{"id":115273,"date":"2025-05-19T20:49:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T20:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/115273\/"},"modified":"2025-05-19T20:49:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T20:49:09","slug":"france-calls-for-greater-checks-on-eu-funding-to-fight-antisemitism-islamism-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/115273\/","title":{"rendered":"France calls for greater checks on EU funding to fight antisemitism, Islamism \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Paris intends to present a proposal for discussion by the foreign ministers of EU member countries at the next General Affairs Council on May 27. The proposal, seen by POLITICO, says the EU needs to \u201cincrease its efforts\u201d in the face of \u201can alarming increase of hate speech and hate crimes,\u201d in particular following Hamas\u2019 Oct. 7, 2023 attacks against Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.<\/p>\n<p>Israel\u2019s ground and air campaign has killed more than 52,000 people in the Gaza Strip, according to the territory\u2019s health ministries. Israel launched its campaign in response to the Hamas attacks in which 1,200 people were killed.<\/p>\n<p>France\u2019s focus on EU financing follows cases of EU money being used to fund campaigns that did not respect France\u2019s secular values, or to allegedly fund entities linked to Islamist movements, said a person familiar with work on the proposal. Secularism \u2014\u00a0or la\u00efcit\u00e9 \u2014 is enshrined in France\u2019s constitution.<\/p>\n<p>In 2021, the Council of Europe human rights organization ran a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.europarl.europa.eu\/doceo\/document\/E-9-2021-005129_EN.html#:~:text=On%202%20November%202021%2C%20a,tune%20of%20EUR%20340%20000.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">European Commission-funded<\/a> anti-discrimination campaign featuring the slogan \u201cfreedom is in hijab,\u201d drawing a strong backlash from France.<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lefigaro.fr\/international\/antisemitisme-islamisme-une-note-gouvernementale-denonce-les-subventions-de-l-ue-a-des-entites-hostiles-aux-valeurs-europeennes-20250519\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Le Figaro<\/a>, which was the first to publish extracts of the proposal, France also wants to see grants given to the Islamic University of Gaziantep in Turkey reviewed following homophobic and anti-atheist comments by the university\u2019s officials.<\/p>\n<p>The French proposal suggests several ways to tighten the EU grants systems, including suspending financing for grant recipients who don\u2019t respect the values set out by European treaties, stricter checks on grant applications, and drawing up recommendations for grants allocated by EU-funded agencies or programs such as Erasmus+.<\/p>\n<p>France\u2019s call for stricter rules on EU grants, which has the support of Austria, comes as European NGOs <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/article\/europes-ngos-fear-trump-style-funding-cuts-are-coming\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fear funding cuts<\/a> amid a push by conservative European lawmakers for greater oversight over civil society lobbying activities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paris intends to present a proposal for discussion by the foreign ministers of EU member countries at the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115274,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[26388,7907,6715,2000,9898,299,474,36,837,461,771],"class_list":{"0":"post-115273","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-antisemitism","9":"tag-austria","10":"tag-benjamin-haddad","11":"tag-eu","12":"tag-eu-funding","13":"tag-europe","14":"tag-finance","15":"tag-france","16":"tag-israel","17":"tag-turkey","18":"tag-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114536471833544035","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}