Far-right French politician Eric Zemmour calls on Muslims to be assimilated and not to fulfill Islamic duties

Far-right politician Eric Zemmour, who is running for president, stressed in his televised statements aired by the TF1 television channel that if he wins the presidential election to be held in April 2022, he will become president of French and "French Muslims".
"Unlike others, I have no need to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. I consider them the same thing. But I attach importance to distinguishing Muslims from Islam. I ask all Muslims to be assimilated and refuse to fulfill the Islamic duties, which force worshippers to obey a legal and political rule," the far-right extremist figure said in his comments.

Zemmour was interviewed on TF1 television on Tuesday evening, praising American-born entertainer Josephine Baker -- who Macron had just inducted into France's Pantheon for outstanding historical figures -- for her "French first name".

After the tense interview, Zemmour accused the interviewer, journalist Gilles Bouleau, of "intellectual fraud", acting like a "prosecutor", and "taking sentences from my book out of context".

French far-right pundit Eric Zemmour announced on Tuesday that he will run for president in next year's election, staking his claim in a video peppered with anti-immigrant rhetoric and doom-laden warnings about the future.

Zemmour, a 63-year-old writer and TV commentator, is the most stridently anti-Islam and anti-migrant of the challengers seeking to unseat President Emmanuel Macron in the April 2022 vote.

"It is no longer the time to reform France, but to save it," he said. "That's why I have decided to stand."

Referring repeatedly to his view that white French people are being replaced by foreigners, he said he had joined the race "so that our daughters don't have to wear headscarves and our sons don't have to be submissive".

A photograph of the Paris-born pundit giving a middle finger with the comment "Real deep!" to a protester during a trip to Marseille at the weekend was seen as his latest misstep and he is yet to draw any political heavyweights to his side.

The author of the hit 2014 book "The French Suicide" announced his candidacy in a YouTube video that showed him sitting at a desk reading his speech into an old-style microphone.

It was intended to recall a famous 1940 address by war hero General Charles De Gaulle, who led resistance to Nazi occupation.

Over nine minutes, Zemmour, the son of Algerian Jewish migrants, warned that the France "of Joan of Arc and Louis XIV" and "of Notre-Dame and village churches" was disappearing.

"You feel like foreigners in your own country," he said, his voice playing out over recent colour images of violence and rioting which contrasted with a peaceful vision of the past in black-and-white.

"Immigration is not the cause of all our problems but it aggravates them all," he declared.

By Tuesday evening, the video had been watched 1.5 million times on YouTube.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin called his presentation "absolutely dreadful" while Socialist party head Olivier Faure dubbed it "sinister".

Far-left MP Alexis Corbiere mocked it as "more like an announcement for the presidential election in 1965".