Hundreds of people gathered in Paris on Friday answering a call by Muslim leaders to denounce the “barbarism” of Islamic State (IS) militants, as flags across France flew at half mast after the beheading of a French national.
Imams and ordinary Muslims have rallied to condemn the execution of 55-year-old mountaineer Herve Gourdel this week by militants in Algeria with ties to the IS jihadists, as the country mourned the brutal murder.
“We French Muslims say stop to barbarism, stop to terrorism,” Dalil Boubakeur, head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith — an official representative for the country’s roughly five million Muslims — told the gathering outside Paris’s main mosque.
He said the demonstration was a “vibrant expression of our desire for national unity and of our unwavering will to live together”.
“Islam is a religion of peace”, he said, adding it “orders respect for life”.
Leading Muslim figures also signed a message published in French newspapers on Friday condemning “atrocities committed in the name of a murderous ideology hiding behind the Islamic religion”.
“We are also the ‘filthy French’,” said the statement, referring to an epithet the Islamic State group has used. Gourdel was kidnapped on Sunday by Algerian group Jund al-Khilifa shortly after a chilling call by IS militants for Muslims to kill citizens from countries involved in a US-led coalition fighting the extremists, “especially the spiteful and filthy French”.