Between the time he slipped away from the French police who came to arrest him at his home in Lourches on August 30, and his arrest by the Belgian police near Mons on September 30, the case of the Muslim brother preacher, Hassan Iquioussen, has been extensively commented on.
His profile as a self-proclaimed imam with controversial remarks; his career as a “city preacher” in the shadow of “Muslims of France” (Ex-UOIF), the French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood; his figurative career as an Islamo-youtubeur, whose video-sermons count more than 34 million views; were examined from every angle.
Like Salman Rushdie, I think that “if I were asked to give one short sentence about religion, I would say: I am against it”! Not because the problem is religious faith itself, but because “from the beginning, men have used God to justify the unjustifiable”.
Like Salman Rushdie, I consider that “freedom of expression is the whole, the whole story”, that it “is life itself”, that “without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist”.
When the people point out the real problems, the politicians blithely point their accusing finger!
Thus, in a recent poll conducted during the presidential election campaign (Ifop for Global Watch Analysis), 85% of French people expressed the wish to see the “future president” tackle head-on the rise of Islamism and communitarianism by banning Islamist organisations in France linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafism, the Turkish Milli Görüs and other Tablighs.
Beware of polls that seem bent in advance. If there is a lesson to be learned from this French singularity which consists in electing the President of the Republic by universal suffrage, it is this one. These dear ”refractory Gauls” take malicious pleasure in denying predictions, refusing the idea that the media, analysts or polls – these tools for measuring democratic debate, which they moreover love – can ”impose’ ‘ the fatality of an unavoidable electoral scenario.
For a long time, the international branch of the Muslim Brotherhood has benefited from the benevolence of the authorities and the largesse of the legislation on political asylum in European countries.
For almost half a century, a double aberration prevailed in this respect. First of all, there was the glaring semantic contradiction known as “moderate Islamism”. For how can one be “moderate”, or even tolerant, while claiming a divine truth that is impervious to any criticism or examination of conscience?
It is well known that ridicule does not kill – unfortunately. Faced with certain aberrations, we would like him to do so. If only once, for the sake of example! Thus, in response to the revelations of Global Watch Analysis (see Screen Watch n°17, December 2021) and our colleagues from Marianne, concerning the excesses of “consular Islam” which led the “moderate” rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Chams Eddine Hafiz, to seal an unholy alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to remove the control of the National Council of Imams (CNI) from the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), against a background of Algerian-Moroccan diplomatic animosity; The French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, “French Muslims” (MdF), issued a strange communiqué entitled “stop the slander”, claiming to have no link with the Islamist Brotherhood!
It is a real hold-up operated by the Islamist associations affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, which got their hands on a gigantic hoard estimated at more than 64 million of public subsidies granted by the European Commission and the Council of Europe, since 2007.
What could be more natural than that, at the end of the mandate of a president perceived – rightly or wrongly – as the “president of the rich”, purchasing power should be the primary concern of the French? That the reference to the people should once again become (as it should never have ceased to be) the central theme of political debate?
Should the defence of the “little people” have led to this visceral hatred of the elites? That concern for the “weakest” should give rise to a populist drift whose aim is not to come to the rescue of the “left behind”, but to exploit the crowds distress and feed them resentment, to turn it into a destructive force driven by the vilest impulses: racism, suprematism, xenophobia…
Can God’s laws claim to be above those of man? No! Not in France, in any case! This is true for the secrecy of the confession evoked by Monsignor Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the French Bishops’ Conference, as well as for the Islamic Sharia law that the supporters of political Islamism are trying to impose on the country of Voltaire, by means of community separatism and blackmail to Islamophobia.
The whole world was stunned at the overwhelming images of Afghan civilians clinging, by dozens, to the cabins of American military planes, which were about to take off from Kabul airport, abandoning them to their sad fate under the Taliban cut back to power, twenty years after being driven out, in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
A tragic and unbearable distress which leaves no one indifferent. Almost nobody. Because, during this time, in the supposedly moderate Islamist circles, which advocate a “political Islam” known as “golden mean”, supposed to be the exact opposite of the obscurantist and medieval doctrine of the Taliban, some self-congratulate, in an obscene delight, of a “grandiose victory” falling under the “divine will”!