Great Replacement: Renaud Camus files a complaint against minister

It was one of the highlights of the face to face meeting between Éric Zemmour and Marlène Schiappa on Monday, February 10 on CNews.

The Secretary of State for Gender Equality had said that we had “found on the killer of Christchurch a manual called The Great Replacement” inspired by the Great Replacement by Renaud Camus. She took the opportunity to accuse the latter of “blowing on the embers of hate” and therefore to have indirectly allowed this attack which left 51 dead and 49 injured in two New Zealand mosques.

Renaud Camus announced on Twitter that he had filed a complaint against her for these ludicrous comments.

“Me Rimokh [his lawyer, ed.] and I have just filed a complaint against Ms. Marlène Schiappa for defamation and endangering the lives of others. She has amalgamated my book with the brochure of the same title of the killer of Christchurch, not inspired by him but by the observation of the same evidence,” tweeted the writer, on Wednesday, February 12.

Shortly after the broadcast of Face à l’Info, he defended himself on Twitter. “Marlene Schiappa claims that the killer from Christchurch had my book on him. It’s a serious defamation, it confuses it with the killer’s brochure, ‘The Great Replacement’, which has nothing to do with it. Given the customs of the occupant, it is also a danger to the lives of others,” he wrote.

On Thursday, February 13, his lawyer Yohann Rimokh also responded on this issue. “How can one proffer such things when one is a minister? How can we seriously confuse the manifesto of ten rudimentary and abject pages of a terrorist and the book of Renaud Camus, several hundred pages thick, all entirely based on the love of this country, innocence, non-nuisance and non-violence?” he said in particular.

Rimokh added that the concept of Grand Replacement was too often diverted from its original purpose. A lawyer does not normally have to make pleas to the media as courtrooms are made for such things, but sometimes it just is too much as the minister maintained that the Christchurch terrorist had wanted to pay a morbid tribute to the Renaud Camus. “You just have to live in 21st century France; its political and media scene is a menagerie in full dementia,” said Rimokh.

When the complaint was announced, Marlène Schiappa also reacted on Twitter. Except that the secretary of state, as often during her debate against Éric Zemmour, missed the point completely. “‘We can no longer say anything’ says the far right to the media, pretending that their opponents are procedural censors,” she quipped. “The result: Renaud Camus is the one to file a complaint against me for daring to contradict his racist theory of the Great Replacement. Take off the masks!” She continued.

In doing so, she completely ignored the reason for the complaint against her, which is not aimed at any “censorship” but rather serious defamatory remarks against an author whom she tried to implicate in a terrorist attack.

During their confrontation, the secretary of state was also surprised that the columnist Zemmour told her that Mohammed was an “Islamic” first name. She claimed that “this was not the debate”.

Days after the confrontation on CNews between Zemmour and Schiappa, the debate is still raging in France. On Twitter, the Secretary of State for Gender Equality also returned to a particular sequence when her interlocutor told her that Mohammed was an “Islamic” first name , because “it comes from the Quran” . She had seemed particularly surprised by this statement.

On Wednesday, February 12, she replied, on Twitter, to a user, LGBT activist named Mehdi, who explained to her that she was “wrong” and that Mohammed was indeed an “Islamic first name” given that “it is of the first name of the Prophet of Islam Muhammad”.

“It’s not the debate,” retorted Schiappa, because, for her, “the debate is: does your first name indicate your religion? The answer is no. You can call yourself Mohammed and not be a Muslim. You can call yourself Eric and not be Catholic. Otherwise it is the assignment to religious identity,” she argued.

“Madam Secretary of State, that was absolutely not the purpose of your conversation with Zemmour,” replied the Internet user, rightly so. “He was talking about a first name with a religious connotation, in this case, Islamic – having a connection with Islam – Mohammed is an Islamic first name, I reiterate and persist”, he insisted.

At the same time, he explained that his name was Mehdi and that he was an atheist, but that “[t]he first name is an Islamic name, it has a strong religious consonance and refers to an Islamic figure that the one finds in hadiths [collection of the acts and words of the prophet Muhammad, ed.].”

In any case, the subject of religious first names does not seem to be the strong point of Schiappa. Indeed, during the debate, Éric Zemmour even explained to her the origin of her own. “Marlene, what is a first name? It’s a Christian name,” the editorialist pointed out.

“Ah no, it’s not a Christian name,” she assured him, confidently. Only, as Éric Zemmour explained to her, her own first name represents the contraction of “Marie-Hélène”, two first names celebrated in the Christian calendar.

But Schiappa believes she is also responsible for combating discrimination. For example, she fights so that men with the first name “Karim” are no longer victims of “discrimination in hiring”. However, the name of Renaud Camus is passed off as the inspirer of repugnant attacks.

“There is indeed only one category of the population who is able to understand what the Great Replacement is: these are those who have eyes to see and who sometimes leave the metro at Gare du Nord, in Châtelet-les-Halles, in Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, in Saint-Denis; or who pass by Roubaix, or by certain districts of Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Brest, Nîmes or elsewhere,” said Rimokh.

In the Great Replacement, the theory is that ​​immigration has become an invasion. “It is a point of view. One day, Pope Francis himself declared on this subject: ‘We can speak today of an Arab invasion. It is a social fact.’ [LifeMarch 2, 2016],” Rimokh noted.