French Interior Minister Manuel Valls (L) and Jean-Paul Bonnetain, newly-appointed Marseille Government Prefect in charge of security. – Reuters

STRASBOURG: France will expel anyone who threatens security at home or abroad in the name of Islam or does not respect the country's secular traditions, Interior Minister Manuel Valls said Thursday.

France will be “intransigent... and I will not hesitate to expel those who claim to follow Islam and represent a serious threat to public order and as foreigners in our country do not respect our laws and values,” he said at a ceremony to inaugurate a grand mosque in the eastern city of Strasbourg.

“The preachers of hatred, those espousing obscurantism and fundamentalists ... do not have a place in France,” he said.

“Racism, fundamentalism is not part of Islam.”

"Those who are on our soil to defy our laws and want to attack the foundations of our society cannot remain here," he said.

The mosque, which can hold 1,500 worshippers, is the biggest in France, which with four million Muslims has the largest Islamic population in western Europe.

Opinion

Editorial

Ties with Tehran
Updated 24 Apr, 2024

Ties with Tehran

Tomorrow, if ties between Washington and Beijing nosedive, and the US asks Pakistan to reconsider CPEC, will we comply?
Working together
24 Apr, 2024

Working together

PAKISTAN’S democracy seems adrift, and no one understands this better than our politicians. The system has gone...
Farmers’ anxiety
24 Apr, 2024

Farmers’ anxiety

WHEAT prices in Punjab have plummeted far below the minimum support price owing to a bumper harvest, reckless...
By-election trends
Updated 23 Apr, 2024

By-election trends

Unless the culture of violence and rigging is rooted out, the credibility of the electoral process in Pakistan will continue to remain under a cloud.
Privatising PIA
23 Apr, 2024

Privatising PIA

FINANCE Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb’s reaffirmation that the process of disinvestment of the loss-making national...
Suffering in captivity
23 Apr, 2024

Suffering in captivity

YET another animal — a lioness — is critically ill at the Karachi Zoo. The feline, emaciated and barely able to...