Paris city officials have suspended a librarian without pay for two years after discovering that he had been waging a two-year personal campaign to remove books about Moslems and the Arab world from the branch where he worked.
Reuters reported July 22 that the unidentified man, in his 40s, had been employed since 1989 at a library near the Place de la Bastille and had a reputation as a model employee until he began making anti-Moslem comments at work and letting colleagues know that he belonged to a Christian fundamentalist group.
An investigation into the unusually large numbers of missing books on Islam revealed that the man forged 25 library cards with Arabic-sounding names, each of which was used to check out and destroy up to five books at a time. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 75 and 300 books are believed to have been lost.
Posted July 27, 1998.