France restaurant refuses to serve Muslim women

Paris: Protests sparked off when a restaurant owner in a Paris suburb refused to serve two Muslim women, a media report said. A video, widely shared on social media, showed the restaurant owner telling the hijab-wearing women: "Terrorists are Muslims and all Muslims are terrorists," BBC reported on Sunday. The incident took place at Le Cenacle restaurant in Tremblay-en-France on Saturday. On Sunday, the restaurant owner apologised to a group who had gathered outside. According to a French daily, the restaurant owner said he had "got out of hand" due to the current tensions around the issue of wearing burkinis on French beaches, but also because he had lost a friend at the Bataclan concert centre attack last November. "We don't want to be served by racists," one of the women said. The restaurant owner retorted: "Racists don't kill people." He also said: "I don't want people like you at my place." Government Minister Laurence Rossignol said that she had asked Dilcra -a government anti-racism body  to investigate, describing the behaviour as "intolerable". A court ruling on Friday overturned France's controversial burkini ban on civil liberties grounds, but some local authorities have vowed to keep it in place. French anti-Islamophobia organisation CCIF said that "Following the umpteenth Islamophobic incident which led to the humiliation of two young Muslim women" its director would be speaking outside the local mosque on Sunday, the BBC reported. The CCIF, which says, it was offering legal and psychological support to the two young women, appealed for no protests outside the restaurant itself.