THE JERUSALEM POST: Paris says it will deport foreign-born imams, disband radical faith-based groups if they suffer a "religious pathology."
PARIS - France will deport foreign-born imams and disband radical faith-based groups, including hardline traditionalist Catholics, if a new surveillance policy signals they suffer a "religious pathology" and could become violent.
A French Islamist shooting spree last March that killed three soldiers and four Jews showed how quickly religiously radicalized people could turn to force, Interior Minister Manuel Valls told a conference on the official policy of secularism.
His warning came two days after President Francois Hollande announced the creation of an agency to track how the separation of church and state is upheld in this traditionally Catholic country with Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish minorities.
Valls and two other cabinet ministers told the conference on Tuesday evening the Socialist-led government would stress the secularist policy called "laicite [sic]" that they said was weakened under the previous conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"The aim is not to combat opinions by force, but to detect and understand when an opinion turns into a potentially violent and criminal excess," he said. » | Reuters | Wednesday, December 12, 2012
