Demonstration in Paris for the murder of Professor Samuel Paty, on October 18.CHARLES PLATIAU / Reuters
A French teenager has lived in hiding for more than a year and under the threat of torture, rape and death for having dedicated thick words to the Muslim religion.
Her name is Mila and she is 17 years old.
He likes to write, sing and put on makeup.
In a recent interview in the weekly
Le Point
, she explains that she suffers from attention deficit disorder, defines herself as pansexual and declares herself addicted to social networks.
In one of them, Instagram, she sometimes shows her face with fantasy makeup;
others, from a horror movie.
In this social network began the nightmare that has led her to change schools twice and live under the permanent protection of the police.
His case shows the risk that the right to blaspheme can carry in the homeland of the Enlightenment and human rights.
In France, it is not an anecdotal risk.
Six years ago, journalists and cartoonists for the weekly
Charlie Hebdo
were shot dead for publishing cartoons of Muhammad.
And last fall, an Islamist beheaded high school teacher Samuel Paty for showing these pictures in a class on freedom of expression.
“I hate religion, the Quran is a religion of hate, Islam is bullshit,” Mila, whose last name has not been disclosed, said during a heated discussion in a video on Instagram on January 18, 2020.
The discussion had started when, in the same social network, Mila and another girl commented on their preferences regarding women and they agreed that Arab women were not their style.
Someone started insulting them and treating them, "in the name of Allah", as "dirty racists" and "dirty lesbians", as Mila would later recall.
The exchange led to a verbal fight over religion.
Mila, in the crude and provocative language of other network users, expressed her point of view on Islam.
His life turned upside down.
Mila is subjected to a daily bombardment of death threats, more than 50,000 since, according to her lawyer, Richard Malka, who is also
Charlie Hebdo's
lawyer
.
“What this girl did was nothing more than exercise her right to criticize religion.
He never spoke racist words.
He only used words a little vulgar, as a teenager, "Malka explained a few weeks ago to EL PAÍS and other media.
"A 17-year-old Salman Rushdie has been created," he added, alluding to the death sentence that fell on the author of
The Satanic Verses
, against whom Ayatollah Khomeini launched a fatwa in 1989 by judging that the book was a blasphemy against the Islam.
At first, Mila's words and the campaign of harassment against her caused discomfort among some commentators and politicians.
There was a division between those who proclaimed
I am Mila
and those who replied
I am not Mila
.
“A young woman who may still be in the crisis of adolescence, if she had said the same about her teachers, about her parents, her neighbor, about her friend, what would we have said?
We would have said: 'A little respect! ”, Said the former socialist minister Ségolène Royal, who in 2007 was a candidate for the presidency of the Republic.
Royal regretted that a disrespectful adolescent was "set up as a model for freedom of expression."
Mila has already changed schools twice.
First, he left the one he frequented in the Lyon region, his place of residence, until January 2020.
Later he went to a military institute, from which he had to leave when it was revealed that he was studying there.
Now she is attending school at home.
"How to live with police officers at this age?
Minimal displacements must be avoided.
Always be accompanied.
How do you combine this with a life as a teenager? ”Says lawyer Malka.
"And think about your mother, who sees threats to her daughter every day: 'We will rape you, we will tear you apart.'
It is a cataclysm ”, he adds about this case.
When asked what she advises Mila, the lawyer replies: “I think she cannot be sentenced to silence for life.
I can live without social media.
A teenager, no.
We cannot make it disappear, it has done nothing. "
And he adds that, as in the case of the cartoons in the satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo
, there are those who tend to point out that nobody sent them to get into trouble by messing with this religion.
"Yes.
It is said: 'It is their fault'.
But if nobody claims our rights, they disappear.
If no one exercises religious criticism, it disappears.
Why shouldn't I say what I want about God and religion?
In the name of what should I respect the idea that 70 virgins await the kamikazes?
Can't I make fun of it? ”Says the lawyer.
Last August, Mila traveled to Malta to take a language course, according to
Le Point
.
One night, while dining with a colleague, a guy came up to her and asked if she was Mila.
"Yes," she replied.
He asked her if she was proud of what she had done.
"Yes, very proud," she said.
The guy threatened to strangle her, according to the teenager.
He was arrested and sentenced to one year in prison.
Last November, a 23-year-old man was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for pretending on Facebook that he cut Mila's throat and for threatening her.
Half a hundred cases are in the hands of the courts, explains lawyer Malka.
And remember that, even in the periods that Mila has been absent from the networks, the threats have not abated.
“It is January 18, 2021 and today I have been harassed on the Internet for a year and I run the risk of dying with my throat slit every day in the real world.
A year in which I have learned that my life will never be the same again, "Mila wrote on Twitter on the day that commemorated a year since the beginning of her private confinement, imposed not by the pandemic, but by the danger of an attack.
And he added: "But give the vodka, we have to celebrate!"
The dilemma of calling a Samuel Paty school
The news broke a few days after an Islamist beheaded Professor Samuel Paty as he left the school where he taught history and geography in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, near Paris.
The administrative department of Yvelines, where this municipality of 35,000 inhabitants is located, proposed to rename the Bois d'Aulne school, its current name, by Samuel Paty school.
The name change must go through the educational center, the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine municipal council and the Yvelines departmental council, a process that may conclude in April, explains a department spokeswoman.The school where Paty taught is not the only one of the 60,000 educational centers in France that, after the teacher's murder on October 16, considered changing their names.
In some cases, no problem has arisen.
In others, such as the nursery school in Cap d'Ail, in the Alpes-Maritimes department, the initiative raised doubts among some families.
They feared that renaming the school would place it in the crosshairs of the jihadists and force it to install strict security measures to protect itself.
The mayor, the conservative Xavier Beck, has declared that he will uphold the decision to rename the school, according to Marianne magazine. The most striking case, so far, has been that of the Los Eucaliptus school in Ollioules, a municipality of 13,000 inhabitants in the south from France.
The mayor, also conservative Robert Beneventi, proposed to rename the center Samuel Paty.
The school consulted teachers, parents and students.
100% of teachers, 89% of parents and 69% of students opposed, according to the public broadcaster France Bleu.
Beneventi withdrew the proposal.
“It is the general state of mind in our country.
It is the cowardice that reigns today, and it is worrying, "said the mayor.
Sandra Olivier, a math teacher and representative of the SNES union, declared herself in favor of paying tribute to Paty, but considered that renaming the school was not a good idea, according to France Bleu.
"He was targeting us and we don't need him," Olivier said.
"It's taking a risk that could be avoided," he added.
