MAKKAH: France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, told Mohammed bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, secretary-general of the Muslim World League (MWL) his country respects Islam and that French Muslims are a part of the country.
The two were speaking in a telephone conversation, in which they also discussed a number of other issues of common interest on Thursday.
French President Emmanuel Macron was recently accused in the British press of “stigmatizing French Muslims for electoral purposes and of fostering a climate of fear and suspicion toward them.”
At the time Macron responded saying his country was fighting “Islamist separatism, never Islam,”
The French president had already sparked protests across the Muslim world after the murder of teacher Samuel Paty in October — who had shown his class a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed — by saying France would never renounce its laws permitting blasphemous caricatures.
