May 4, 2002	Saturday	Safar 20, 1423

PARIS, May 3: Only a few days before the second round of presidential elections on Sunday, French Muslims say they are in a quandary as to what will be their place in France once presidential and legislative elections are over.

True, Jacques Chirac, who won the support of all major Islamic organizations for the first round of elections, is expected to be re-elected to a new five-year term, and this, say pollsters, with as much as 80 percent of the vote.

If, however, the French Muslim community is so concerned in recent days, it’s because Mr Chirac is also being elected with the support of French Socialists, all of whose leaders have asked the electorate to vote for Mr Chirac as a way of “barring the road” to extremist National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Ostensibly in return for the gesture, Mr Chirac has spared no effort to condemn French “anti-Semitism”, and took note recently of a French police report according to which in only a few days last month, 350 incidents of “anti-Semitic” activity had been reported.

Muslim leades are concerned too because Mr Chirac is also attempting to win votes away from Mr Le Pen, who has placed much of the blame for crimes in France on young Muslims who inhabit the country’s poorer suburbs on the periphery of such cities as Paris, Marseilles and Lyons.

Only a few weeks ago, Mr Chirac would have also spoken out against anti-Arab behaviour which is also flagrant in France, but his remarks - undoubtedly as a function of the need he perceives of attracting the traditionally strong pro-Israeli support of French Socialist voters - have in recent days been limited to incidents in which Jews have been attacked or Jewish places of worship have been the target of vandals.

Notes one prominent Muslim leader: “Where was Mr Chirac last weekend when two youths, one of them a government employee working for French National Railways, threw a Molotov cocktail against a mosque at Chalons-en-Champagne” in the eastern part of France?”

To add insult to injury, he notes, the two men did not hide their affiliation with the local chapter of the National Front. “It was a golden opportunity for Mr Chirac to take a further distance from Mr Le Pen,” notes the community leader, “but there too he seems to have forgotten he received our overwhelming support for the first-round vote, when undoubted we helped him maintain his three-point lead against Mr Le Pen.”

Another incident has also left Muslim leaders in a quandary as to what role they will play once presidential and legislative elections are all over next month.

The Muslim community, which was to elect on May 26 its first representative council, quite sadly decided this week to postpone indefinitely the elections, given its inability to receive the support of the Grande Mosquee de Paris, and this after the extensive efforts of community leaders to come through with a joint position in the matter.

Here too, President Chirac is being held responsible by community leaders for the decision to postpone the elections, as in the past, they say, he would have certainly intervened to see to it that French Muslims are at last accorded the same status as France’s other major traditional religions.