Michel Houellebecq, investigated for racial hatred against Muslims

BarcelonaThe French writer Michel Houellebecq has been charged with racial hatred against Muslims, for statements he made published in November 2022, according to the newspaper Le Figaro and as reported by Efe. The author of Submission is being investigated in a court in Nanterre for "complicity in the provocation of discrimination, hatred or violence against a group of people" based on their membership in a religion.

The Public Prosecutor's Office was investigating Houellebecq for statements made in the magazine Front populaire, directed by the philosopher Michel Onfray, following which he was denounced by the Union of Mosques of France and the Movement against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples. "When entire territories are under Islamist control, I believe there will be acts of resistance. Attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafes frequented by Muslims, a reverse Bataclan," said Houellebecq at the time. "And Muslims will not be satisfied with just lighting candles and laying bouquets of flowers," he added.

In the same interview, he asserted that "native French people" do not want Muslims to integrate, "they want them to stop stealing and attacking, for violence to decrease, for them to respect the law and the people," and he proposes that "a good solution" is "for them to leave." "I have the impression that the line of conduct most consistent with the Quran, the best one for a good Muslim, is to return to the land of Islam," said Houellebecq, who considers the "great replacement theory," promoted by the writer Renaud Camus and which maintains that the European population is being replaced by immigrants, to be "a fact," a "statistical evidence" that translates into "the modification of the ethnic and religious composition of the European population."

Houellebecq's lawyers assure Le Figaro that their client was not inciting any acts against Muslims and point out that his words fall within the scope of freedom of expression. "A prophet of tragedies does not ask for them to be fulfilled, on the contrary," explain the lawyers, who lament the "growing judicialization of intellectual debates." The lawyers recall that Houellebecq himself clarified his words in January 2023 in a conversation with the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, who withdrew the complaint he had initially filed. A few months later he published the book Quelques mois dans ma vie, in which he reviewed the statements and the controversy they caused. In an interview granted at that time to Le Figaro, Houellebecq assured that "the problem is not Islam, but delinquency".