Vandals carried out a fresh attack on the graves of hundreds of Muslim war veterans in France's biggest military cemetery in an assault President Nicolas Sarkozy denounced Monday as "revolting."
The graves in Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery were sprayed with graffiti on Sunday night, the eve of Islam's Eid al-Adha feast, a police spokesman said, adding that a hunt was under way to find the culprits.
The cemetery, near the northern border with Belgium, commemorates the tens of thousands of victims of a series of long and bloody battles for control of northern France at the start of World War I.
It had already been hit in April this year, when vandals desecrated 148 Muslim graves, hanging a pig's head from one tombstone and daubing slogans insulting France's Muslim justice minister, Rachida Dati, who is of North African descent.
Sunday’s attack came days after Jewish settlers in the West Bank town of Hebron vandalized Muslim graves with graffiti defaming the Prophet Muhammad and almost exactly a year after neo-Nazi vandals painted swastikas on 52 of the French cemetery's Muslim graves.
Prior to 2007, there were four incidents involving the desecration of Muslim graves in northern and eastern France in 2004, and one in 2003. Jewish graves have also been vandalized.
Sarkozy denounced the latest outrage as "abject and revolting" and "the expression of a repugnant racism directed against the Muslim community of France."
There was this sidebar, " These are probably the tombs of heroes who fell in combat. This is a hateful, scandalous act, an insult to all Muslims." Dalil Boubaker. I confess ignorance to who he is, what public voice he has beyond this quote.
However, I recall in the ramp-up to election day, vandalism at a number of officeholder homes. In Minnesota, not an ocean away. Nastiness has no excuse, and hides behind anonymity. Such things usually happen in the dark, at night, the circumstances showing the perpetrators know they are out of line, not merely with criminal law, but with most sensibilities held by the public. Why do they do it anyway? What's the purpose of such "speech?" Who benefits? What is the psychology of such mean behavior? Hate for one different in some aspect, carried to a logical extreme, means hate for everyone but oneself.