The Union of French Mosques (UMF) filed a complaint on Friday January 6 against the columnist of the CNews channel Jean-Claude Dassier for “public insult”, learned Agence France-Presse (AFP) from his lawyer. This complaint for “public insult” and “incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence”consulted by AFP, was filed with civil action on Friday at the Paris court, announced Najwa El Haïté.
On December 27, 2022, Jean-Claude Dassier, former manager of the LCI channel and the Olympique de Marseille football club, said, during a debate on juvenile delinquency, that “Muslims, they don’t care about the Republic, they don’t even know what the word means”. Statements condemned three days later by the president of the UMF, Mohammed Moussaoui. The latter, who temporarily co-chairs the French Council of Muslim Worship (CFCM, former interlocutor of the State with representatives of the Muslim faith), had described them as “shocking and defamatory”.
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Two days after the remarks made by Jean-Claude Dassier, the presenter of CNews Barbara Klein, at the helm of the show in question, had dissociated herself from her columnist on behalf of the channel and its editorial staff.
The complaint also relates to another statement by Mr. Dassier, quoted to AFP by the lawyer for the UMF: “What do you do with the millions of Muslims who have French papers and who live [pour] some for decades (…) with a completely different culture than ours under the French flag? What do we do with it? »
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On Wednesday, the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (Arcom, ex-CSA) announced that it had seized an independent rapporteur from the Council of State to study the possibility of a sanction after these remarks by Mr. Dassier and those of Another CNews speaker, Laurent Ozon. The latter had for his part “vaunted the merits of ‘remigration'”, Arcom told AFP. This procedure opens the way to a possible sanction of the channel, on which the administrative authority has already imposed a fine of 200,000 euros in 2021 for comments made by Eric Zemmour.
Arcom is regularly seized for slippages observed on CNews and C8, two channels of the Canal+ group, a subsidiary of Vivendi, controlled by the billionaire Vincent Bolloré. The regulator thus recently opened the way to a sanction procedure after Cyril Hanouna insulted a deputy on the C8 channel, already fined 3 million euros in 2017 for a hoax deemed homophobic by the host.