Thursday, August 23, 2007

An Inside Look at France's Mosque Surveillance Program

by Pascale Combelles Siegel from The Jamestown Foundation

The Renseignements Généraux (RG), the French internal intelligence service, have been monitoring mosques, their clerics and their sermons since the mid-1990s. The section of the RG called Milieux Intégristes Violents (Violent Fundamentalist Environment) is in charge of monitoring and they have identified radical mosques in almost every corner of French territory, with the exception of four, predominantly rural, régions (Corse, Poitou-Charentes, Basse-Normandie and Limousin). Every Friday, sermons are collected through unidentified means, and they are centralized and analyzed. The RG use their analysis to determine which imams are preaching a radical Salafi brand of Islam, or if they are assisting terrorist activities by helping recruitment or granting material support to an operational network ... But Mosques do not constitute the only channel of religious radicalization in France. The internet, with numerous jihadi-friendly websites available in both Arabic and French, allows the dissemination of a radical Salafi discourse that preaches hatred of the West, rabid anti-Semitism and anti-French racism.

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