Censure of French Muslims condemned

PARIS – Human rights groups are reacting with outrage to comments by French officials who have said polygamy is one of the reasons youths from underprivileged Muslim households have been rioting.

France’s League of Human Rights called the comments “sickening and irresponsible,” while the anti-racist group MRAP said that such remarks would only feed the “racism and exclusion” that incited youths to riot.

Muslim leaders in France have condemned the attacks against houses of worship, and said the violence against mosques showed that Muslims were not the only ones behind the attacks.

Dalil Boubakeur, the director of the Great Mosque of Paris and one of the country’s leading Muslim figures, said in a statement Tuesday that it was too easy to make Muslims “the scapegoat” of France’s riots, and that he detected a “troubling Islamophobia.”

That debate grew more strident after Labor Minister Gerard Larcher was quoted in Wednesday’s Financial Times as saying that youths from large polygamous families often had social behavioral problems, stemming from lack of a father figure.

At the same time, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was quoted in the current issue of news weekly L’Express as saying that polygamy is one of the cultural differences that “makes it more difficult to integrate a French youth of African origin with a French youth of another origin.”

And Conservative lawmaker Bernard Accoyer told RTL radio that polygamy was “certainly one of the causes” of the problems of integrating Muslim families into French society.

Polygamy is illegal in France. But visas were granted freely to family members of immigrants until 1993, after which visas were authorized for only one spouse. The Ministry of Social Affairs estimates on its Web site that there are between 8,000 and 15,000 polygamous families in France.