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President Emmanuel Macron justified the move with verbal attacks from his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He told his party supporters on Saturday in reference to the measures announced by France against Islamism: “What is the problem that this person called Macron has with Muslims and Islam? Macron needed “treatment at the mental level,” Erdogan said.
“President Erdogan’s statements are unacceptable,” a representative of the French presidency told the AFP news agency. “Excess and rudeness are not a method.”
In early October, Macron had declared that he would fight “Islamist separatism” that threatened to take control of some Muslim communities in France. A few days later, history teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the street by an 18-year-old jihadist. The attacker was shot and killed by the police shortly after.
Criticism of the raid on the Berlin mosque
According to the investigation, the teacher was killed for using Muhammad cartoons in a class on the right to freedom of expression in front of 13-year-old students. Many Muslims consider a pictorial representation of the prophet to be blasphemous.
Erdogan not only criticized the measures taken by the French authorities. The president described the raid on a Berlin mosque on suspicion of fraud with the help of Corona as racist and Islamophobic.
“I strongly condemn the police operation carried out during the morning prayer in the (…) Berlin mosque, which completely ignores freedom of belief and is clearly nourished by racism and Islamophobia, which every day brings closer to Europe in the darkness of the moving Middle Ages, “Erdogan wrote on Twitter the night before.
On Wednesday, around 150 police officers searched several businesses and a mosque in the German capital on suspicion of fraud in the crown grant. They confiscated 7,000 euros in cash, data carriers, computers and files. According to the authorities, the raid involved three suspects who had requested grants of more than 70,000 euros, of which 45,000 euros had been paid. It is said that some of the money ended up in the mosque account.
