Thanks much.
Can't hurt their feelings now, can we?
Brigitte Bardot fined for slurring Muslims in book
Former French actress Brigitte Bardot was fined 5,000 euros (6,000 dollars) by a Paris court for writing a book in which she declared disgust with her country's tolerance of Islam.
The judgement added to a number of previous decisions which have found the 69-year-old of provoking racial hatred in her expression of right-wing, xenophobic views.
Bardot's publisher, Rocher, was also fined 5,000 euros for last year bringing out the book, "Un Cri Dans le Silence" (A Cry in the Silence).
Bardot, who lives in the French Riviera town of Saint-Tropez, was not present for the verdict.
Two civil rights groups, the Movement Against Racism and For Friendship Between People and the League of Human Rights, brought the lawsuit because of several passages in the book.
One of the most incriminating sections read: "I am against the Islamisation of France! This obligatory allegiance, this forced submission disgusts me.... Our ancestors, the elderly, our grandfathers, our fathers have for centuries given their lives to push out successive invaders."
The two groups which sued the ex-actress were each awarded a symbolic one euro in damages.
A complaint over a tirade in the book against "mixing our genes" with non-European immigrants -- taken in context to mean Muslims -- was not upheld.
In its verdict, the court ruled that Bardot had deliberately tried to draw a link between Islam and terrorism by mentioning the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States in a chapter on a Muslim holiday celebrated in France and elsewhere.
It found that the book argued that "the presence of Muslims on French territory and only seem undesirable to the reader, who is ineluctably led ... to reject members of the Muslim community through hate and violence."
France has Europe's biggest Muslim community, estimated at five million out of a total population of 60 million.
In her defence, Bardot admitted in court last month that she may have been too direct in the expression of her views but she did not seek to hurt anyone.
"It's my overall view of a society becoming completely decadent, where it's like mediocrity has become more important than beauty and greatness, where there are more dirty, badly kept people invading the world," she said.