Writer, researcher, professor, journalist… In Mohamed Sifaoui’s closet, all these hats overlap to form a large pyramid. This Tuesday morning, we would bet that the balance of the building was damn upset by a search carried out by the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Tax Offenses at the Parisian home of the 55-year-old man. A judicial development which prevented Mohamed Sifaoui from honoring his summons, scheduled for the same day, before a senatorial commission of inquiry.
What is reproached to the fifty-year-old, co-responsible for the Union of Physical Education and Military Preparation Societies (USEPPM), the main beneficiary association of the Marianne fund for the fight against “separatism” (355,000 euros)?
“Failures” and “irregularities” in the application process and use of the fund. All this, for an almost non-existent final result, despite a position of “project manager, transmission belt and scientific guarantee” for Sifaoui, as mentioned before the Senate his friend Cyril Karunagaran, president of the USEPPM.
Between “scientific caution” and “scheming”
Supporters as detractors, getting people to talk about Sifaoui is not an easy task. After many rejections, the interviewees requested anonymity. “This case is not surprising, it is even surprising that it did not happen sooner. Sifaoui, it’s business, shenanigans, scrambles ”, retorts a close friend of the file. Launched in April 2021 after the assassination of Samuel Paty, this fund led by Marlène Schiappa was to be used to finance associations defending “the values of the Republic” by bringing, on social networks, “counter-discourses” to Islam. radical.
Radical Islam precisely, was the goodwill of the journalist, author of about twenty works on the subject. Born in Algeria in 1967, the former correspondent of Young Africa has won several awards for undercover investigations in the jihadist milieu. Came to work in France after experiencing the dark years in Algeria, his works with shocking titles (In the footsteps of bin Laden, How I infiltrated Al-Qaeda) have almost all been called into question.
Notably My brother, that terrorist, a book co-written with the eldest brother of terrorist Mohamed Merah. As reminded Mediapart, a man presented as a “gypsy” converted to Salafism, is indirectly accused by the authors of having a link with the Merah affair. His fault according to them? Having left the neighborhood after the attacks. Arrested by the authorities a few days after the publication of the book, the man will be released after a police custody, for lack of convincing elements.
“It is very surprising that this person could have had any credibility in certain media. It was enough to read what he had written or look at his achievements to realize that he had no credibility, in the academic world and among the actors in the field, ”points out a person close to the file.
Regularly invited on TV sets, Mohamed Sifaoui acts as an editorial writer. He talks a lot, and does not hesitate to broach subjects far from his area of expertise. Like secularism. “He has no serious knowledge on the subject. He instrumentalized secularism for ideological purposes and for ego issues,” criticizes a former ministerial adviser.
Former gun holder of Manuel Valls on secularism
Support for Manuel Valls during his campaign for the primary on the left, Mohamed Sifaoui had at the time not hesitated to step up to defend his candidate’s vision of secularism. To the point of comparing the Islamic veil to “a Nazi armband”, as we wrote in our columns in 2017. Not the only controversy for a man accustomed to slippages on social networks, and close to the Republican Springa political movement accustomed to this type of methods on the Internet, as revealed Slate in 2021.
Mohamed Sifaoui also tried his hand at the world of football, during an express six-month mission to SCO Angers, in Ligue 1. Propelled director of communication, he will have had time to toast with the supporters, in an admittedly delicate context. After a period of adaptation marked by tense relations with journalists, he resolved to let go.
In April, during the first developments around the affair of the Marianne fund, Mohamed Sifaoui had reacted. “I have already suffered several attacks during my career, I am used to when we work on political Islam, we receive a few banana peels when we defend the Republic […]. I am not Jérôme Cahuzac, I am not François Fillon, I am not Pénélope Fillon”, he had defended himself on the set of BFM TV.
“It is important that he can be heard quickly and demonstrate as he has always said that he had nothing to reproach himself for in this affair”, indicated his lawyer on Tuesday, recalling “the fight against Islam policy for thirty years” of his client. He will be heard by the authorities on Wednesday in an open hearing. Before a passage in the Senate, Thursday.