Le Pen refuses ‘to cover up’ for meeting with Lebanon’s Grand Mufti

The office of Lebanon’s Sunni Grand Mufti said that a head covering was standard procedure for women meeting with the sheikh.

The leader of France’s National Front party, Marie Le Pen, refused to attend a meeting with Lebanon’s Sunni Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdel-Latif Derian, after she was directed to don a white headscarf.

“You can pass on my respects to the Grand Mufti, but I will not cover myself up,” Le Pen told reporters while in Lebanon for a brief visit.

“They didn’t cancel the meeting, so I thought they would accept the fact that I wouldn’t wear one,” she added. “They tried to impose it upon me.”

The Grand Mufti’s office, however, claimed that they made it clear that she would have to put on a head covering while meeting the Sheikh.

“This is the protocol,” the sheikh’s office stated. “The mufti’s office regrets this inappropriate behavior in such meetings.”

Le Pen’s party is running on a populist platform aimed at quelling radical Islam in France as well as stopping the wave of hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees from the Middle East into Europe. She suggested that religious Jewish men wear a hat instead of a kippah, the traditional Jewish skullcap, in order to facilitate the “effort to stamp out radical Islam in France.”

By: World Israel News Staff