PARIS – France on Saturday condemned a tweet by Pakistan’s human rights minister, comparing President Emanuel Macron’s treatment of Muslims to the treatment of Jews by the Nazis in World War II.
As tensions between the European nation and the Islamic world continue to rise, Shirin Mazari, a former journalist and active member of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s team, wrote that “what the Nazis do to Jews is to Muslims.”
He added: “Muslim children will get ID numbers (other children will not) just as Jews were forced to wear a yellow star on their clothes for identification.”
Below her post, she shared an article claiming that Muslim children would be excluded by a new French bill that would give them an identification number so that they could attend school, part of a larger effort to curb the country’s youth radicalization. Is part. The law was proposed because some families in France do not send their children to school.
If introduced nonetheless, the bill applies to all French children.
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In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, French Interior Minister Gerald Durmani defended the plan earlier this week. “We must save these children from the clutches of Islamists,” he said.
The French Foreign Ministry condemned Mazari’s tweet, saying in a statement on Saturday that Minister Macron and the whole of France had spoken in “shocking and insulting terms”.
“These hateful words are clear hateful lies, surrounded by an ideology of hatred and violence.” “Such condemnation is not appropriate for this level of responsibility. We reject them with the greatest conviction. ”
Mazari later deleted the tweet.
Taking to Twitter again on Sunday, he wrote that he had been approached by the French envoy to Pakistan, who had given him the message that the article with which he had commented had been corrected, so he decided to delete his tweet.
Protests erupted in Pakistan and many other predominantly Muslim countries over Maron Kron’s stance following the beheading of a teacher on a religious street last month and the killing of three people at a church in Nice.
Some burned statues of the French president, while others shouted “death to France” and vowed to boycott French products.
The protests came after Macron vowed to fight “Islamist separatism”, which he said threatened to take control of some Muslim communities around France.
His remarks were also condemned by several Muslim political leaders, including Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan, who said last month that Macron had “attacked Islam” and “hurt the feelings of millions of Muslims in Europe and the world.”
Nancy Ing from Paris, Mushtaq Yousafzai from Peshawar and Yulia Talmazan from London report.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Mushtaq Yusufzai Contributed.
