“The Toulouse criminal court on Tuesday acquitted an imam charged with “incitement to racial hatred” after he spread a sermon in Arabic on social networks in 2017.
The prosecution had demanded a six-month suspended prison sentence at the end of June because the speech by Mohamed Tataïat, the imam of the Great Mosque of Toulouse, had contained “anti-Semitic stereotypes”.
“The court does not see in the remarks of Mohamed Tataïat any intention to incite hatred or discrimination,” the court president said. “The remarks may have been careless, but not with the intention to discriminate,” he stressed.
One of the imam’s lawyers, Jean Iglesis, welcomed the court’s recognition of “the personality of Mr Tataïat, a peaceful and moderate imam who has been preaching in Toulouse for 30 years and has always maintained close and friendly relations with all religious communities”.
The Toulouse prosecutor’s office had initiated an investigation in 2018 after having in its possession a video showing Imam Tataïat preaching to worshippers in Arabic.
In the text translated in the course of the investigation, the Imam quotes a hadith which says: “The Day of Judgement will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, the Jew will hide behind the tree and the stone, and the tree and the stone will say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him'”.
Almost a dozen associations had joined as civil parties. During the trial, Me Michaël Bendavid, speaking for the NGO Licra, had argued that Tataïat had ” deliberately chosen his sermon “, condemning in particular the allusion to the ” martyr ” Ahmed Yassine. ” It is the intention to quote a person in charge of a terrorist movement, namely Hamas, without any critical distance “, he said.
This imam was sent to France by the Algerian Ministry of Religious Affairs, which paid him first in the Grand Mosque of Paris from 1985 to 1986 and then in Toulouse in 1987.