French President Hollande seeks tolerance; Charlie Hebdo buries staff

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PARIS (TIP): French President Francois Hollande insisted January 15 that any anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic acts must be “severely punished,” as he sought to calm rising religious tensions after his country’s bloodiest terrorist attacks in decades.

With 120,000 security forces deployed to prevent future attacks, nerves jumped overnight when a car rammed into a policewoman guarding the president’s palace. The incident at the Elysee Palace had no apparent links to last week’s shootings and might have been an accident, prosecutors and police said.

The country is tense since 20 people, including three gunmen, were killed in last week’s rampage. It began at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which was burying several staff members Thursday. Charlie Hebdo had been repeatedly threatened for caricatures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

Two of the attackers claimed allegiances to al-Qaida in Yemen, and another, who targeted a kosher supermarket, to the Islamic State group.

The attacks occurred in an atmosphere of rising anti-Semitism in France, and have prompted scattered attacks on Muslim sites around France in an apparent backlash. They have also put many French Muslims on the defensive.

Hollande said in a speech that France’s millions of Muslims should be protected and respected, “just as they themselves should respect the nation” and its strictly secular values.

“Anti-Muslim acts, like anti-Semitism, should not just be denounced but severely punished,” Hollande said on Thursday at the Institute of the Arab World in Paris.

Noting that Muslims are the main victims of Islamic extremist violence, he said, “In the face of terrorism, we are all united.” At his office overnight, a car carrying four people took a one-way street in the wrong direction then drove off when the police officer tried to stop them. The officer sustained slight leg injuries, police said. Two people were later arrested, and two others in the car fled. US and French intelligence officials are leaning toward an assessment that the Paris terror attacks were inspired by al-Qaida but not directly supervised by the group, a view that would put the violence in a category of homegrown incidents that are extremely difficult to detect and thwart.

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