Intolerance, extremism on rise across EU: Official
A senior European Commission official has warned about rising levels of extremism and intolerance across the 28-nation bloc that especially target minorities and women.
"There is rising anti-Semitism, there is rising Islamophobia," European Commission Deputy President Frans Timmermans said.
The high-ranking official added that there are people in EU countries who are actually challenging the positions of women.
Timmermans said the governments should do their best to stop the trend, otherwise, he warned, nothing would be left of the European values.
“This cannot happen. We need to put the rule of law front and center in our European discussions because if we don't have that, we have nothing,” he told EU parliamentarians in Latvia's capital, Riga.
According to the French National Observatory against Islamophobia, anti-Muslim attacks in France have soared since the January 7 attack on the office of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. At least 128 attacks were registered over the two weeks that followed the attack, almost the same number as in the entire 2014.
Other European countries have been also hit by Islamophobia campaigns over the past weeks with the extremist PEGIDA group holding rallies in some German cities to promote intolerance against Muslims. The group broke up after senior German officials warned that the rallies were meant to spread hatred and prejudice in the German society. PEGIDA is a German acronym which stands for the “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West.”
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