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Will Le Pen's Front National Party Attempt to Force Jewish Children to Eat Pork?
By R. Hofner
The head of the extreme rightist Front National party in France, Mrs. Marine Le Pen, who won a rousing victory in the last local elections, announced at the end of last week that she intends to remove the pork substitute foods from the school menus of the municipalities under her jurisdiction. In an interview to the RTL radio broadcasting station, she declared that she refuses to capitulate to religious demands regarding the menus of municipal educational institutions. "There is no reason that religion should play a role in public life. There are laws to regulate such things," she said, claiming again that "we must preserve secularism in France."
Understandably, this decision has aroused great wrath within the Jewish community, and equally in the Moslem one. The world is waiting to see how France's Moslems, with a population of 6.5 million, the largest in Europe, will react.
The Front National, repositioned as more than just an anti-immigrant party, won control of 11 towns and more than 1,400 municipal seats nationwide in recent local elections, its best performance ever at the grassroots level of French government.
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