BBC NEWS | France responds to hostage crisis

"After a meeting on Sunday with French Muslim leaders, Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said: 'French people of all origins and all religions are united in support of our compatriots Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot. Together, we ask for their release.'
The head of the French Council for the Muslim Faith, which serves as a link between the French government and the country's five million Muslims, has condemned the kidnappings as an odious act of blackmail.
...
Dalil Boubakeur told reporters: 'The Muslim community must set itself apart from these schemes, which are reprehensible in the eyes of Islam.'
Lhaj Thami Breze, head of the Union of French Islamic Organisations, which has urged schoolgirls to defy the ban, said the headscarf issue was strictly a French affair.
'We cannot accept any outside interference,' he said. "

The muslim community in France is truly outraged by this hostage/blackmail incident. It's once thing to have a local disagreement about "conspicuous religion" in the French schools and quite another thing to have your compatriots kidnaped and threatened.

Moreever, these guys aren't just two consulting yahoos: they're two very well respected reporters on middle-eastern affairs. These are the kind of guys who bug Israel a lot because they give impartial information to Europeans. Kind of like the BBC, these guys are trouble-makers to those who wish to marginalize Arabs. So to have a radical Arab faction acting like this is like having George Bush threatening Tony Blair: it's doing bad stuff to your best friend.

Finally, the muslim community in France is scared about this because of what the French call "amalgame", which is when you make a global point from a single incident and confuse everything together. An incident like this will create a backlash effect against the muslim community. I'm glad to see that they are united against this act.