A 20-year-old Muslim was subjected to an assault from an acquaintance and several others after he posted pictures of a Christmas dinner on social media and was called a “dirty son of a white man”.
The victim, a resident of the city of Belfort, is also the son of a local police officer and filed a complaint against the individual who made the threats, that are thought to have been motivated by anger at seeing a Muslim celebrating the Christian holiday.
“Dirty son of a white man, son of a snake, son of policemen… I’m going to show you what a real rebeu is,” the message said, newspaper Le Figaro reports.
The term rebeu or beur is French slang denoting a person from a North African migration background who was born in France, and is sometimes used as a pejorative.
After receiving the threat, the victim made arrangements to meet with the acquaintance but was ambushed by a group of five individuals who beat the 20-year-old and threatened him not to complain to the police.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin commented on the incident on Twitter, saying:”In Belfort, a young man was attacked because he would have celebrated Christmas and would not be a ‘good Arab’.”
“Justice has opened an investigation. No place for separatism in our country, no place for racism wherever it comes from,” Darmanin added.
The attack comes just days after heavyweight boxer Bryant Jennings stated that just wishing Muslims a Merry Christmas or even “Happy holidays” was “disrespectful.”
“To say Merry Christmas or Happy holidays to a Muslim is ignorance, idiocy, and out right [sic] disrespectful,” Jennings wrote.
In 2018, Canadian imam Younus Kathrada went even further, telling Muslims that wishing Christians a merry Christmas was a sin worse than murder.
“If a person were to commit every major sin — committing adultery, dealing with interest, lying, murder…”
“If a person were to do all of those major sins, they are nothing compared to the sin of congratulating and greeting the non-Muslims on their false festivals,” he said.
According to an Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDACE) report released in July of this year, anti-Christian attacks in France have risen by 285 per cent from 2008 to 2019.
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