Franco-Algerian Journalist Mohamed Sifaoui: Provocative and Divisive Actor in the Fight Against Islamism

Published on : 14/06/2023 – 11:54

Born July 4, 1967 in Kouba near Algiers, recognizable by his large glasses and salt-and-pepper beard, he was one of the two promoters of the project of the Union of Physical Education and Military Training Societies ( USEPPM).

This association is the main beneficiary of the Marianne fund, launched after the shock caused by the assassination in 2020 of Professor Samuel Paty, whose controversial management is today the subject of a judicial inquiry.

The tidy sum collected by the USEPPM, 355,000 euros, would have only fed a website and publications with little follow on social networks, according to press information.

A political refugee in France, Mohamed Sifaoui escaped four attacks in Algeria in the 1990s and remains the target of recurring death threats.

Willingly provocative, very present on social networks, he has, because of these threats, been placed under police protection.

The author of books and director of documentaries on political Islam and terrorism rose to prominence in 2003 with his work “My Assassin Brothers: How I Infiltrated an Al-Qaeda Cell”.

Veil Slayer

Vibrant, the character is far from unanimous. During a hearing in the Senate, the manager of the Marianne fund, the prefect Christian Gravel, had mentioned about him an “expert” who “is authoritative”.

UDI Senator Nathalie Goulet had however refused to hear it when she chaired a commission of inquiry into jihadist networks in 2015, referring to “a generation of experts who, on the grounds that they were Muslims, could criticize Islam and tell what they wanted”.

“My commitment against extremism, in particular against Islamism, is pegged to the body,” he said on Twitter in early April, after the first revelations about the Marianne fund.

The soon-to-be 56-year-old journalist collaborates occasionally with written press media engaged on the secular front, Marianne for a time or Franc-Tireur more recently, or on certain television sets as an editorial writer.

Short-lived director-founder in 2018 of a magazine called Counter-Terrorism, he launched in September 2020 a web channel on Islam and Islamism, islamoscope.tv.

Since the revelation of a judicial investigation aimed at the management of the Marianne fund, the people who have worked with him directly or indirectly questioned by AFP prefer to remain silent: “no thank you” or “nothing to say”.

Mohamed Sifaoui is fiercely opposed to the Islamic veil. Invited to CNews in 2018, he criticized the headscarf of Latifa Ibn Ziaten, mother of one of Mohamed Merah’s victims, according to him “incompatible with the values ​​she says she defends”.

Prosecuted for defamation, he was acquitted by the Paris Criminal Court, which considered that his remarks fell “from the simple expression of an opinion, even if it is controversial”.

From last October, he made a quick stint in the world of professional football by taking the direction of the communication of the SCO of Angers which, at the end of a catastrophic 2022-2023 season, was relegated to League 2.

He quickly alienated the environment around the team, starting with the journalists “who sometimes let themselves be drawn into sneaky maneuvers aimed at destabilizing the club”, he said on Twitter, after being questioned. of the president of the SCO Saïd Chabane.

He did not spare the Angevin supporters either, sorting between the false and the “real”, “those in real life (…), positive”, who “come to encourage our players”.

Mohamed Sifaoui will finally leave the SCO on words of Winston Churchill: “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction. To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to is changing often”.

© 2023 AFP