SCANDAL: French Female Black Minister Racially Abused
The
Minister of Justice of the French cabinet has been publicly subjected
to racist taunts for the third time in barely a month, triggering a wave
of outrage on November 12, 2013, Tuesday, over the hounding of the
country’s top politician of African origin.
In the wake of two highly-publicised incidents in which the minister, Christiane Taubira, was compared to a monkey, far right weekly magazine Minute published a cover page with the headline “Crafty as a monkey, Taubira gets her banana back”.
Amid
an outcry over the magazine’s contents, the Interior Minister Manuel
Valls announced he was examining whether it was legally possible to
block the distribution of the magazine.
“We cannot let this pass,” Minister Valls said.
Numerous
politicians took to Twitter to demand the prosecution of the magazine’s
editor and publisher for incitement to racial hatred.
Rights
group SOS Racisme said it would lodge a legal complaint over the cover,
a move that will force
authorities to investigate whether any law has
been breached.
The
First Secretary of the ruling Socialist Party and one of the founders
of SOS Racisme, Harlem Desir, said all copies of the magazine should be
seized by police.
Valerie Fourneyron, the Minister of Sports, called the cover as “unacceptable and nauseating”.
The embattled Minister Taubira is a hate figure for some on the right in French politics as she was the Minister responsible for the legalisation of gay marriage earlier this year.
Last
week, she spoke publicly of her dismay over the attacks she has been
subjected to and implicitly criticised her government colleagues for not
coming to her defence.
It
would be recalled that at the end of October, a group of children
attending an anti-Taubira/anti-gay marriage demonstration were filmed
chanting “monkey, eat your banana”.
That
came shortly after an electoral candidate of the far right National
Front (FN) was expelled from her party for writing on her Facebook page
that she would prefer to see the Minister “swinging from the branches rather than in government”.
The
treatment of Taubira has sparked much soul-searching among liberal
commentators over whether racism has become widely acceptable in parts
of France.
