The imam of Empalot, who had delivered a controversial sermon on the Jews, sentenced to 4 months suspended sentence
Judge 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 question 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 proposals had been misinterpreted, that he had used the controversial text in the form of a prophecy, a kind of warning of what should 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 prayer. “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 issue of freedom of expression and the use of religious texts in faith-based places was also discussed. “The Toulouse Court of Appeal did not sanction the hadith, it did not sanction Islam, it sanctioned the drift of a statement which starts from a hadith which is very subject to interpretation, which is extremely explosive and must be handled with care. Anything can be said in a place of worship, as long as it is said without hatred. The Court of Appeal has put an end to this kind of false ingenuity in this type of speech where we take refuge behind religious texts to come and explain to us that we have decontextualized, that we have misunderstood when there were explicit references to terrorist leaders in the Palestinian territory”, reacted this Wednesday Jacques Samuel, lawyer of the Ben Gurion association which filed a civil action.
An opinion that does not share Jean Iglésis, counsel to Imam Tataiat, whose intention is already to appeal to the Supreme Court. “He considers that he has not committed any reprehensible act and the remarks he made come essentially from the reading of a text which is part of the corpus of Islam. And therefore, incriminating this reading can pose a major problem for all religions. There are sacred texts that can be translated as appeals to hatred: should we no longer be able to read them in the pulpit or in the context of preaching, it is a real social issue. The Republic must respect the principle of freedom of worship, secularism and freedom of opinion”, explained at the end of the deliberation hearing the lawyer of the imam of Empalot, also condemned to pay several thousand euros in damages to the various civil parties.