Tried last May for “provocation and incitement to racial hatred”, Mohamed Tataiat, the imam of the Empalot mosque, was sentenced to four months in prison suspended on Wednesday by the Toulouse Court of Appeal. A judgment which goes against that pronounced last year by the judicial court which had acquitted the religious of Algerian nationality, considering that there was no desire for provocation, nor a discriminating thought on his part.
“There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”. It is in particular this sentence, taken from an old hadith, and pronounced at the end of 2017 to address the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which led to this imam being tried twice by French justice . In his sermon, broadcast on social networks, evokes the intense tensions in the Middle East when the American president at the time, Donald Trump, had just announced that he was going to move the United States embassy from Tel- Aviv to Jerusalem.
At the helm, Mohamed Tataiat, explained that his remarks had been misinterpreted, that he had used the controversial text in the form of a prophecy, a kind of warning of what must not happen. A faithful had come to support the words of his imam, recalling that he was considered a moderate, vilified by the Salafist Muslims of Toulouse.
A position that the civil parties and the Attorney General of the Court of Appeal, Franck Rastoul, had denounced, emphasizing that it was not the quotation of the hadith alone which was an incitement to hatred, but the whole discourse held in the sermon. “The meaning and scope of the subject are unequivocal: to kill the Jews. The responsibility of the State is to prevent incitement to hatred, provocation, murder,” said the representative of the public prosecutor.
Debate around holy texts
The question of freedom of expression and the use of religious texts in confessional places was also during the debates. “Can a court today be authorized to define what should be read and what should not be? It’s no. Especially since the legislator has considered the subject by imagining the prohibition of certain texts. It was never submitted because the principle of secularism arose. The law does not prohibit the reading of a text which is part of the corpus of a religion”, had justified in May by Mohamed Tataiat, Me Jean Iglésis. The Court of Appeal ruled against him.