This is an interview carried out on the set of the show “L’heure des pros 2” by Pascal Praud on CNews. Guest Monday evening on the continuous news channel, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin discusses the hot topics of the moment. On the menu: the security of France, immigration, but also the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And in this theme comes the case of former Real Madrid footballer Karim Benzema who published a message on Sunday on unjust.”
“We can embrace a Palestinian cause, we can want a Palestinian state without wanting to behead Jewish children on kibbutzim. Mr. Dray (former socialist MP who criticized the 2022 Ballon d’or for its absence of a message aimed at the Israeli victims of the Hamas attacks on October 7) is absolutely right, supports Gérald Darmanin. This is selective emotion. When you have a strong voice like Mr. Benzema, you have a responsibility when you tweet. »
All our prayers for the inhabitants of Gaza who are once again victims of these unjust bombings which spare no women or children.
— Karim Benzema (@Benzema) October 15, 2023
“For several weeks, I have been particularly interested… Mr. Benzema has, as we all know, a notorious connection with the Muslim Brotherhood,” said the Minister of the Interior at the end of the program. We are attacking a hydra that is the Muslim Brotherhood (editor’s note: Islamist organization founded in Egypt) because they give an atmosphere of jihadism, as Gilles Kepel (specialist in Islam and the contemporary Arab world) said. »
Since then, the sequence involving the center forward who joined the Saudi club Al-Ittihad in June has gone viral on social networks. “For several years, we have noted a slow drift in Karim Benzema’s positions towards a hard, rigorous Islam, characteristic of the Brotherhood ideology consisting of disseminating Islamic norms in different spaces of society, particularly in sport,” explains the office of the Ministry of the Interior, contacted by Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui in France this Wednesday.
He is thus accused of having refused to sing the Marseillaise when he was with the French team or of being proselytizing around the Muslim cult on social networks. On the question of the national anthem, which he refused to sing from his first selections at the end of the 2000s, Benzema explained himself several times. The last time in 2018, for Vanity Fair: “If you listen carefully, the Marseillaise calls for war. And I don’t like that,” he said, before asserting that the subject had become a “political matter”.
“A particularly vague signal from an athlete benefiting from such an audience”
Another grievance raised by the cabinet of the Ministry of the Interior, a photo taken with the influential imam of Meaux Nourdine Mamoune, whose home was searched in 2020 as part of the investigation into the assassination of Samuel Paty . This photo, shared by former member of the National Rally Damien Rieu, then went viral, and Karim Benzema filed a complaint for defamation. Although he lost his trial at first instance in September, the footballer appealed.
Finally, the sharing of publications on his social networks – Benzema is followed by 140 million followers on all networks – of the MMA fighter Khabib Nurmagedov, considered by Gérald Darmanin’s team as “a real call to hatred following publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the French press”, are also mentioned.
Elements which, for the office of the Minister of the Interior, do not “relate to legal proceedings, but constitute a particularly vague signal from an athlete benefiting from such an audience”. But which do not prove, as it stands, a “notorious link” between Karim Benzema and the Muslim brothers, as Gérald Darmanin argued on Tuesday evening.
“The Minister of the Interior surely has other information which he does not want to report on this subject,” two majority deputies believe. In May, Gérald Darmanin received the academic and anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who wrote a book dedicated to the Muslim Brotherhood and their networks in January.
As a reminder, Karim Benzema plays today in Al-Ittihad, in Saudi Arabia, a country which considers the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization since 2014. Contacted, Karim Benzema’s advice has not yet responded to our requests on the subject. Senator from Bouches-du-Rhône (Les Républicains) Valérie Boyer demanded in a press release on Wednesday that the former Lyon player be stripped of his Ballon d’Or as well as his French nationality.
