Excerpt:
France's women's rights minister faced growing criticism on Thursday, including calls on social media to resign, after comparing women who wear the Muslim headscarf and veil to "negroes who supported slavery".
An online petition that collected nearly 18,000 signatures within hours urged Prime Minister Manuel Valls to punish Laurence Rossignol, while a leading French Muslim group accused her of aiding the Islamic State group.
It was as if she had "set out to help the recruiters of Daesh", said Abdallah Zekri, president of the National Observatory against Islamophobia, using a pejorative Arabic term for IS.