France has ordered the closure of a mosque in the country’s north due to the radical tone of its imam’s preaching, regional authorities in France told on Tuesday. According to the prefecture of the Oise region, the mosque in Beauvais, a town of 50,000 people located 100 kms (62 miles) north of Paris, would be closed for six months. The sermons there, according to the report, incite hatred, violence, and ‘defend jihad’.
The move comes two weeks after Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin announced that the procedure to close the site had been initiated because the imam there ‘targets Christians, homosexuals, and Jews’ in his sermons. This, the minister said, was ‘unacceptable’.
Local officials were obliged by law to conduct a 10-day investigation before taking action, but they told AFP on Tuesday that the mosque would be closed in two days.
The mosque’s imam, according to the local newspaper Courrier Picard, was a recent convert to Islam. A lawyer for the association managing the mosque told that it had filed for an injunction to overturn the ban.
According to the official document stating the reasons for the mosque’s closure, the imam, who the association claims preached only occasionally and had now been suspended, was in fact a daily presence at the mosque. It said According to the report, the imam referred to jihad as a ‘duty’ and hailed its combatants as ‘heroes’ who saved Islam from Western influence. It also claimed that he had labelled non-Muslims as ‘enemy’.
Earlier this year, the French government declared that it will increase inspections of places of worship and associations accused of disseminating extremist Islamic propaganda.
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