A French blasphemer?
Mila (Television Monte Carlo)
With her purple hair and dreams of becoming a singer, 16-year-old Mila spends hours in her room live-streaming from Grenoble to her hundreds of followers on Instagram.
The French teenager is happy to reveal her face and her sexual orientation, and say what’s on her mind. In January, she summoned up a firestorm of hate and accusations of homophobia when she said that she “was not really into Arab and black women”.
The hate campaign, much of it centred around religion and her apparent blasphemy, just got her blood up. In another defiant video posted on her social media stream, she declared: “I hate religion, the Koran is a religion of hate. There is only hatred in it! Islam is shit, your religion is shit.”
Mila miscalculated the risks of her honesty. Death threats and insults rained down on her at a rate of around 200 messages per minute. The situation was considered so serious that she was taken out of school and she and her family placed under police protection.
Her widely shared video has reignited an explosive debate on free speech and sparked a nationwide philosophical crisis. Five years after wondering if they “were Charlie” — the question that was asked after the terrorist attack on the satirical news magazine Charlie Hebdo five years ago — French people are now asking themselves: Are we Mila?
France formally separated the institution of the Church from the State in 1905, implementing a “laïcité” that would eventually be enshrined in the Constitution. This doesn’t, however, oblige anyone to be tolerant.
Over the last few decades, France has struggled with the minority populations of its former colonies. Although claiming its Enlightenment heritage, the country is periodically enmeshed in controversies surrounding religion and minority cultures, probably most notably on the veil.
The first official reaction to Mila’s controversy was to blame her. Nicole Belloubet, the Justice Minister, said, while condemning cyberbullying, that Mila’s anti-religion rant was “clearly an infringement on freedom of conscience” — which it was not.
French statute books do not have an offence of blasphemy; precedent was set in 2002, when the French novelist Michel Houellebecq was cleared of incitement to racial hatred charges after calling Islam “the most stupid religion”. His acquittal means he avoided up to a year in prison and a €45,000 fine.
Similar charges against Mila have already been dropped but the debate on freedom of speech continues. Some insist there should be no self-censorship on Islam, and that any other option would be a cultural regression after France spent centuries ensuring that religious belief is optional.
On the other hand, Mohammed Moussaoui, President of the French Council for Muslim Worship (CFCM), has said that criticism of Islam is “often used as a way to justify exclusion and segregation“ of Muslims in French society. Around 40 per cent of French Muslims say they have experienced racist attacks, according to a survey last year. In consequence, wrote Moussaoui, in a response to the controversy, Muslims in France “should sue every time the border is crossed between freedom of expression and will to offend”.
Mila’s case is interesting because, as a young lesbian woman, she is seen both as a victim and an offender of Muslims. (The general delegate of the CFCM Abdallah Zekri said the death threats that she had received were her own fault.)
For weeks, politicians and organisations stayed silent. Eventually, the Senate leader of the main right-wing party, Bruno Retailleau, applauded the teenager for speaking out about “this political Islam, which is trampling our values”.
Former socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal also supported Mila’s freedom of speech but stressed she shouldn’t become “a paragon of freedom of expression” because of her lack of “respect, manners and knowledge”.
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen also, perhaps predictably, weighed into the controversy, breaking a long media silence to come to Mila’s defence. “Mila had more courage than the entire political class in power for the past 30 years,” she wrote on Twitter.
Is Mila a standard-bearer for freedom of speech? During her sole TV interview since the controversy blew up, she said she didn’t regret her words, apologised “a little bit” to people who might have been hurt, and explained: “I never wanted to target human beings. I only wanted to blaspheme, to talk about a religion and say what I thought.”
