By SUSANA FERREIRA and DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARS in Paris JUNE 23, 2009   President Nicolas Sarkozy took sides in a growing debate on the burqa, a head-to-toe garment that is worn by some Muslim women and that conceals their faces, saying it isn’t a religious symbol but "a sign of enslavement and debasement" of women. "The burqa is not welcome on French territory," Mr. Sarkozy said. "In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity." Mr. Sarkozy, who was addressing a joint session of the French Parliament at Versailles — the first French president to address the legislature in more than a century — also pledged further government investment to help the country out of its recession. Almost halfway through his five-year term, Mr. Sarkozy is struggling to deliver on his electoral pledge to downsize the French

Copyright Jewish Telegraphic Agency Mar 6, 2009 By Devorah Lauter IDENTITY CRISIS: MUSLIMS IN EUROPE PARIS (JTA) – With the late afternoon sun hovering in the sky, the cries of Orthodox Jewish youngsters playing ball echo in a square just around the corner from a cluster of kosher Moroccan bakeries in this city’s 19th arrondissement. High-rise housing projects loom behind the children, where Muslim immigrant families from sub-Saharan Africa live adjacent to the heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods that comprise this multicultural neighborhood in northeast Paris, which is home to some 30,000 Jews. This mostly low-income neighborhood is no stranger to ethnic tensions. In 2007, the 19th district saw 27 reported anti-Semitic incidents, compared with just two or three per district elsewhere in Paris, according to France’s Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism. Last June, a Jewish teenager, Rudy Haddad, was savagely beaten by a gang of youths of sub-Saharan African extraction.