SAWT BEIRUT INTERNATIONAL

| 28 March 2024, Thursday |

Suspended terms sought for alleged harassment of French teen over anti-Islam video

A French prosecutor on Tuesday called for suspended prison terms for 12 people on trial for online harassment, including death threats, against a teenage girl who was placed under police protection after posting anti-Islam rants on social media.

The treatment of Mila, who was forced to change schools over her expletive-laden videos, caused an outcry and fuelled a debate about the right to offend religious beliefs.

“The Quran is filled with nothing but hate, Islam is a shitty religion,” the teen said in the first post on Instagram in January 2020. She was 16 at the time.

She posted a second video in November, this time on TikTok, after the extremist killing of high school teacher Samuel Paty, who had shown students controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed.

The reactions to the video lambasting “your mate Allah” were swift and virulent.

“You deserve to have your throat cut,” read one.

Mila was placed under police protection along with her family in Villefontaine, a town outside Lyon in southeast France.

Even President Emmanuel Macron came to her defense, saying that “the law is clear. We have the right to blaspheme, to criticize and to caricature religions.”

Investigators eventually identified 13 people from several French regions aged 18 to 30 and charged them with online harassment, with some also accused of threatening death or other criminal acts.

The prosecutor in the trial asked on Tuesday for the charges against one of the accused to be dropped because of lack of evidence, but said the remaining 12 deserved a “warning punishment”.

Those guilty of online harassment should get three months suspended, he said, rising to six months suspended for those who also issued death threats.

Early in the trial, Mila’s lawyer Richard Malka said that she “received more than 100,000 hateful messages and death threats promising to have her trussed up, cut up, quartered, beheaded, with images of coffins or doctored pictures of her decapitation.”

France’s defense of the right to mock religion and its crackdown on religious extremists have sparked protests in several Muslim countries, where the French have been accused of stigmatizing Islam.

    Source:
  • alarabiya