This is the story of a live explosion. On February 16, 2017, Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Saïd Abdallah, two young authors who worked for the suburban media Bondy-Blog and France Inter radio, present their novel Minute in the show The Great Library, on France 5. An important moment for the two young men. “Spoiled”, so to speak in the second, by the revelation, on social networks, of an uninterrupted series of hateful tweets from the hand of Mehdi Meklat. Anti-Semites, sexists, homophobes, many of the incriminated tweets date back to 2012 and are signed with a nickname, Marcellin Deschamps, a nod to the artist Marcel Duchamp.
The year 2012 is important. It is that of the attacks in Toulouse and Montauban committed by Mohamed Merah. And for a politicized fringe of the suburbs, what I call the “party of the suburbs”, committed to the left and for Islam in its identity form, these attacks are a disaster. They can ruin so much effort.
Since the suburban riots of 2005, the year of creation of the Indigènes de la République, a narrative has taken hold among the second generation of North African and sub-Saharan immigration, that of racism and Islamophobia of State, the opposite face of which would be “state philo-Semitism”.
Exhausting dilemmas
This story, minus the philo-Semitism, most of the headlines of the left-wing press, in search of a position as one would say of a job in the theater, are ready, if not to adopt it, at least to relay it. . If the Mohamed Merah attacks are indicative of anything, it can only be serious dysfunctions in French society. If only these killings had been the work of the ultra-right, some seemed to hope, against the evidence: would the ultra-right have killed French soldiers, whether they were black or Arab?
At the same time, the suburban party takes refuge in denial, conspiracy and cynicism. As with the twin towers of New York eleven years earlier, the state would have let the worst happen in order to smear Muslims. Tweets, which are not those of Marcellin Deschamps, spread in insinuations.
Despite the anger and sadness that I feel in the face of this refusal to enter into the matter, I understand it. I would have liked the Bondy-Blogthe media of which I was the editor-in-chief from 2009 to 2011, horrified by these acts and having condemned them like the rest of France, seizes the “bottom of the problem”, that is to say its banality: anti-Semitism in the suburbs (which does not have a monopoly on it), resentment, exhausting dilemmas, unlived but reconstructed memories of the Algerian war and all the colonial conflicts.
“dominant-dominated”
But I understand his restraint. This reality is too hard, too knotted, too embarrassing too. It is an obstacle to dreams of ascension. The old “dominant-dominated” reading grid will once again make it possible to evacuate inner torments. To do a work of introspection, we, the victims of social and racist discrimination? Faced with the rantings of Republican notability, the suburban party replies with “no justice, no peace” which is as much an observation as a warning.
On February 16, 2017, François Busnel, the host of The Great Library, does he notice? His tray exudes embarrassment. Facing Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Saïd Abdallah, Kamel Daoud and Philippe Val. Kamel Daoud is this Algerian writer warning against the dangers of Islamism and whose hard-hitting analyzes demystify Arab societies. For the party of the suburbs, Islamism is a false problem, a diversion aiming to hide social difficulties aggravated by racism, a maneuver to prevent the second generation from organizing the Muslim worship as it sees fit. Kamel Daoud is an accomplice of the colonial and bourgeois state.
As for the former director of Charlie Hebdo and ex-boss of France Inter Philippe Val, who comes to talk about his book Hide this identity that I cannot seean ode to the Judeo-Greek contribution to the West sounding here like a provocation, he may be remembering an unfortunate article published in the Bondy-Blog in 2013, in which he was accused of writing Charlie Hebdoon the one hand, to have been moved by the words of a rapper calling for an auto-da-fé against the weekly, on the other hand, to have made tons of them after the arson attack which had destroyed its premises in 2011. As he spoke that evening to viewers as much as to Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Saïd Abdallah seated next to him, was Philippe Val already aware of the tweets?
Dieudonne years
We could, as is the case with Laurent Cantet’s film inspired by this case, Arthur Ramboreleased this Wednesday, February 2 in theaters, favor a reading centered on the misdeeds of social networks and the phenomenon of “class defectors”, Mehdi Meklat being from a socially disadvantaged background. These dimensions are important, but they should not hide the ideological context prevailing at the time in this sociological block that is the “suburb”.
The “Marcellin Deschamps” years are crazy years. Those of complete unreason. From an “everything is permitted” on this left front mixed with a halal standard out of its traditional gangue. Whether or not to believe in God is not the point. Only the bearer identity counts. Spartacus is then Muslim, and facing him stands an unjust and decadent state.
This is the time when Dieudonné weaves together his anti-Semitic provocations and his denunciation of pedophilia in the face of an audience that we will see again here and there in the demonstrations of the yellow vests, associating the “suburbs” and the “periphery “, an electorate coveted by both Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen.
“Islamo-Christianity”
This is the time when the anti-Semite Alain Soral, an accomplice of Dieudonné, tries to substitute an “Islamo-Christianity” for “Judeo-Christianity” by making fun of Muslims.
This is the time when the CCIF, the Collective against Islamophobia in France, dissolved at the end of 2020 under the “separatism” law, moving from leftism to Salafism and from Salafism to leftism, turns against the communist mayor of Gennevilliers . The latter dared to require monitors paid by the municipality to eat and hydrate during a summer camp under the sign of sport and whose dates partly coincide with Ramadan in July 2012.
It was the time when people were scandalized by the second generation of spotlights shone on Imam Chalghoumi, whose corny accent reminded some of the hesitant French of parents of whom they had been ashamed as children, but where pays little attention to the intrigues of Abdelhakim Sefrioui, author, then, of intimidation in the pure Islamist tradition against the same Chalghoumi, Sefrioui indicted in June 2021 for complicity in the assassination of Professor Samuel Paty.
Between The good ones and Everything that shines
This context, full of hubris and recklessness, cannot be dissociated from Mehdi Meklat’s tweets. On the other hand, how not to see, under the sadism of these verbal outbursts, the expression of frustrations? An inferiority complex that grows as the claimant enters the Parisian milieu? Does he feel up to it? Does he suffer from a feeling of imposture? Does he tell himself that he has everything to gain by playing the suburban moralist rather than hoping for a place in the world, which would require of him all the work of catching up? A former editor-in-chief of a women’s magazine, who watched over “Mehdi and Badrou” like a mother over her children, had begged them not to abandon their studies. They hadn’t listened to her.
The trajectory of Mehdi and Badrou could at this precise moment have been somewhere between The good onesthe drama of Jean Genet, and Everything that shinesthe comedy by Géraldine Nakache and Hervé Mimran, where the return to square one threatens at every moment.
As if taken from a masochistic headlong rush, left-wing titles will extol tall teenagers who will make them see all the colors. Mehdi and Badrou, whom I knew pleasant and sometimes insolent, eaters of “bearded men” in their beginnings at the Bondy Blog, tackling Tariq Ramadan, become icons of diversity, representatives of the suburbs, brands that are displayed in the front page with Christiane Taubira.
The tweets oozed envy
In Autopsy, the book where he apologizes for his tweets as much as he tries to explain himself, we learn that Mehdi Meklat, who one day introduced his father to me when we happened to meet on avenue de Saint-Ouen, in Paris, has a whole French and provincial section on his mother’s side. If there is imposture, it is in this way of embodying the exceptional, where normality reigns. It is all part of the misfortune of diversity to have been considered as apart and as in need of special treatment. But it is another part of his misfortune to have been kept and to have stood aside.
The tweets signed Marcellin Deschamps oozed envy. Their anti-Semitism was that glimpsed elsewhere, in other hopes for “diversity”, in other tweets of “youth”, before recognition, as if the Jews were an obstacle, when the cinema, this enjoyable place of appearance, showed quite the opposite. True that it took time, too much time, for black and Arab actors to get on stage and be visible on the screen. Islam, in all this? What Islam? Muslims? Which Muslims? Simply individuals.