen, leader of the the nationalist Front National party, called on Friday for the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF) to be banned and its congress next week to be scrapped, the FN said.
“Marine Le Pen calls for a ban on the event in Le Bourget. Marine Le Pen wants the break up of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France,” Le Pen said in a statement.
The congress is scheduled for April 6-9. The French government has recently banned four Islamic religious leaders heading for the UOIF congress from entering France.
The ban came after President Nicolas Sarkozy ordered a crackdown on “preachers, continually attacking French values” from entering the country.
Nationalist feeling has been rising in France, with the far-right National Front performing better than expected in recent local elections. Marine Le Pen is widely expected to make the run-off in presidential polls set for April 22.
The issue has been at center stage following the killings of seven people by a man of Algerian origin in the south of the country last week in a series of shootings. The man, Mohamed Merah, was later shot dead by police following an armed siege at his home in Toulouse.
Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the FN party, was a paratrooper who fought against Algerian rebels during that country's war of independence from France in the early 1960s.
