Far-Right Extremist Éric Zemmour Incites Against Muslims in Marseille

French far-right politicians continue to target the Algerian and North African communities with documented racist statements, in the absence of any intervention by the French judiciary to prevent these dangerous lapses.

This is particularly true given the widespread sensitivity of the French social fabric, which played a prominent role in the construction of modern France.

This time, the task was undertaken by one of the most prominent figures hostile to Algeria, despite his family having lived in Algeria during the colonial era. The founder and president of a far-right party, Eric Zemmour, has uttered abhorrent racist remarks targeting the Maghreb community in Marseille, the vast majority of whom are immigrants of Algerian origin.

Zemmour claimed, in a talk show with the French news channel BFMTV last Thursday, that Marseille, the largest city in southern France, has fallen into the hands of Arab Muslims, which, he said, has stripped it of its French character, which has nothing to do with Arab and Muslim customs and traditions.

In the interview, Zemmour said, “I am very sad when I see Marseille transforming steadily. It is no longer the city I knew in the 1980s. It has fallen into the hands of the North Africans, the Arab Muslims (he is usually referring to the Algerians, given his hatred of them). It is no longer truly a French city, and there is no longer a French social life.”

The leader of the Reconquest Party believes that “there are a few places in Marseille that still preserve their traditional French character. The rest resembles a large Arab-Muslim city, and is no longer French as it once was. It is a city that has been transformed into mere neighbourhoods for selling and promoting drugs. These are not my words, but those of the judges,” he claimed.

Stigmatising a group of French society based on their ethnic or religious affiliations is considered, under French law, stigmatising and discriminating against a community from the rest of the French population. This requires the French judicial authorities to file a lawsuit against him, given that he has previously been prosecuted in similar cases and convicted.

The most dangerous aspect of everything Eric Zemmour said was his accusation that the people of this ancient city in southern France were killing in the name of Islam, a claim he considered more dangerous than terrorism: “There are people who kill in the name of Islam, and I don’t call them terrorists, I call them jihadists. They kill in the name of Islam those they consider non-believers… They kill French people like Lola, Elias, Thomas, Philippine and others… This is the heart of the issue. It’s not just about terrorism or mental illnesses, but jihad, in the sense of holy war (jihad) against non-believers.”

This rhetoric represents the most extreme version of the rhetoric adopted by Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who proudly announced last Wednesday that he had succeeded in shutting down the European Institute of Human Sciences (IESH), an institution founded in France in the early 1990s and tasked with training imams working in French mosques.

Eric Zemmour has previously made similar statements and was brought before the French judiciary by anti-racism organisations and associations in France. However, the French judiciary ruled to convict the accused and impose financial penalties, the most recent of which was last March, when he was fined nine thousand euros for making racist and ethnic statements in which he described Arabs and Muslims as “scum.”

Zemmour has been accustomed to repeating such descriptions against members of the Muslim, Arab and African community in France, but without receiving any punishment that would deter him from repeating his racist attacks.