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SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Muslims protested in Bangladesh on Friday after killings by a knife-wielding assailant in a French church prompted President Emmanuel Macron’s promise to stand firm against attacks on French values and the freedom of belief.
French Interior Minister Gerald Damarnin said France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim community and hit by a series of militant attacks in recent years, was engaged in a war against Islamist ideology and likely to ensue. more attacks.
Demonstrators marching through the streets of Dhaka, the Muslim-majority capital of Bangladesh, chanted “Boycott French Products” and carried banners calling Macron “the world’s greatest terrorist.”
“Macron leads Islamophobia,” protester Akramul Haq said. “He does not know the power of Islam. The Muslim world will not let this happen in vain. We will rise up and stand in solidarity with him.”
In a Muslim-majority district of India’s financial center, Mumbai, around 100 posters showing Macron with a boot on his face and calling him a “demon” were posted on the sidewalks and roads around Mohammed Ali Road.
France raised its security alert to the highest level on Thursday after a knife-wielding man yelled “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) beheaded an old woman in a church and killed two more before the police will shoot him and take him away.
“We will not give ground,” Macron said in front of the church in the city of Nice, on the French Riviera, vowing to deploy thousands more soldiers to protect places such as places of worship and schools.
France had been attacked “for our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief,” he added.
The violence came at a time of mounting Muslim anger over France’s defense of the right to publish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, and protesters have denounced France in street demonstrations in several Muslim-majority countries.
French investigators said the man suspected of carrying out the Nice attack was a Tunisian born in 1999 who had arrived in Europe on September 20 on Lampedusa, an Italian island off Tunis that is the main disembarkation point for migrants from Africa.
AUSTRALIAN AND INDIAN LEADERS RETURN TO FRANCE
Several Asian leaders expressed their support for France after the attacks on Thursday, the prophet’s birthday.
“It is the most cruel, cowardly and cruel act of barbarism of terrorists and must be condemned in the strongest possible way,” said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Morrison had expressed his support for Macron, he told the media on Friday. “We share values. We stand for the same things.”
He also condemned as absurd the comments by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad that Muslims had the right to be angry and kill “millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
“Freedom of expression is a right, calling for violence is not,” US Ambassador to Malaysia Kamala Shirin Lakhdhir said on Twitter in response to Mahathir’s comments.
Mahathir said his comments were taken out of context, while a senior Malaysian government figure, Abdul Hadi Awang, said Macron’s comments could not be justified.
“The French president’s statement exposes his hostility against Islam and its followers,” said Abdul Hadi, leader of the Malaysian Islamist party PAS.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also expressed support for Macron’s position and condemned the violence.
“I strongly condemn the recent terrorist attacks in France,” Modi tweeted on Thursday. “India supports France in the fight against terrorism.”
Thursday’s attack came less than two weeks after a high school teacher in a Paris suburb was beheaded by an 18-year-old assailant who was apparently outraged that the teacher had shown a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad in class.
France has suffered a series of attacks by Islamist militants, including 2015 bombings and shootings in Paris that killed 130 people and a 2016 attack in Nice that killed 86 when a militant drove a truck through a crowd on the seafront. from the city to celebrate Bastille Day.
(Reporting by Ruma Paul in Dhaka, Sanjeev Miglani in New Delhi, Rozanna Latiff in Kuala Lumpur and John Mair in Sydney; written by Clarence Fernandez; edited by Robert Birsel and Mark Heinrich)
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