France Expels Imam Accused of Hate Speech, Reviving a Thorny Debate

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/world/europe/france-imam-hate-speech.html

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PARIS — Hassan Iquioussen, a prolific Moroccan preacher in France, has some 180,000 followers on his YouTube channel and 46,000 on Facebook. His sermons, which sometimes espouse antisemitic and misogynistic views, have long skirted close to the line separating hate speech from freedom of expression, but he has never been convicted of a crime nor, for decades, had any trouble renewing his residence permit.

Last week, however, a French court endorsed the government’s move to deport him. The decision has turned up the heat on a simmering debate in France about the balance between security and civil liberties, an issue that has been thrust back into the public consciousness by a series of recent trials about deadly terrorist attacks in the mid-2010s.

The French authorities say the move to deport Mr. Iquioussen is part of a crackdown on “Islamist separatism.” Gérald Darmanin, France’s hard-line interior minister, called the court’s decision “a great victory,” saying that he would continue fighting against “those who hold separatist discourses.”

But critics say Mr. Iquioussen’s expulsion is a political stunt that infringes on individual rights. And discontent has been stirred by a further twist: Mr. Iquioussen left France before the police could deport him and his whereabouts is unknown. His disappearance has led some French news outlets to brand the whole case a “fiasco.”

Mr. Iquioussen, a 58-year-old imam, was born in France and has always lived in the country. His lawyer, Lucie Simon, said that his Moroccan father had barred him from obtaining citizenship when he was a teenager and that two subsequent requests as an adult had been turned down. Despite his online audience, Mr. Iquioussen was not broadly known in France until the immigration authorities took an interest.

In July, Mr. Darmanin announced that Mr. Iquioussen would be expelled for “hate speech against the values of France,” citing the country’s commitment to secularism and gender equality. Under French law, a foreigner can be expelled for acts that are considered discriminatory or for promoting hatred or violence.

Rights groups and Muslim organizations quickly protested. While acknowledging Mr. Iquioussen’s “particularly conservative view of religion,” the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, an advocacy group, said that expelling him amounted to an “instrumentalization” of his case for political motives.

Judges in Paris initially blocked the deportation, pointing to limited evidence of hate speech and Mr. Iquioussen’s right to lead a family life in France. But the case landed before the Council of State, France’s top administrative court, which authorized the expulsion on Aug. 30.

Hakim El Karoui, a senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne and an expert on Islam in France, said that Mr. Iquioussen was close to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that has inspired followers around the world.

“He does politics with religion,” Mr. El Karoui said of the imam, adding that Mr. Iquioussen’s goal was to promote an ultraconservative vision of Islam in parts of the French Muslim community.

Mr. Darmanin, the interior minister, said the deportation had been made possible by legislation intended to combat Islamist extremism passed during President Emmanuel Macron’s first term.

But Serge Slama, a law professor at the University of Grenoble Alpes, in southeastern France, said that the case relied on older legislation to combat hate speech, not the new law. “This case is a bit of a fabricated case,” he said.

After Mr. Iquioussen’s disappearance, France issued a European arrest warrant. But Professor Slama said he was skeptical that the warrant was applicable, noting that, technically, the imam appeared to have simply complied with the deportation order.

Ms. Simon, Mr. Iquioussen’s lawyer, declined to say where her client was. She said that Mr. Darmanin’s announcements had been part of “a political show.” The decision to suddenly deport her client, she added, was “not justified” because most of his contentious statements went back 10 or 20 years and had never resulted in a conviction.

Mr. Darmanin’s actions against Mr. Iquioussen were further questioned after Mediapart, a French investigative news outlet, revealed that Mr. Darmanin had dined with the imam in an effort to woo Muslim voters during his successful campaign to become mayor of Tourcoing, in northern France, in 2014.

The stir over Mr. Iquioussen’s expulsion has achieved at least one thing: The imam’s profile has skyrocketed. The number of views on his YouTube channel in the week after the government’s deportation announcement in July reached more than half a million, compared with a weekly average of 35,000 before.

Mr. Darmanin has become well known for his attempts to root out those he considers Islamist radicals, whom he has called “the enemy within.” Shortly after the beheading of a teacher by an Islamist extremist in October 2020, Mr. Darmanin closed a mosque and banned two Muslim groups that the government considered extremist. He has also suggested the elimination of ethnic food aisles in stores.

This past week, Mr. Darmanin said that his officials were working on a list of “fewer than 100” preachers and organization leaders who could also be expelled using the legal precedent set in the Iquioussen case.

Mr. El Karoui, the Islam expert, noted that there had been “a change in doctrine” in late 2020, when the authorities began prosecuting people whose public statements were considered a threat to the country’s secular and universalist values. Previously, he said, such comments would have been considered free speech.

But, Mr. El Karoui added, the crackdown risked instilling fears in French Muslims that their community as a whole was being targeted. The new approach, he said, “must be counterbalanced fairly quickly by a gesture of openness.”