Imam deported for ‘satanic’ French flag rant: It would not occur in UK

The swoop was made with ruthless pace and stealth. It got here simply because the Muslim preacher was settling right down to learn his newspaper after having fun with a household lunch.

Shuffling to the entrance door to see who was banging so loudly, Imam Mahjoub Mahjoubi discovered himself confronted by 15 plain-clothes law enforcement officials.

They had emerged from a convoy of vehicles and descended with out warning on his residence in Bagnols-sur-Ceze, a quaint, Thirteenth-century city close to Avignon the place British vacationers typically cease off en path to the French Riviera.

After marching inside they ordered the imam (who had lived in France for all however 12 of his 52 years, by no means troubling to use for citizenship) at hand over his Tunisian passport.

Then they thrust an official-looking doc earlier than him and advised him to signal it.

Mahjoubi, who runs a constructing agency and provides fashionable Friday sermons at his native mosque, claims they didn’t clarify the small print contained on this type.

But after he had put his title to it they arrested him, giving him just a few moments to gather his belongings earlier than they took him away, ignoring the tearful entreaties of his spouse, Almira, and their weeping kids, the youngest of whom, a seven-year-old boy, is being handled for most cancers.

It was solely that night, after he had been flown to Paris and processed at a police station, Mahjoubi tells me, that he realised he had signed a governmental order bringing an abrupt finish to his 4 a long time of residency in France.

Issued by Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin — the equal of our Home Secretary — below powers bestowed by a troublesome new Immigration Act which got here into power final month, it authorised the imam’s quick expulsion from his adopted nation.

And at 8.30pm, on Thursday, February 22 — simply eight hours after that first knock on the door — he was bundled below guard onto an Air France aircraft certain for Tunis.

So what had this bespectacled, scholarly-looking man finished to warrant being exiled with guillotine-like swiftness and finality?

‘One word. Just one, small word,’ he repeated again and again this week, once I posed him that query at his non permanent refuge — his in-laws’ home in Soliman, a rundown Mediterranean resort, 15 miles south of the capital.

‘It’s such an injustice!’ he wept, head in palms. ‘For speaking one word my entire world has been destroyed. They have separated me from my wife and children, ruined my business, thrown me out of the country I have lived in for 40 years. A country I love.’

The small phrase to which he referred is ‘Tricolore’ (or tricolour in English) the title, after all, for the French nationwide flag, with its vertical blue, white and purple stripes.

During his weekly sermon, three Fridays in the past, Mahjoubi described this unassailable banner — an emblem of Republican democracy for the reason that French Revolution — in phrases that may shock and offend many proud Gauls.

Addressing 500 male congregants crammed right into a nondescript breeze-block mosque in Bagnols-sur-Ceze (and 12,000 extra Facebook followers who watch his weekly sermons, delivered in Arabic and French) he insulted the flag as a devilish image that causes division amongst Muslims.

To translate his actual phrases, he stated that at some point, when the world ends, all ruling authorities would fall, after which ‘we will no longer have these Tricolore flags that gangrene us . . . the only value they have is a Satanic value, in the eyes of Allah’.

Imam Mahjoubi now insists that his use of the phrase ‘Tricolore’ was an unlucky ‘slip of the tongue’, made when his impassioned sermon was in full movement. When he spoke, he tells me, the African Cup of Nations soccer event was being performed in Ivory Coast, and — as an enormous soccer fan — he had meant to decry the varied nationwide flags being brandished confrontationally by rival supporters whose shared Muslim faith must have united them.

But as an alternative of claiming multi-national, he claimed, he had stated Tricolore ‘by mistake’. Could this be true? Or was he being disingenuous?

He actually appeared contrite after we met, presenting himself as a paragon of tolerance who had spoken out in opposition to Islamist atrocities such because the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan assaults in Paris in 2015.

Yet it stretches the bounds of credulity to simply accept that this educated imam, who had lived in France since he was 12 and should have been effectively conscious of its deep cultural attachment to the flag, might have made such an elementary error.

Indeed, his protestations of innocence have did not persuade outstanding French Muslims who watched movies of the speech, additionally stated to have included passages prone to heighten tensions with the Jewish neighborhood, and foster discrimination in opposition to girls.

This week, the Rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris ‘strongly condemned’ the 40-minute handle, saying it ran ‘counter to the principles of peaceful co-existence and mutual respect’ and ‘the values advocated by Islam’.

The imam’s outburst additionally shocked Bagnols-sur-Ceze’s mayor, Jean-Yves Chapelet. ‘This is a man I have known for ten years,’ he stated. ‘I am completely stunned.’

We can solely guess how Imam Mahjoubi’s phrases have been interpreted by his viewers that Friday, nearly all of whom have been younger, and presumably impressionable, males.

With anger amongst already disaffected sections of the French Muslim neighborhood heightened by occasions in Gaza, absolutely he would have been effectively suggested to keep away from saying something remotely delicate, not to mention trigger younger individuals to query their nationwide allegiance and think about Jews with enmity?

For these are darkish and harmful occasions in France. It has develop into a rustic the place a well-meaning instructor could possibly be beheaded merely for exhibiting a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad throughout a lesson in about freedom of expression in 2020.

Where the temper within the grim, high-rise banlieues to which thousands and thousands of French North Africans are consigned simmers perilously — not solely over Palestine however societal inequality and flashpoints such because the deadly taking pictures final summer season of a 17-year-old by police, who had pulled over his automobile within the Paris suburbs.

A rustic, furthermore, the place the avowedly centrist Macron administration is being compelled ever additional to the Right to retain its recognition amongst alarmed white voters who more and more imagine the one reply to France’s multicultural woes lies within the hard-line insurance policies of the National Rally (RN).

Founded because the National Front by Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose extremism as soon as rendered him unelectable, the celebration was renamed by Le Pen’s daughter Marine in 2018. Under her management, the RN has now develop into undeniably mainstream, as latest polls present.

Obliged to flex its muscular tissues within the face of this existential menace, the federal government has launched a raft of measures designed to exhibit its willpower to fight radical Islamism and reinforce the secularist values of the Republic.

Students have been banned from carrying the abaya, and state subsidies for Muslim faculties and faculties in the reduction of. Only this week, the schooling minister introduced plans to shut a outstanding Muslim academy in Nice, saying its funding was ‘contrary to the anti-separatism law’ launched in 2021.

Attempts have additionally been made to introduce immigration quotas and make it more durable for incomers to deliver their households to France. For the second, they’re being vetoed by the courts.

Not so the legislation on the centre of this story — the brand new Immigration Act, which comprises among the authorities’s most stringent new measures, a lot to the anger of the liberal Left.

Among them is the fitting of the authorities to ‘visit’ (a euphemism for raid) the properties of residents deemed to have spoken or acted seditiously, confiscate their nationwide identification paperwork, and expel them instantly.

When Mahjoubi was deported, final week, the architect of this new legislation, Interior Minister Darmanin, triumphally cited the imam’s fast-track elimination as proof that it’s going to shield the nation from extremist enemies inside.

‘No call to hatred will go unanswered,’ he declared, making to certain to emphasize that the preacher’s allegedly inflammatory feedback had been reported to the general public prosecutor on his private directions.

Indeed, Mahjoubi claims the minister was so desirous to see him develop into the primary ‘symbolic example’ of the crackdown on radicalism in mosques that he flew from Paris to Nimes to signal the expulsion order himself.

The lightning dismissal of this obscure imam has actually caught the nation’s consideration, sparking handwringing debates on French political speak reveals and in intellectual newspapers.

Inevitably, maybe, opponents similar to migrant help group attorneys dismiss the brand new act as a blatant vote-catcher that wasn’t even essential to deport Mahjoubi. Powers to expel undesirables in circumstances of ‘absolute emergency’ have been first launched following World War II, they level out.

Last yr, certainly, 44 individuals linked to radical Islam and deemed to be harmful have been summarily kicked out of France, a 26 per cent improve on 2022.

However, different immigration legal professionals say the so-called Darmanin Act undoubtedly hastened Mahjoubi’s repatriation, and it seems to pave the best way for others.

Before it got here into power, non-citizens might keep away from or postpone their elimination by destroying — or conveniently ‘losing’ — identification paperwork, putting the onus on the French authorities to show their nationality. Legitimising residence raids and passport seizures means this ruse will now not work.

Given the large obstacles the UK authorities should overcome earlier than banishing even essentially the most harmful of resident non-citizens, many would probably wish to see the British authorities handed equally powerful powers.

One thinks of the 12 years and thousands and thousands of kilos in authorized charges expended to ship the toxic hate-preacher Abu Qatada, whose movies have been discovered within the 9/11 hijackers’ lairs, again to his native Jordan.

Then there’s the bureaucratic nightmare of making an attempt to rid these shores of murderers, drug-dealers, robbers and rapists who inveigle their approach into the UK and stay right here with assist of resourceful legal professionals and beneficiant authorized support.

But then, on the subject of dealing with these issues, our nations aren’t simply separated by a Channel. They are oceans aside.

‘The French authorities have a long-standing right to remove someone who is not a French citizen, provided it is to a country that is not unsafe,’ says former Supreme Court choose Lord Sumption. ‘The right to remain in France is a police matter and regarded as discretionary. Britain has a completely different legal tradition.’

Life in Tunisia could also be much less snug than in provincial France, however it’s protected sufficient. So, on the authorities’s discretion, the imam has been unceremoniously shunted again to the nation of his delivery.

Had he made those self same remarks in a mosque in Birmingham, say, or Bradford, it could most likely have been a pointless waste of time for anybody to report him. But is his expulsion justifiable?

While nobody I spoke to in Bagnols-sur-Ceze believes he’s a hatemonger within the Qatada vein, and his flock (together with a Birkenhead-born Muslim with a French-Scouse accent) backed his declare to be a voice of moderation, he was, on the very least, silly to talk as he did. For in contrast to Britain, the place protesters can — and do — overtly abuse the Union Jack in any approach they selected, as long as the oblong material belongs to them, France fiercely protects its cherished Tricolore.

Designed by revolutionaries in 1790 as a distinction to the frilly pennants flown by the the Aristocracy, its three easy stripes have since been copied by many different nations, together with Italy, Germany, Ireland and India.

As in lots of different nations, desecration of the nationwide flag is an imprisonable offence (in Turkey, the utmost sentence is eighteen years). As Mahjoubi must have recognized, even to disrespect it verbally at a public gathering can have critical penalties.

Moreover, having already been taken to process for educating native kids spiritual classes contained in the mosque advanced — in breach of French legislation governing using municipal buildings — he ought to have realised his videoed speeches have been being monitored by the regional authorities, which is how his inflammatory phrases got here to their consideration.

In reality, by some accounts they’d beforehand warned him to mood his fervid speeches.

Mahjoubi denies this.

True or not, on the Friday in query he went too far, not solely showing to rattling the Tricolore however allegedly branding Jews as ‘the enemy’ and calling for the destruction of Western society.

Putting his aspect of the story to me this week, throughout a prolonged interview in his Tunisian in-laws’ whitewashed villa, the imam rejected each such declare.

When alluding to the nationwide flag, Jewish individuals and the feminine intercourse, he maintained, he had been quoting from Islamic scriptures that envisage scenes on the ultimate day of reckoning.

Had his phrases been interpreted in that context, as an alternative of being utilized to modern France, nobody might probably have been offended or incited to hatred.

Why, then, had he been singled out? Because, he stated in a whispery voice that contrasted starkly with the stridently excitable tones one hears on his movies, the Interior Minister was vaunting his new legislation and wanted ‘a scapegoat’.

‘It was only a word, just one misplaced word,’ he says once more, although entire passages of his speech have been cited as grounds for his expulsion.

‘I was the first to suffer but it (the new law) will do a lot of damage to Muslims. I think imams will have to be really, really careful about what they are saying from now on.’

Quite so, and lots of would counsel that’s no dangerous factor.

As I’m leaving this woebegone man, he espouses his admiration for Britain.

Though he hasn’t been to our nation, he praises its tolerance, and a system that enables unbiased judges, moderately than politicians, to rule on circumstances similar to his. So a lot fairer, he muses, than in France.

‘They would never do this to an imam in England. A minister wouldn’t be allowed to throw me out. I’d have the prospect to defend myself in courtroom.’

With dollops of unwitting bathos, he fixes me with a significant gaze and provides: ‘So, I appeal to King Charles — and I hope he soon gets better — to help me!’

Perhaps the imam’s Anglophile outpouring was honest. A cynic would possibly suspect it to have been affected within the hope of profitable the Daily Mail’s sympathy.

Last evening his authorized group in Paris launched a last-ditch problem to deliver him residence from Tunisia.

Yet his gushing homage to Britain, with its extra clement type of justice, is unlikely to have warmed French patriots to his doubtful trigger.