The Paris shop owner in the viral clip says religion had nothing to do with it, as the UN prepares its first action plan against Islamophobia, a process Pakistan has driven at the General Assembly.
LAHORE: A video from France’s street unrest that has been shared on Burmese-language Facebook pages and on Instagram as proof that looters spared a shop because its owner was Muslim is false, the owner herself has said, in a case that shows how religion is being pulled into a crisis that began over school conditions and the cost of living.
The clip shows a woman holding a long stick and shouting at masked men outside a sneaker store in Paris until they move on. Posts in Burmese on Facebook from Oct. 20, and an English-language Instagram post the next day, claimed the group left after realising she was a “sister”, and that no Muslim-owned business had been attacked during the looting, AFP’s fact-checking service found.
The shop’s co-manager, Assia Sanna, told AFP that no one asked about her religion. “They are vandals, they are thugs, people who want to get goods for free. End of story. It’s not about religion,” she said.
In the footage, Sanna can be heard telling the men in French to get out and that she is 54 years old. One man in the group then persuades the others to leave, saying she is a woman on her own. Nothing in the exchange refers to faith.
AFP traced the clip to a post on X by “A T Media” on Oct. 19 whose caption said only that the shop manager had come out and asked the men to stop breaking things. Sanna, who co-manages seven sneaker and sportswear stores in Paris, said two of them had already been broken into on Oct. 18. By the time she was filmed, she said, the window behind her had been smashed and the shop looted, and she was trying to stop the group reaching the stockroom and setting it on fire.
Sanna told her story on camera to Le Parisien in a video titled “J’ai pris une barre” (“I grabbed a bar”), available on YouTube.
Muslim traders were not spared either. A woman who identified herself as Muslim told French broadcaster BFM on Oct. 19 that her shop in Marseille had been looted, AFP said.
A crisis that began in classrooms
France’s unrest started with high school students protesting over neglected school buildings, teacher shortages and a university admissions system they see as unfair, before broadening into anger over fuel prices and living costs. On Oct. 17, more than half a million people marched nationwide, by government estimates, and shops in Paris were looted. The United States, China and Germany issued travel advisories for their citizens.
On Oct. 31, the third consecutive weekend of protests, authorities counted 320,000 marchers nationwide while organisers put the figure near half a million. Police used tear gas in Paris and Lyon, and the Interior Ministry reported at least 290 arrests, Al Jazeera reported. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has met student unions and is weighing measures to ease living costs.
Rumours cut both ways
The false “Muslim shop” claim mirrors a far louder narrative from the opposite direction. U.S. President Donald Trump made unsubstantiated claims that Muslim migrants were behind the rioting and urged France to close its borders. President Emmanuel Macron, speaking in Qatar on Oct. 21, called such comments “as unacceptable as they are stupid”, said there had been foreign manipulation of information and AI-generated images of events that never happened, and described claims that France had been invaded by migrants and Islamists as “completely false”. Euronews has video of his remarks (in French).
One story casts Muslims as rioters, the other as a protected in-group spared by fellow believers. Both rest on the same false idea, that religion explains the looting, and both can feed suspicion of Muslim communities in Europe. Fact-checkers documented a similar pattern during France’s 2023 riots, when recycled and foreign footage was used to stir anger against immigrants.
The UN’s next step
The episode comes as the United Nations moves to formalise its response to anti-Muslim hatred. Miguel Ángel Moratinos, the High Representative for the UN Alliance of Civilizations and the UN’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, said in Baku on Oct. 27 that his office was “advancing work towards a United Nations Action Plan to Combat Islamophobia”.
Speaking at the ministerial meeting of the Baku Process and the 7th World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue, Moratinos said institutions should be judged not just by the number of meetings they hold but by “whether we have helped build trust where mistrust existed”. In a UN video interview in March, he described the rise in anti-Muslim incidents in Europe as “very, very serious” and said a UN plan was expected later this year.
Pakistan has been central to that process. In March 2022, the General Assembly adopted a resolution introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation designating March 15, the anniversary of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. A further Pakistan-led resolution in 2024 called for a dedicated envoy, and when Secretary-General António Guterres named Moratinos to the post in May 2025, Pakistan’s UN ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad called it “a major milestone”.
Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai, chairman of the Washington-based World Forum for Peace and Justice, has opened a four-part series arguing that Islamic teachings and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights share core commitments to dignity, equality and the protection of life. Fai, who joined the PMML in urging the world to settle the Kashmir dispute last month, cites the Qur’anic verse that Allah Almighty made humanity into “people and tribes that you may know one another” alongside Articles 1 and 2 of the declaration on equal dignity and non-discrimination.
He says recognising that compatibility does not mean overlooking rights abuses in Muslim-majority countries, but separating a faith’s ethics from the conduct of governments that fail to uphold them.
At a conference in Kuala Lumpur in September organised by the Malaysian groups WADAH, ABIM and PKPIM, Fai urged Islamic movements to move “from slogans to scholarship” and “from survival to contribution”. He said Islamophobia should be confronted with research, dialogue and institution-building rather than protest alone, and praised Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s Malaysia Madani framework of good governance and social harmony.
Checking before sharing
The Paris video is a reminder that disinformation travels fastest when it flatters the audience sharing it. Pakistan has its own battles with the problem, with Punjab ordering a fact-based drive against disinformation and journalism educators training reporters to counter AI-led fake news.
For Sanna, the record is simple. She was a shopkeeper defending what was left of her store. Turning her into a symbol of religious solidarity, or of anything else, she said, misses what happened on her street.
– with additional fact-check material from AFP
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