The leader of the far-right French National Front party, Marine Le Pen, said that if elected France's new president next year, she would push for a ban of all displays of religious symbols and clothing in public, including Jewish ones.
In an interview on Sunday with the TV station BFM, Le Pen said she was seeking to extend an existing law banning displays of religious symbols in public schools to include all public areas.
She called the ban a struggle against radical Islam, but added that Jewish and Christian symbols would have to be included in the ban in the name of equality and the “national interest.”
“I know it is a sacrifice but I think the situation is terrible these days…I know that every French person, including Jews can understand that if we ask for this sacrifice from them [in the framework] of the battle against the advance of Islamic extremism, they will make this effort and understand it,” Le Pen said.
The FN leader stated that she would like all conspicuous religious symbols from all public spaces to "confront the rise in power and extremely strong pressure of political Islam that uses women and the veil to advance their propositions."
When her host sought to clearly define what constituted a "conspicuous" symbol, Le Pen pointed out that "tThe Catholic religion doesn't have conspicuous symbols" worn by its adherents. She continued that it was perhaps because Catholicism had "invented secularism," a cherished ideal of the French Republic.
Marine Le Pen, whose father Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the FN in the 1970s, made a similar call already in 2012.
France has the largest Jewish community in Europe and the third largest in the world.
