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‘“We are tired and sick of always being targeted, of being the subject of stereotypes and racist fantasies,” Sihame Assbague told AlterNet over the phone from her home in Villetaneuse, a suburb north of Paris. “Muslim women are talked about every day, but we are not given the right to speak. Other people speak for us.”
An activist against state racism and organizer for the website Contre Attaques, aimed at countering Islamophobia, Assbague is not alone in her frustration. Muslim and Arab communities find themselves increasingly attacked by discriminatory house raids and warrantless arrests, over four months into a heavy-handed “state of emergency” imposed and then extended by the French government in the wake of the Paris attacks.’