FRENCH police are inspecting 76 mosques in a national crackdown on what President Emmanuel Macron calls “Islamic separatism.”

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said that any mosques found guilty of promoting extremism would be shut down. He said the Macron government had closed down 43 mosques over the past three years.

Mr Darmanin says the inspections are a necessary response to incidents of Islamist terror such as the murder of teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded on October 16 after showing his pupils cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in a class on free speech.

The minister warned last month that anyone calling on teachers not to show such cartoons in class would be sued as a threat to secularism, and that “foreign families” who raise objections to such practices could be deported.

President Macron has also unveiled a “charter of Republican values” that imams will be required to sign to prove they are sufficiently loyal to the French state to be allowed to preach.

But France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Melenchon said the new legislation uses the language of secularism to cloak an Islamophobic agenda.

Accusing the government of being “hypocrites of secularism,” he declared on Thursday: “With this law, you again target Islam. Yet we should not be fighting a religion, but political, terrorist jihad. Secularism should be applied to all [religions] in the same way.”

And he called out its double standards, asking: “Do you intend to break off relations with Islamist regimes that this year have condemned dozens to die or be stoned? Of course not.”