Alleged Hate Crime Against Two Muslim Women Near Eiffel Tower

Two Algerian-French Muslim women were stabbed in Paris on Sunday 18th October, in what appears to be a "racist attack".

Two white women have been charged with assault and racist slurs after they repeatedly stabbed two Muslim women near the Eiffel Tower.

The assault followed a heated argument between the victims, known only as Kenza and Amal, and their attackers. The dispute is thought to have concerned an unleashed dog, which scared the four children who were with the victims.

The attackers were heard yelling “dirty Arabs” and “go home” while the Muslim women were brutally stabbed in front of their four young children. Two local shop workers then intervened and restrained one of the attackers until the police arrived, while the second suspect was arrested afterwards.

The victims were hospitalised, and the younger has since been discharged. The two women sustained six and three stab wounds respectively.

The lack of initial police information or French media coverage of the incident led to backlash on social media, where images and video footage of the scene, in which shouting and screaming could be heard, were circulated. One Twitter user, echoing the sentiments of many others, accused the French media of being “selective on who they want to label as terrorists, they pick and choose what they want to air on the news, what they want to remain silent about and what they want to protest about."

However, two days after the incident, Paris police released a statement, explaining: “around 8pm, the police intervened following an emergency call from two women wounded by knives on the Champs-de-Mars’ (the Field of Mars) by the Eiffel Tower.”

This attack comes just two days after tensions were heightened following the decapitation of a French teacher, named Samuel Paty. The 47-year-old had been on his way home, when he was murdered on the outskirts of Paris by 18-year-old student and refugee, Abdullakh Anzorov. Just days before, Paty had shown his class satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo's caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

The perpetrator was soon shot down by police after threatening them with a knife, and shooting at them with an air rifle. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, called the murder a “typical Islamist terrorist attack”.

Islamophobia has been increasing in France at an alarming rate. In 2019, the Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (CCIF) "received 789 report forms referring to 1,043 Islamophobic incidents”, with many attributing this rise against Islam and Muslims as a direct consequence of the French government’s clampdown on Mosques and Muslim organisations. These measures have led to the shutting down of over 70 mosques and private Islamic schools since the start of the year.

The stabbing of the two Muslim women is just one of the increasing number of attacks on Muslims in France over the past few years. According to the president of the National Observatory of Islamophobia, anti-Muslim attacks soared by 54% last year, after the number of attacks against Muslims in France rose from 100 in 2018 to 154 in 2019.

In a speech delivered on 2nd October, Macron said that “Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country”, and announced that the government would present a bill in December which would see the strengthening of a 1905 law that officially separated the church from the state, adding that "secularism is the cement of a united France”.