'Veiled women are like negroes who support slavery'

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 IS 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.

The minister had "stigmatised" thousands of women, he added, and "spat in the face of the (secular) laws of the Republic by trying to interfere with the way women dressed."

The row was also trending on Twitter across France with a hashtag #RossignolDemission (#RossignolResign) demanding that she step down.The League of French Muslim Women also condemned her comments, calling them "dangerous and irresponsible" and reminding her that women who wear the veil and headscarf were the main victims of racist attacks in the street. "It is all the more surprising because the government has just launched an (advertising) campaign against racism, antiSemitism and Islamophobia," the league said.