He dared to testify and is already paying the price. Public law lawyer Amine Elbahi was featured in Zone Interdite’s latest report entitled “Face au danger de l’Islam radical, les réponses de l’État” (Faced with the danger of radical Islam, the state’s responses). The programme Zone Interdite, broadcast on M6 on Sunday 23 January, focused on the city of Roubaix (northern France) where “a small radicalised minority rejects the laws of the Republic”. In it, Amine Elbahi denounces a growing communitarianism that could well tip towards fundamentalism. The day after the documentary was broadcast, the 25-year-old lawyer, who grew up in Roubaix, was a guest on BFMTV. He stated that he had been threatened with death.
“My phone number was circulating on social media”, he explained, and went on to say that “several calls for my murder were spread”. Amine Elbahi continued to journalists Alain Marschall and Olivier Truchot: “I’m threatened with beheading, with having my throat slit, with attacks on me for speaking the truth face to face, and especially about the inaction of the mayor of my municipality.” On CNews, he also reported on Morandini Live the same day that he was “accused of publicly denouncing the mayor of Roubaix and the excesses of radical Islamists”. He added: “Between the filming date of the programme in 2020 and the broadcast date yesterday, I was the subject of several complaints from the mayor of Roubaix and his entourage for defamation.” Complaints that “were stopped without consequence”, he assures. Amine Elbahi complained that they wanted to “silence him” and that they had been “sweeping the dirt under the carpet for 30 years”, which had led to “this disastrous situation”.
Despite the threats, however, this did not stop him from referring to “Salafists who call to segregate themselves from society and not to vote” and denouncing the “import of a political Islam that influences political decisions through associations and movements”. “This radical Islam has established itself because of the inaction of a number of elected representatives,” he said on BFMTV. Before concluding: “Almost all Muslims in this country respect the values of the republic and love this country.”
In a film sequence for Zone Interdite, the young man from Roubaix at the wheel of his car showed Rue de Lannoy. It is “one of the biggest streets because it leads to the city centre”, as Amine Elbahi reports. In this street there are “five, six halal butcher shops”, an oriental spa, “Islamic bookshops”, but also ready-to-wear shops where “the full-body veil, the niqab, is sold”. His conclusion is alarming: “It is an invitation to segregate oneself from the national community and to join a more rigorous practice of Islam.”
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