by Giulio Meotti
A famous Algerian academic, Saïd Djabelkhir, was sentenced to three years in prison by a court in Algiers for “insulting the precepts of Islam”. It has never happened before. His lawyer said he was “shocked”. “It is a struggle that must continue for freedom of conscience, opinion and expression,” said the academician after the sentence. “It is a non-negotiable struggle,”
Djabelkhir had criticized some practices such as the marriage of prepubescent girls and actions of Saudi Arabia (“since 1979 they have spent $ 64 billion to propagate Islamic fundamentalism,” he said).
“The fundamentalists want to intimidate all intellectuals who have the audacity to have opinions outside the orthodoxy, from the doxa that we are used to hearing on television channels or in sermons, they are trying to stifle freedom of expression by all means,” Djabelkhir explained to Le Figaro before the trial.
From Erdogan’s Turkey, which has the world record for jailed journalists and writers, to Saudi Arabia, where liberal writers are whipped in the streets, Islamic regimes have been engaged in suppressing dissent for years.
In Algeria in the 1990s, dozens of intellectuals were murdered by terrorists. The great novelist Tahar Djaout was killed with two point-blank bullets as he left the house. The novelist Lâadi Flici was killed with pen in hand. The playwright Abdelkader Alloula, director of the Oran theater and interpreter of Gogol, took three bullets in the head. The writer Youcef Sebti was slaughtered at home and on the bedside table he still had the drafts of his latest novel, “Les illusions fertiles”.
Psychiatrist Mahfoud Boucebci was stabbed to death at the entrance to his hospital in Algiers. Sociologist Mohamed Boukhobza was tied up and slaughtered in front of his daughter.
Their stories were collected at the time in a book called Red Ink. Not to mention what happened in other countries, like Mohammed Taha, the only anti-fundamentalist intellectual in Sudan, who was hanged in the streets in 1985 for protesting against the adoption of Sharia law; to the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda, famous for his critical articles and sharp satire on Islamic fundamentalism, killed by the Muslim Brotherhood; and many others like them.
Instead of “dialogue,” thereby legitimizing the representatives of “moderate Islam,” a label that often hides the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations that are enemies of freedom behind double-breasted suits and reassuring speeches, Europe should launch campaigns of solidarity and protection for these heroes.
Before they kill them all.
And instead of capitulating to the “Islamophobia” witch hunt orchestrated by the Islamists.