Secret Life of Tweets Undoes Celebrated Voice of French Suburbs

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/world/europe/bondy-blog-mehdi-meklat-badrou-twitter.html

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PARIS — He and his writing partner were the toast of the Left Bank, published and celebrated by the prestigious and chic. They were praised as authentic voices from France’s troubled suburbs, articulate and poetic chroniclers of the immigrant youth experience.

Barely into their 20s, Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Saïd Abdallah — “Mehdi” and “Badrou,” as they are known — were stars of Bondy Blog, a much-praised chronicle of suburban France sponsored by the mainstream press. They were seen poolside in Los Angeles and at Le Select in Paris, and had their own show on national radio, all the while going home to the cramped housing projects of their parents in the suburbs.

All that is gone now. Mr. Meklat, 24, is now a media phenomenon of a different sort. He has been revealed as the semi-hidden author, under a pseudonym, of hateful and obscene tweets — anti-Semitic, misogynistic, pro-jihadist and homophobic.

“Bring on Hitler to kill the Jews,” he tweeted during the Césars, the French Oscars ceremony; “Charb, what I’d really like to do is shove some Laguiole knives up his … ” he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist, not long before the massacre in which Charb was killed; “I find the phrase, ‘I love death the way you love life,’ of Mohammed Merah troubling in its beauty,” he wrote about the murderer of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse; “I miss Bin Laden,” Mr. Meklat said in another tweet.

And there were other, even more repulsive utterances among his 50,000 tweets over five years under a barely concealed Twitter identity, “Marcelin Deschamps.”

Mr. Hyde was posing as Dr. Jekyll. He might have carried it off if an alert Twitterer, identified by Le Monde as a teacher, had not been angered by Mr. Meklat’s television appearance last month to promote his new novel. Aware of Mr. Meklat’s tweets — she had warned about them before — she blew the whistle, and other Twitterers took up her outrage.

Overnight Mr. Meklat has gone from hero to pariah. A mini-culture war has erupted over the erstwhile star. It has led to uncomfortable reflections on the wide gulf that separates the immigrant suburbs from mainstream France, and on the naïveté of France’s progressive elite. So eager is it to connect with that world, that it is often blind to the dangerous anger and isolation of the banlieues.

Reached by phone in “Asia” — he wouldn’t reveal the country — Mr. Meklat sounded contrite, half-pleaded to be forgiven, acknowledged that tweeting had become an “obsession,” and insisted that “Marcelin Deschamps” wasn’t really him.

“I created a character, it’s a fictional character,” Mr. Meklat said. “He had no morality, his whole business was provocation — massive, extreme provocation, bad jokes. We laughed about it, my friends, the journalists around me,” he said.

“I accept everybody’s pain,” Mr. Meklat said. “People who don’t know me have the right to be shocked. Because yes, these messages are shocking.”

Editions du Seuil, the prestigious publisher of his and his partner Badrou’s novel, “Midnight,” has condemned him but is not answering questions about him.

A largely flattering profile in Le Monde last fall mentioned the “Marcelin Deschamps” identity without highlighting it. The article’s author said much of Mr. Meklat’s Twitter stream had been suppressed, and Le Monde said its journalist received threats from Mr. Meklat’s circle merely for evoking his double identity.

“Everywhere, everybody is scrambling to get a piece of them,” Le Monde’s article said. “For a while now, Harlem or Hollywood have been among the favorite destinations of Mehdi and Badrou.”

No more. Encomiums to Mr. Meklat have been replaced by a bitter war of recrimination on French airwaves and in print. The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism has turned over Mr. Meklat’s tweets to the Paris prosecutor.

Now the question is being asked: How could anybody harboring such vile views have been taken up with such enthusiasm?

In their blog posts Mr. Meklat and his partner depicted, with force and emotion, the troubled inner life of the suburbs. Their writing never transgressed societal norms. That made both rare commodities in the French literary world, spurring their lightning ascension.

Now, on the left, Mr. Meklat’s defenders are reduced to stuttering disavowal or halfhearted defense, and on the right, critics are spinning variations of “I told you so.”

Meanwhile, the National Front of Marine Le Pen has been having a field day with the “Meklat Affair,” in an election season where the far-right party is doing everything it can to stir up fears about the menace of Islam.

“Praise for Merah, threats, homophobia, hatred of France and anti-Semitism: why does the media protect @mehdi_meklat?” Marion Marechal Le Pen, Ms. Le Pen’s niece and a rising star in the National Front, gleefully tweeted while the affair unfolded late in February.

More mainstream figures on the right, some the object of Mr. Meklat’s nasty tweets, have raised questions about the “paternalistic” attitude of much of the French literary and media establishment, as the political scientist Laurent Bouvet put it in Le Figaro.

Mr. Meklat tweeted about the right-leaning philosopher and essayist Alain Finkielkraut, son of a Holocaust survivor, that “they should have broken his legs, that son of a whore.” Mr. Finkielkraut responded in Le Figaro that “Mehdi and Badrou were the turbulent chouchous” — pets — “of the hate-filled left.”

But as unsettling as what Mr. Bouvet called in an interview the “complaisant attitude” of part of the media establishment is the content of Mr. Meklat’s tweets.

“It reveals that in a certain milieu, in the suburbs, and in the Bondy Blog, there is a sort of regular anti-Semitism that is almost anodyne. It’s not necessarily aggressive, it’s almost on the level of a joke,” Mr. Bouvet said.

“There is a kind of mockery of the Jews and Israel,” said Mr. Bouvet. “He went very far.”

Despite that, Mr. Meklat had “benefited from a kind of impunity that, today, is a real problem,” the government’s anti-discrimination representative, Gilles Clavreul, said in an interview.

“All the people in his professional entourage knew about his bad behavior,” he added. “They thought it wasn’t important. What’s really terrible is that Meklat reinforces the xenophobes’ stereotypes about the suburbs. It’s a gift to them.”