way to go, France !

Disturb the public peace, get kicked out of the country: whats wrong with that ? Nothing .

"France Moves Fast To Expel Muslims Preaching Hatred

In bid to pre-empt terror, nation targets 8 imams; Law hits legal residents. Sent to Turkey after 28 years. "Today, one can no longer separate terrorist acts from the words that feed them"

The Wall Street Journal
8/9/2004 "

COURTRY, France -- Mihdat Guler was 17 years old when he moved here from his native Turkey to find work in 1976. Over time, he saved enough money to buy a tidy house in this middle-class Paris suburb, where he lived a quiet life as a legal immigrant with his wife and five children.

One afternoon three months ago, Mr. Guler learned he had overstayed his welcome. Police stopped his van as he was returning from selling sewing supplies at an outdoor market and arrested him. Within a few weeks, he was on a flight to Istanbul.

France has taken one of the hardest lines of any Western country in fighting Islamic extremism. Other democracies, including the U.S., have been criticized for excessive methods, such as holding prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But few have been as systematic and zealous as France in attempting to stamp out Islamic militancy.

Mr. Guler is one of eight Muslim men France has expelled this year on the ground that they are preachers who foment anti-Western sentiment and violence in their sermons.

"Today, one can no longer separate terrorist acts from the words that feed them," Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin recently said.

French counterterrorism magistrates often round up suspects in broad sweeps and detain them for years without trial. With its new practice of expelling Muslim preachers, France is taking its campaign against extremism one step farther.

France's hardball approach comes as Europe faces stark questions about how to integrate its surging Muslim population. Once tiny, it has grown exponentially, fueled by immigration from North Africa and the Middle East and from countries such as Turkey and Pakistan, as well as by higher birth rates in Muslim families. France, with a population of about 60 million, is now home to an estimated five million to seven million Muslims, the most in Western Europe.

Other Western European countries with large Muslim communities, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, haven't gone as far as France for fear of undermining basic civil liberties. But the U.K. has recently begun threatening to hold Islamic preachers accountable for their words. In Germany, expulsions require court orders, and courts have been unwilling to send radicals back.

France's expulsions of preachers raise questions about how far Western democracies should go in trying to pre-empt Islamic terrorism. Some of the men, like Mr. Guler, who is 45, have legally lived in France for decades.

As a rule, France wants its immigrants to leave their languages and cultural origins behind and become primarily French.

Of the more than 1,500 imams who lead Friday prayers across France, fewer than 300 have formal religious educations. Many hail from countries such as Algeria that are hotbeds of extremism. Schools created in the past decade to educate French imams have produced few graduates. The government has become increasingly concerned that the poorly trained foreign imams are radicalizing people with their virulent sermons.

The Madrid train bombings, the first massive Islamist attack in the heart of Europe, convinced Mr. de Villepin, the interior minister, that drastic measures were needed to root out preachings that could spark terrorism. He ordered a crackdown, building on a few expulsions already carried out by his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Expulsion has been legal in France since 1945. But the procedure is usually used against illegal immigrants. Last year, France sent home more than 11,000 illegal aliens. Since the Muslim men it was now targeting were mostly legal residents, the Interior Ministry invoked another part of the 1945 legislation.

'Absolute Emergency'

That clause allows the state to expel "in absolute emergency" any foreigner deemed a threat "to the security of the state or public safety." In the past, the clause was mainly used to expel foreigners convicted of violent crimes such as rape or murder who had finished serving their prison terms.

The eight preachers France has expelled this year hail from four countries: Algeria, Turkey, Morocco and Egypt.

In April, the Interior Ministry expelled Abdelkader Yahia Cherif, a 35-year-old Algerian who preached at a prayer room in Brest, a port city on France's northwestern coast. France alleged that Mr. Cherif was recruiting young Arab men to a radical brand of Islam known as Salafism, which advocates a literal, inflexible interpretation of the Quran. The government contended Mr. Cherif had incited violence in his neighborhood since arriving four years earlier, including a fire at a town hall.

The order justifying his expulsion said Mr. Cherif had rejoiced over the Madrid bombings in sermons, and cited an interview he gave to a newspaper in which he said there was "no absolute proof" Islamists had been involved in either the Sept. 11 or the Madrid attacks.

The Beating of Women

As the expulsions accelerated, one drew special notice: that of Abdelkader Bouziane, an Algerian from Lyon. Mr. Bouziane, who has fathered 16 children by two Algerian wives, triggered a public uproar by endorsing polygamy and the beating of women in an interview with a French magazine shortly after the Madrid attacks.

Mr. Bouziane, 52, was already the subject of a pending expulsion order for allegedly issuing a religious order on March 28, 2003, calling on Muslims to target U.S. interests in France, and for having links to suspected terrorists. After the interview, the government rushed his expulsion, sending him out of the country in April. But within a few weeks he was back, after a French court deemed the reasons for expelling him as too vague.

Angered by his return, France's parliament has since amended the 1945 law to allow expulsion of any foreigner who incites "discrimination, hatred or violence against a certain person or group of persons."

In the absence of trials, it's hard to determine the danger posed by the expelled men. After ordering the expulsion of another Algerian imam from Lyon in January, the Interior Ministry appeared vindicated when, within days, he was arrested by counterterrorism magistrates for allegedly aiding a plot to stage a chemical attack. That imam, Chellali Benchellali, is now in prison in France.

The expulsion of Mr. Guler, the Turkish sewing-supply salesman, was a "very efficient and expedient tactic" for the government compared with prosecuting a case.

Prayer and Caliphate

Mr. Guler is one of 400,000 Turks who live in France. Though he immigrated 28 years ago, he never sought French citizenship. Instead, he obtained a residency card renewable every 10 years. All five of his children were born and raised in France.

In 1988, the elder Mr. Guler became president of an organization that rents a prayer room in central Paris. The prayer room, in a rundown building in a racially mixed neighborhood, initially catered to Turkish immigrants. It now draws a diverse crowd that includes Arabs.

On Saturday, May 1, policemen pulled over Mr. Guler's white Ford van and jailed him. He soon learned that the Interior Ministry had ordered his expulsion. With help from a lawyer, he filed a request for political asylum. Though denied, it delayed the government's plans by forcing a review of his case.

On May 19, Mr. Guler appeared before a judge in an administrative court. There, the Interior Ministry laid out its case. It rested on a 10-page memo by the Renseignements Generaux, a domestic intelligence service. There were no wiretaps, pictures, witness testimony or other evidence in the case file. Such memos are called note blanches, or white notes, because they aren't signed or dated and don't cite their sources.

The memo didn't implicate Mr. Guler in terrorist acts or plots but made a number of accusations, including: that he incited hatred of Western societies and Israel in sermons; that he allowed to be distributed at the prayer room Islamist newsletters that glorified jihad; and that he is a member of the Caliphate State, a group that seeks to overthrow Turkey's secular government and replace it with an Islamic state.

Based in Cologne, Germany, the Caliphate State calls for the restoration of Turkey's Caliphate, the Islamic theocracy that ruled much of the Muslim world until the Ottoman empire collapsed after World War I. It is banned in Turkey and Germany. Its leader, Mr. Kaplan, was arrested by German police in 1999 for inciting the killing of a rival Islamic cleric. He served four years in prison.

Since his release last year, Turkey has been seeking Mr. Kaplan's extradition on charges that he masterminded a failed 1998 terrorist plot, but Germany's courts have balked.

At the hearing, the judge asked Mr. Guler whether French law took precedence over Islamic law. Mr. Guler gave an ambiguous answer, according to people present. "There's a polemic there, Your Honor," he said. "In Quranic law, God is higher than French law but, if I say that, I know I'll be punished by French law."

The judge ruled in the government's favor. Mr. Guler made plans to return to Turkey on his own, but the Interior Ministry moved faster. Three days after the hearing, policemen seized him at his house and put him on a flight to Istanbul.