France sentences to 4-6 months in prison those who harassed a teenage girl for criticizing Islam

The French Justice this Wednesday sentenced eleven people to between four and six months in prison for having participated in cyberbullying against a teenager who had criticized Islam in vulgar terms.

The condemned, between 18 and 29 years old, will not have to enter prison and remain on probation, but the sentence sends a warning to those who launch harassment and hate campaigns on the Internet.

Ten of those convicted were for harassment on the internet;

another for death threats.

One of the 13 defendants was acquitted for lack of evidence and another escaped conviction for a procedural flaw.

More information

• Mila, a year hidden by the Islamist threat in France

• A lie activated the gear for the assassination of French professor Samuel Paty

“We have won and we will win again,” Mila, the victim of harassment and threats, celebrated after leaving the Paris Court.

"I thank (...) the feminists who have supported me, and I feel sorry for the others, whom I do not consider feminists."

Mila resides today in an unknown place and is under police protection, which makes her "a 17-year-old Salman Rushdie [she has already turned 18]", as her lawyer, Richard Malka, said a few months ago, in reference to the writer. on which Ayatollah Khomeini launched a death sentence in 1989 when he considered his novel

The Satanic Verses

blasphemous

.

Malka was also the lawyer for the satirical weekly

Charlie Hebdo

in the trial last fall for the January 2015 attack, in which two jihadists entered the newsroom and killed ten journalists, cartoonists and employees.

For some, Mila is a symbol of freedom of expression in France - freedom that includes the right to mock a religion and to blaspheme - and a victim of a campaign of sexist and fundamentalist intimidation.

She has not shied away from the spotlight: she fearlessly exposes her ideas and has just published her first book,

Je suis le prix de votre liberté

(I am the price of your freedom).

For others, she is nothing more than “a disrespectful adolescent”, as the former socialist candidate for the presidency of France Ségolène Royal put it, or a young woman “instrumentalized” by adults for political purposes, according to Juan Branco, lawyer for one of the defendants.

It all started in January 2020 when, during a live video on the social network Instagram, she discussed with another girl her preferences in terms of women and said that Arab women were not her type.

Someone began to insult and treat them, "in the name of Allah", as "dirty racists" and "dirty lesbians", to which she replied: "I hate religion, the Koran is a religion of hatred, Islam is shit" .

And: "I'll stick my finger in your ass with your god."

An avalanche of death threats was then unleashed, a total of 100,000, according to Malka.

Since then, Mila has had to change schools twice and the police protect her day and night.

Professor Paty's case

In November, Mila re-posted a message with a reference to Allah, and another storm broke out. It was inconceivable to take these threats lightly after the beheading in October, at the hands of an Islamist, of Samuel Paty, the high school teacher who in his classes had shown some cartoons of Muhammad published in the weekly

Charlie Hebdo

. A law adopted in 2018 strengthened protection against so-called "herd harassment" on social media.

The defendants did not belong to any terrorist organization, the majority had no prior records, among them were eleven atheists and Catholics and two Muslims.

During the trial, on June 21 and 22, they alleged that they had sent their messages without thinking, that they did so without being aware that Mila was being the victim of a massive campaign of harassment.

"Let it bust", "you deserve to be slaughtered, you dirty whore", "please someone crush his skull", some of these messages said.

"The social network is the street," Judge Michaël Humbert told those convicted when issuing the verdict.

“When you come across someone on the street, you refrain from insulting him, threatening him, laughing at him.

What they would not do on the street, do not do on social networks ”.