A certain relentlessness. The Pessac mosque, in the Bordeaux metropolitan area, was again targeted during the night from Saturday to Sunday by the far-right group Action Identitaire. He left racist inscriptions on the walls of the religious building “be racist, vote white” and “Foreign Imams outside France”, taking the trouble to sign.
This last inscription specifically targets Abdouramane Ridouane, the president of this mosque, who is subject to an expulsion request from the Gironde prefecture, after his positions in favor of the Palestinian people. It will be examined by the Bordeaux judicial court this Friday.
“A disregard for our security”
Concerning the racist tags, the imam filed a complaint for the seventh time since 2015 but fears that the latter will again be closed without action, without official notification, like the previous ones. In November 2023, four mosques in Gironde were targeted in four months “and it didn’t cause any more debate than that,” he remembers.
After the seventh time, “it’s not even indifference but contempt for our security,” reacts to 20 minutes Abdouramane Ridouane. We are not a synagogue so it is not the same importance and no authority comes. We don’t even have a deputy mayor who comes to check on the faithful, who are very anxious.” CCTV footage shows that the people came to vandalize the mosque around 2 a.m.
“Often, it stops there”
The police came to take samples on site. “But often it stops there,” laments the imam. The tags follow one another and look similar, and seem to come from the same small far-right group.
Abdouramane Ridouane denounces a trivialization of Islamophobia, a “stigma of Muslims on a daily basis” and “decisions that undermine the rights of Muslims”, taken very regularly by the State itself. “We must not come and shed crocodile tears and make speeches about the unity of the nation, if there are deaths,” he warns, recalling the death in 2018 of a leader of the Bayonne mosque , as a result of his gunshot wounds.
“We are not victimizing ourselves, we are drawing attention to a real security problem,” he warns. There is a lack of real political will to take on the defense of Muslim places of worship.”