Charlie Hebdo journalist Zineb El Rhazoui has received rape and death threats for saying “Islam must submit to criticism”.
The journalist, who has lived under police protection since a number of her colleagues at the satirical magazine were murdered by radical Islamic terrorist for satirising the Prophet Mohammed, said she has received “Insults, racist insults, [and] threats of death or rape” since she insisted: “Islam must submit to criticism, submit to humor, submit to the laws of the Republic, submit to French law.”
“I have not changed my mind since,” she added defiantly in an interview with the Europe 1 radio station.
“I think that have not only the right to just say these things, but I think that in the current context, I also have the duty, because unfortunately, many voices have given way to the intellectual terror that is trying to impose this wall of silence on us,” explained the French-Moroccan.
Speaking to Le Figaro about the situation, Professor Laurent Bouvet, of the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, suggested El Rhazoui’s treatment was a consequence of hosting Islamic radicals who “do not accept the secularisation of society and secularism as a regulatory principle.”
“They are unable to think of their faith in a world where it does not produce law… a significant part of the Muslims living in France today do not accept to put the law of the Republic before the law of God,” he warned.
Professor Bouvet also criticised the academic and media establishment for coddling Islam and affording it a certain privileged status.
“If Zineb El Rhazoui would have been threatened for criticising Judaism or Christianity, she would have been immediately defended, rightly, by those who are silent today because it is about Islam… This place apart reserved for Islam leads to permanently assigning to Muslims, in a collective and essentialised way, the role of victims,” he observed.
“The idea of suspending any critical reason, any feminist consideration, any humanism or universalism as soon as it is Islam or Muslims can only lead to the worst,” he added.
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