(Paris) In the name of freedom to inform and seven years after the jihadist attack against the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, media and associations of journalists stepped up to the plate this week in France to support a journalist under police protection after a report on Islamism in France.
Posted at 12:42 p.m.
The presenter of the “Forbidden Zone” program on the M6 television channel, Ophélie Meunier, was threatened with death and placed under police protection after the broadcast on January 23 of a report on fundamentalism. The subject, sensitive for a long time in France, has become flammable there two months before the presidential election.
A witness to the show, Amine Elbahi, a young man from Roubaix, a working-class town in northern France, was the subject of a similar measure, for the same reasons. He had notably alerted to a homework assistance association which, according to him, could in fact provide Koranic lessons, benefiting from public subsidies.
At least 120 French people under police protection
“We are now a small club of people under police protection for the same reasons. For my part, it’s been seven years, ”recalled Friday on the LCI channel the former journalist of Charlie Hebdo and activist Zineb El Rhazoui. For having published caricatures of Muhammad, the weekly had been the victim of an Islamist attack in January 2015 which had left 12 dead, the first of a series having struck from the country.
Like Mme El Rhazoui or the Franco-Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui, “120 to 150 people would live in France under this regime” protected, according to a police source quoted by the daily The world.
The report of “Forbidden Zone” on Islamization also showed faceless dolls on sale in a Muslim store in Roubaix (the saleswoman asserting that Islam forbade the representation of human features) or veiled girls separated from boys in a private school in Marseilles (southeast).
The show provoked very strong reactions on social networks. Some saw in it a faithful and alarming description of the rise of Islamism, others an alarmist and stigmatizing presentation of all Muslims.
The reactions of support to the presenter and the witness of the show were not immediate but surged this week.
The government gave its “full support” to the presenter, notably through the voice of the Minister for Citizenship, Marlène Schiappa.
” Fundamental liberties ”
Many journalists’ companies also gave their support, starting with those of M6 and RTL radio where Ophélie Meunier also works, the ministerial press association and Reporters Without Borders.
“Informing is one of the fundamental freedoms of our democracy”, underlined on Twitter the director of information of France Télévisions, Laurent Guimier. This message was also read in the television news of the public group.
In an editorial on Tuesday, Le Monde pointed out the danger of such threats to “freedom of expression and information”, recalling that “in Islam as in any other religion, these freedoms are only limited by criminal laws which punish insult, defamation, incitement to hatred or discrimination”.
At the same time, a debate within the debate has emerged. The media review site STOP ON IMAGES criticized “the methods” of the authors of the report, citing “misleading emails and messages” sent by the team to ask Muslims to participate in the filming.
According to these people, the program had contacted them for a subject on “secularism and living together” and not on radical Islam.
In the name of “freedom of information”, we must “defend Ophélie Meunier, without quibbling”, for his part estimated the journalist Luc Le Vaillant, in Liberation. This “obviously does not prevent criticizing the theses or the methods of these colleagues, if necessary. But that can only be secondary,” he added.
“We are in denial of reality,” Richard Malka, the lawyer for the production company Tony Comiti, who produced the report for “Forbidden Zone”, told AFP.
“No one disputes, I believe, that there were these faceless dolls in the shops […], that there were these schools where little girls are veiled, ”continued Mr. Malka, also a lawyer for Charlie Hebdo.