PARIS (Dispatches) – On July 9, Francois Burgat, a prominent French expert on political Islam and pro-Palestine activist, spent eight hours in police custody at the Aix-en-Provence station in the south of France.
Burgat, whose expertise is widely sought after, was detained concerning a complaint filed for “apology for terrorism”, a charge which involves defending or positively portraying terrorist acts.
The complaint was filed by the European Jewish Organization (Organisation Juive Europeen), a French NGO made up of around 60 volunteer lawyers that fight against antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Burgat is accused of reposting a statement by the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas on X last January, which refuted allegations of sexual violence against Israelis during the October 7 operation, as reported by The New York Times.
Following backlash over his retweet, Burgat, a former research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), posted that he had “infinitely more respect and consideration for the leaders of Hamas than for those of Israel”.
A few days after his police questioning, Burgat, now retired, told Middle East Eye that his perspective on terrorism aligns “the same as the one made in his day by General de Gaulle”.
In November 1967, Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, declared: “Israel is setting up in the territories it has captured an occupation that will inevitably involve oppression, repression and expulsions and a resistance to this occupation is forming, which Israel in turn classes as terrorism.”
A group of academics voiced their concern over Burgat’s police detention in a letter published on 12 July.
“Until recently, Francois Burgat’s expertise on questions relating to ‘terrorism’ was sought by institutions such as the National Assembly, the Senate, the NATO military command and even the anti-terrorism court in Paris,” the authors wrote.
“This transition from expert to suspect testifies to the bad wind blowing in France against rights and freedoms, in particular against the freedoms of research and expression.”
Social scientist Hicham Benaissa, one of the signatories, expressed his concerns to MEE.
“We must be extremely vigilant because academic freedom says a lot about the democratic state of a society, its capacity to accept contradiction and disagreements, even the most radical ones,” he said.
“History has taught us that when a society moves to a more authoritarian regime, it quickly attacks academia and particularly social sciences, which are not sciences like others since their mission is to produce critical discourses on society.”