A French researcher is under death threats for publishing a paper on the Muslim Brotherhood in France. Below are excerpts from a relevant article in Charlie Hebdo. Many thanks to Gary Fouse for the translation:

Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, a researcher targeted by bearded men

by Jean-Loup Adenor
April 20, 2023

Since the appearance of her work “The Brotherhood and its Networks” on January 25, the CNRS researcher Florence Bergeaud-Blackler has been the target of a wave of death threats, putting her under police protection, a first in at least the last ten years, the research institutes informs us.

Police protection at Charlie, that we know. But at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS)? We will have to face that. One of their researchers, the anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, has just been placed under protection per the request of the Protection Service (SDLP), the organization of the Interior Ministry charged with the protection of persons threatened with death.

No, Bergeaud-Blackler has not discovered a late vocation as a caricaturist. Her offense? Publishing a work, “The Brotherhood and its Networks, the Investigation”, in which she analyzes, dissects, and exposes the history of the Muslim Brotherhood — the Islamic organization that became international, founded by Hasan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928 — and its implantation in Europe.

“A scientific racism”

“I am developing a new definition of the Brotherhood,” she summarizes for Charlie Hebdo. An Islamism adapted to European societies, born in the 1960s on their soil, which bypasses the political to pass to the cultural and the economic in order to construct an Islamic society.” Since the appearance of her book, and more particularly, since a seminar in which she participated on March 10, along with Gilles Kepel, director of the Mediterranean Middle East Chair at the Superior Normal School, and who wrote the preface to her work, the researcher says she has been the target of numerous death threats. Threats that have justified her placement under police protection— a first in at least ten years at CNRS.

Since its release, “The Brotherhood and its Networks, the Investigation” has sparked a violent outcry. At the head of the pack is the Islamologist Francois Burgat, who does not hide his connections with Qatar, nor his admiration for Tariq Ramadan. This director of research emeritus at CNRS, president of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, Paris (Carep), a Francophone lobby for the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies of Doha, immediately condemned the work with several big salvos from blog postings and vengeful tweets. According to Burgat, Bergeaud-Blackler’s thesis would fall under “scientific racism” and a “witchcraft trial”, and her work would be nothing more than a “rant in the delusional paradigm of the great replacement.” In short, “her thesis borrows from the most uninhibited anti-Semitism.”

FBB accused of being the new Drumont

Here we are: The work of Florence Bergeaud-Blackler on the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing more than racism, Islamophobia, and a new anti-Semitism. It is, in addition, exactly what the lawyer and militant Rafik Chekkat claims in a posting in the form of a review, published in the online journal Orient XXI (on whose editorial board sits Francois Burgat). “In reading ‘The Brotherhood and its Networks’, the reference to the anti-Semitic pamphlet by Edouard Drumont, Jewish France (1885) becomes disturbingly clear.” Jewish France, considered as the work of reference for anti-Semitic thought at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century, develops a very vehement racial anti-Semitism, feeding its obsessions of the Jewish deicide thesis, thus very much the enemy of French Christians.

Long questioned by Charlie, Rafik Chekkat, affable as a Tariq Ramadan in the pulpit, condemns the threats and regrets the virulence of the debate, but maintains his analogy, as outrageous as it is. According to him, Florence Bergeaude-Blackler’s book is in “no way a research work. It puts a target on certain people: to say that the veil is a sign of the Muslim Brotherhood conquest — what does it have to do with veiled women?” And what does it mean to make a recognized researcher the reincarnation of anti-Semitism?

The lawyer, founder of the platform of “information and formation of Islamophobia”, “Islamophobia.fr”, thrashes a work he judges to be “conspiratorial” and “just serious enough to convince journalists, too light for academics to really be interested in.” A work comparable to the anti-Semitic pamphlet of Edouard Drumont? “I do not compare Jews to Muslims, they are different kinds of population, a very different population in numbers, but I am convinced that in fifty years, when we look back at France in the 2010 years, we will see this society as having a general distrust toward Muslims.”

Mirroring the threats targeting Bergeaud-Blackler, Rafik Chekkat claims that Francois Burgat and he have been accused of being part of the Brotherhood and collaboration, since they have been leading the offensive against the work. He would like French society to “judge the Muslim Brotherhood on its parts. Of course, the Brotherhood has plans, every lobby has a plan. What I am asking for is equal rights: One may detest the Muslim Brotherhood, but one cannot make connections between them and people who have nothing to do with their movement.”

Late support from CNRS?

In the face of the virulence of these critiques assumed by their authors and the death threats received by the researcher, the CNRS, to which Florence Bergeaud-Blackler is attached, there has long been “minimum service”, claims the journalist Erwan Seznee in Le Point on April 11. “The National Center of Scientific Research refuses to utter one word of public support for the researcher threatened with death. Confusing,” the weekly states. A position now corrected. On Wednesday April 12, at the end of the morning, CNRS posted on Twitter the following message: “CNRS has always defended the liberty of research. It firmly condemns the threats levied against Florence Bergeaud-Blackler. It (CNRS) gives total support to her research and assures her of the functional protection she requests.”