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.
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