The far-left ‘France in Revolt’ party is reportedly threatening to sue a publisher in an attempt to block the release of a book by a Syrian journalist documenting their ties to radical Islamist groups seeking to institute Sharia.
The Plon publisher has reportedly been served legal notices from an attorney representing the La France Insoumise (LFI) party of former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the 74-year-old socialist often compared to Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the United States.
According to Le Point, LFI attorney Mathieu Davy threatened the publisher with a lawsuit over “unfounded remarks and attacks on the honour and reputation of La France Insoumise” in the upcoming Les Complices du mal (The Accomplices of Evil) book by journalist Omar Youssef Souleimane. The party also reportedly demanded an early copy of the book before its release in October to study the accusations against the LFI.
According to a description published by the bookselling website Lisez.com, Souleimane claims to have infiltrated LFI-organised pro-Palestinian demonstrations and associated Palestinian groups and collected testimonies, and documented antisemitic slogans and radical images. It said that the book will seek to expose the “murky alliance of La France insoumise with Islamism, and its project to destabilise French democracy”.
“After months of work and many interviews with party executives, the author reveals the links between some LFI candidates and Islamist projects trying to impose new social norms compatible with Sharia. By setting up a separatist discourse, playing on colonial memory to mobilise part of the French youth, these actors create the conditions for a social confrontation,” the description continued.
The book is further pitched as a “cry of alarm”, warning that the emerging “alliance between the extreme left and political Islam” risks undermining the official secular values of the French republic’s constitution and threatens national cohesion.
In response to the attempts to shut down the publication of his book, Souleimane wrote on X: “I fled the persecutions of the Assad regime in Syria to live freely in the homeland of human rights, and thirteen years later I find myself facing policies that would seek to silence me!”
Former presidential candidate for the centre-right Les Républicains and current President of the Regional Council of Île-de-France, Valérie Pécresse, remarked that the “LFI wants to censor a book about its ties with Islamists. The author Omar Souleimane fled the Syrian dictatorship to find refuge in French democracy. And the Mélenchonist pack wants to silence him? Freedom of expression is not negotiable!”
As with Corbyn in the UK, the Moroccan-born Mélenchon and the LFI have long faced accusations of antisemitism and of cosying up to radical Islamists.
This has paid off for the far-left in recent elections, with Mélenchon winning 69 per cent of Muslims in the 2022 presidential election and the LFI winning 62 per cent of the Muslim vote in last year’s European Parliament elections, in which they focused heavily on the conflict in Gaza.
However, there has been increasing focus on the threat of radical Islamic networks in France following an intelligence report that found the Muslim Brotherhood has conducted a decades-long “Western conquest strategy” by infiltrating institutions in France and across Europe with the ultimate aim of imposing Sharia on the continent.
Mélenchon attempted to downplay the French intelligence report, claiming that it was full of far-right “conspiracy theories” and was “Islamophobic” — a term invented by the Muslim Brotherhood, which the report noted is used by radical Islamists to protect their public legitimacy and to curry favour with the left.
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