PARIS, January 24 (IslamOnline.net) - The French government’s decision to consider passing a law to ban Islamic Hijab in public schools and institutions still has its repercussions on the French community, as there appears from time to time an individual or institutional anti-Hijab approach.

The hero of the latest of such practices has been a French Physician who decided to prevent patients wearing Hijab from visiting his clinic under the pretext that he wanted to put an end to what he sees as "the escalation of extremism in France and the whole world".

The French physician has put a sign in his Paris-based clinic’s waiting room, on which he expressed his reluctance to receive Muslim women wearing Hijab and asked them to take off their Hijab before going into his clinic.

The sign, a copy of which was seen by IslamOnline.net correspondent Saturday January 24, reads, “I was shocked due to the increasing numbers of veiled women in our neighborhood particularly that most of them came to France without wearing Hijab.”

In his sign, the physician linked Hijab to extremism saying, “Extremism has led to many crises the world over. I thank the women wearing Hijab in advance for taking off their Hijab before coming into the clinic and while in the waiting room.”

The physician has implicitly concluded that wearing Hijab contradicts women’s right, as the sign also reads, “I thank all who think that the escalation of extremism in France is an actual crisis and that living in France necessitates respecting human and women’s rights. This means that women should not wear Hijab that shocks most of the nationals.”

It was only natural for the physician's "sign" to draw fire and backlash.

“This behavior adds to previous abuses against veiled women since the beginning of the argument on the law that bans religious symbols in schools in 2003,” Coalition against Islamophobia official Rashid Boudis commented on this sign.

“It is strange that all such incidents focus on the harassment to which girls wearing Hijab are exposed in schools,” he added.

“The coalition against Islamophobia has coordinated with Islamic associations in the neighborhood to protest in the Physicians Syndicate to take the necessary measures against this physician,” Boudis told IslamOnline.net.

The message of the Coalition was to the effect that the behavior of the physician has been “a violation against personal freedoms.”

A woman wearing Hijab has been denied access into a bank in Paris on January 22, as the guard asked her to take off her Hijab for security reasons. Yet, the bank manager has later apologized for the woman and her husband.

Meanwhile, several French media outlets have recently launched a campaign against the demonstration organized Saturday January 17, by “Muslims of France” party to protest against the ban on Hijab in schools.

Several anti-Semitism accusations have been leveled at the head of the party Mohamed El-Nasser Al-Atrash.

Both the “International Anti-Semitism League” and the “Representative Council of Jewish Schools in France” have sued Al-Atrash for making use of the anti-Hijab law demonstrations to “launch anti-Jewish slogans.”

French foreign policy was now in “an awkward position ... towards Arab countries, and also towards the United States,” sources has quoted him as saying.

A day later, De Villepin denied making the statements, pointing out that the situation should be understood completely and emphasized that the law is not intended against a certain Minority or religion.

French newspapers reported that De Villepin’s statements, prior to being denied, have been “a strong deviation” from the law on religious symbols, supported by the French President Jacques Chirac.

Meanwhile, Swiss-born Islamic intellectual Tareq Ramadan has condemned the decision of a Paris municipality to cancel renting a hall, where he was due to give a lecture, emphasizing that he was prevented from expressing his opinion in France.

According to London-based Al-Hayat Arab daily Saturday, Ramadan said - in a statement issued Thursday January 22 - that the Twelfth Municipality in Paris, following the example of several French cities and provinces, “prevented me from expressing my opinion, while other fanatic groups have been given the right to demonstrate on January 17”.

The Twelfth Municipality in Paris has cancelled the rent of the hall, it owns, under the pretext that a lecture by the Muslim intellectual, who is the grandson of the founder of Muslim Brotherhood Hassan El-Banna, may confuse public order.

The meeting that was due to be held in Paris with world intellectuals had been supposed to be a chance for common, open and free thoughts, away from the fanatic extreme backwardness, referring to the demonstrations organized in several French cities to condemn the law on banning Hijab in French schools, Ramadan said.