A French law professor has been placed under police protection after referring to religions, including Islam, as “sexually transmitted” during a lecture to around 600 students in October.
The 50-year-old associate professor, who works at Aix-Marseille University (AMU), is alleged to have said both Islam and Judaism are, after a fashion, sexually transmitted.
She said: “One of the biggest problems we have with Islam, and it is not the only one, unfortunately, is that Islam does not recognise freedom of conscience. It’s still absolutely terrifying.”
The French Human Rights League has filed an official criminal complaint for the use of a “racial slur”. Since her identity was revealed, the professor has received death threats and is now under police protection, Le Point reports.
According to a report from broadcaster France Info, she added: “The beheading of a history-geography teacher who said and did what he had the right and the duty to do, comes from there. We have no freedom of conscience in Islam!”
“So if you are born to a Muslim father, you are a Muslim for life. A kind of sexually transmitted religion… It sounds like Judaism. It’s the same. It’s from the mother. A kind of STD, an STR, sexually transmitted religion,” the professor said.
The lecturer referenced the October beheading of teacher Samuel Paty, who was killed by a Chechen refugee in the street after showing cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed to his class during a lesson on freedom of expression.
The professor later defended her comments, saying: “I talked about sexually transmitted religion, not a disease: if you consider that you cannot renounce Islam when you were born into a Muslim family, [that] you are Muslim by the father, and you cannot leave, that makes Islam a sexually transmitted religion, which is not conceivable.”
“There is no blood-borne religion. It is a matter of free will in whatever religion,” she said.
Leaving Islam — apostasy — is a crime punishable by death under Islamic law.
Since the death of Mr Paty, threats against teachers and other Republic officials have “exploded”, according to one judicial source.
In French schools alone, nearly 800 incidents of apologism for terrorism or praising terrorism were reported by the end of November.
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