A French judge indicted writer Michel Houellebecq Tuesday for comments he made about Muslim immigrants during an interview in 2022.

Houellebecq is charged with “complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence against a group of people on account of their origin or their belonging or not belonging to a particular ethnicity, nation, race or religion,” according to Le Monde.

In November 2022, the famous novelist told the right-wing magazine Front Populaire, “The wish of the population with French roots, as the phrase goes, is not for Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop stealing from and assaulting them, in short, for the violence to decrease, for them to respect the law and people. Or, another good solution, for them to leave.”

He continued, further observing regarding the “great replacement” theory of white Europeans being replaced by non-European Muslims, “I was very shocked that it was called a theory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact.

“Renaud Camus is a good writer [who promoted the theory], that’s beyond doubt. So, he observed a great replacement or – to be more precise – the changing ethnic and religious composition of the European population. It’s a statistical evidence,” Houellebecq said.

The percentage of immigrants in France has increased from 8.1 percent of the population in 2006 to 11.3 percent as of 2024 (or over 9 million people). Muslims now make up about 10 percent of the population, versus 6 percent in 2006.

The top two countries of origin for immigrants to France are the Muslim-dominated Algeria and Morocco, with Tunisia and Turkey also in the top 10, according to the most recent statistics from WorldAtlas.

Houellebecq’s most controversial statement during his 2022 interview was, “When entire territories come under Islamist control, I think acts of resistance will take place…There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafés frequented by Muslims, in short, Bataclan in reverse.”

Radical Islamist terrorists attacked the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015, killing 130 people and injuring approximately 360 others.

Houellebecq’s lawyer, Louis Cailliez, told Le Monde, that his client published a book in 2023, titled “Quelques mois dans ma vie” (“A Few Months in My Life”), to clarify his views on Muslim immigrants. The writer described “the hell I went through” after the Front Populaire interview.

“[H]e corrected certain incriminated statements, considering them clumsy, to clarify his exact thinking so that the passages in question would be better understood,” Cailliez said.

The “mea culpa” followed an exchange with Chems-Eddine Hafiz, rector of the Grande Mosquée de Paris, who had initially filed a criminal complaint before dropping legal proceedings, Le Monde noted.

However, the Movement against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples (MRAP) and the Union of Mosques of France remained plaintiffs in the case against Houellebecq.

“Michel Houellebecq disputes the criminal charge brought against him. The incriminated remarks have no dimension of incitement, not even implicitly, and therefore fall within the bounds of freedom of opinion and expression. A prophet of doom does not wish for disaster, quite the contrary. His place is not in a courtroom,” responded the author’s lawyers.

“Michel Houellebecq can only regret the increasing judicialization of intellectual debate and that this controversy did not find its conclusion after the calm meeting with Chems-Eddine Hafiz, rector of the Grande Mosquée de Paris,” they added.

The New York Post reported that in 2015 Houellebecq published a novel called “Submission,” which the outlet described “as a fictional account of France electing a Muslim president who slowly unleashes radical political and social transformation on the nation.”

The Post pointed out, “The book coincidentally came out just a day after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, where 12 employees of a satirical magazine which had caricatured Muhammad were massacred in their office, including one of Houellebecq’s friends.”

Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron claimed that Muslims were not responsible for the recent widespread protests and destruction seen in his country and implied that President Donald Trump is pushing that narrative for political purposes.

Trump exhorted in a Truth Social post, “France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered a once great country. Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!”

Asra Nomani, Fox News’s senior investigations editor, reported at the time that Muslims were definitely among the over 550,000 rioters/protesters in France.

She said that her team has identified 54 groups involved in the protests, “and they are specific to the communists, socialists, far-left network that is in Europe and in the world.”

“They work with the Islamist groups that are very anti-Israel, and that’s why you’re going to see the Palestinian flag, along with these images of the hammer and sickle in all of these protests,” Nomani added. The marriage of socialists/communists with Muslims has been called the Red-Green Alliance.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

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