Zineb El Rhazoui

Zineb El Rhazoui (born 19 January 1982) is a Moroccan-born French journalist. She was a columnist for the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo from 2011 to 2017, but was in Morocco during the Charlie Hebdo shooting on 7 January 2015.

She was the magazine's religion expert and an outspoken critic of Islam. Since the killings, she has become a prominent secularist and campaigner for universal human rights, speaking publicly around the world about Islam and free speech. She left Charlie Hebdo on 3 January 2017, citing the magazine's adoption of an "editorial line demanded by Islamists" as one of the reasons for her departure. In 2019, she received the Simone Veil Prize for her fight against global Islamism. However, in December 2023, she was stripped of the title after she reposted a statement on Twitter mounting a Palestinian genocide accusation against Israel in light of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war and also likening Zionism to Nazism.

Early life
Rhazoui was born on 19 January 1982 in Casablanca, Morocco.

Growing up in Morocco, she routinely asked critical questions about the subordinate status of women under Islam. In secondary school, she made a point of wearing black nail polish and low-cut blouses to school, where her teacher was a conservative man with a long beard. "As a woman in a male-dominated country, you sooner or later face a choice. You can comply, let yourself be cowed, and shut up, or you have to fight."

Career
After graduating, Rhazoui worked for a semester as a teaching assistant at Cairo University. At the library she read early Islamic writings, which she found to be more thoughtful and open to critical analysis than modern Islam. She wrote a master's degree on Muslims in Morocco who convert to Christianity. She later said that she "wanted to understand how they first could put out the enormous intellectual effort that it takes to escape from one form of brainwashing, only to voluntarily join another religion."

Rhazoui began her career as a journalist in Morocco working for a weekly paper that was shut down by the regime in 2010. She published a number of articles about religious minorities in the journal Le Journal Hebdomadaire, which was banned by the Moroccan government in 2010. She is the founder of several organizations, including the pro-democracy, pro-secularism movement MALI, which she co-founded with Ibtissam Lachgar in August 2009. She was arrested three times by the Moroccan government for criticizing it. One of the crimes for which she was arrested was at a protest picnic in 2009, which then involved her eating lunch in a public park in defiance of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. She was eventually forced into exile in Slovenia.

She later went to Paris to study, and became a spokeswoman for the feminist organization Ni Putes Ni Soumises ("Neither Whores Nor Submitted [Women]"), for which she worked helping Muslim women in oppressive family relationships. At the Sorbonne she studied Arabic, English, and French.

Charlie Hebdo
In 2011, during the Arab Spring, Charlie Hebdo asked to interview her about her participation in the struggles in Morocco. At a lunch, editors Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier and Laurent "Riss" Sourisseau invited her to join an editorial meeting on the coming Wednesday. She was then offered and accepted a job with the magazine. In order for the magazine to be able to afford to employ her, cartoonist Rénald "Luz" Luzier offered to take a pay cut.

She wrote the text for the 2013 special issue of Charlie Hebdo, a comic-strip retelling of the life of Muhammed, which intensified the harassments and death threats directed at the magazine. The illustrations were created by Charlie Hebdo editor Stéphane Charbonnier. She contributed to Charlie Hebdo issue No. 1178. She was described by the International Business Times as "a secularist and human rights campaigner". In February 2015, she received death threats from ISIS.

Charlie Hebdo shooting (2015)
On 7 January 2015, Rhazoui was at her home in Casablanca, Morocco, having had her Christmas holiday extended. She sent an article about ISIS's views of women to her editor at Charlie Hebdo and then went back to bed. Two hours later she was awoken by her ringing phone. It was a friend telling her about the massacre at the magazine's offices. During the next few hours, she would learn that twelve of her friends and colleagues had been murdered. She later told Aftenposten that she believed herself to have been one of the terrorists' main targets. She said: "Those of us who are alive are alive only because of small coincidences."

In a 9 January article for Le Monde, she recalled her massacred colleagues and praised Charlie Hebdo as an "edgy newspaper" but one that "never takes itself seriously." She stated that "Charlie has never been a newspaper like any other" and that her colleagues had been murdered "because we dared to deride Islam." A meeting room once "accustomed to jokes and laughter" had become the site of a "bloodbath." Charb, she remembered, was always worried about the newspaper dying but "cared little about his own death, he who had been under police protection since 2012." Addressing him, she said: "If you had been here, my Charb, if only you could have seen the place de la République, packed with people, people in tears wearing your portrait in a monastic silence."

She contributed to Charlie Hebdo issue No. 1178, which was published the week after the killings.

Post-shooting
After the massacre, extensive security routines became a part of Rhazoui's life. She avoids eating at restaurants or taking the train.

"Those who defend the violence [against Charlie Hebdo] or who think we've all but asked for it ourselves,' she has said, 'I place...in the same category as the Islamists. Many of those on the left, in several countries, are so scared of being accused of racism or Islamophobia that they accept oppression and abuse of women and children, 'among the others.' They don't dare get involved. I think that's exactly what racism is – approving differential treatment."

In January 2015 she toured Quebec for a fund-raiser for Charlie Hebdo, and also spoke about Islam and freedom. "Secularism as far as I know, is the only way to permit everyone to live in the same society, even if people are different," she stated, adding that Islam "needs to submit to secularism and it also needs to get a sense of humour."

In February 2015, she received death threats via Twitter that she described as "a fatwa 2.0." Several people online have written that it is their "obligation" to find her and kill her in order to avenge the prophet. Her husband has also been targeted with backlash as a result. In that month, thousands of supporters of the ISIS jihadist group called for lone-wolf terrorists to target el-Rhazoui. They tweeted under a hashtag translated as #MustKillZinebElRhazouiInRetaliationForTheProphet and posted her personal details, pictures of her husband and sister, and a map showing places she had visited, along with photographs of ISIS beheadings. In addition, reward money has been offered for information on her or her husband's residence or workplace.

In March 2015, she gave a talk about the freedom of expression at the University of Chicago Law School in Chicago. Her visit to Chicago, sponsored by the university's French Club, marked the first time a Charlie Hebdo journalist had spoken in the United States since the attack.

She was profiled on April 2, 2015, in a long article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

In April 2015, she moved from Casablanca to Paris.

Resignation from Charlie Hebdo
On September 10, 2016, Rhazoui announced her intention to quit Charlie Hebdo during an interview on Web7Radio. According to her, the magazine is "under full police surveillance" and not the same as it used to be prior to the massacre. She formalized her departure on January 3, and criticized the magazine three days later, on the eve of the massacre's second anniversary, for following the "editorial line demanded by Islamists" and for no longer being motivated to draw Muhammad.

She became the subject of a documentary titled Rien n'est pardonné ("Nothing is Forgiven"), directed by Vincent Coen and Guillaume Vandenberghe and co-produced by Belgium's Francophone RTBF network. It chronicles her life from 2011, during the Arab Spring in Morocco, to 2016. The film appeared at the 2017 Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels in Biarritz, and at the 2018 One World Film Festival in Prague.

In November 2019, she was awarded the Simone Veil Prize by the Conseil régional d'Île-de-France for her defense of secularism in France and fight against Islamism. This award was revoked by Valérie Pécresse in December 2023 after the grandson of Simone Veil accused Rhazoui of abusing and relativizing the memory of the Holocaust, this was in response to Rhazoui retweeting a post accusing Israel of Palestinian genocide during the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, and which compared Zionism to Nazism and the Holocaust.

Views


In her controversial book Destroy Islamic Fascism (2016), she states that "those that think that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism are ignorant".

In November 2019, on a televised broadcast on CNews, she triggered a polemic, by saying during a debate on urban violence: "The police must shoot real bullets in these cases." After the debate she explained on Twitter that the law allows police officers to shoot people when threatened with death or serious injury, and that she hasn't called for shooting at protesters who don't pose a threat.

One of the texts in which she has most thoroughly set forth her views on Islam, the concept of anti-Muslim racism, Western attitudes toward Islam, and related issues was a response to a harsh December 2013 critique by Olivier Cyran of her work for Charlie Hebdo. Rhazoui rejected Cyran's charge that she is an anti-Muslim "racist," and that she "contracted this dangerous syndrome from the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo." The operating premise underlying this charge, she stated, was "that the Muslims of Azerbaijan, of Bosnia, of Malaysia, Egypt or Burkina Faso, represent a single whole that can be designated as a 'race.'" If they are indeed all one race, she said, then "that’s the one I belong to. The fact that I’m an atheist, and proud of it? It makes no difference, since you don’t ask us what we think; you talk about racism, and therefore race." She also explained to Cyran the nuances of racial identity in North Africa, alleging that "the Arabs of Morocco often aren't Arabs at all but Berbers," and pointed out that while some North Africans are atheists and others are "agnostics, skeptics, free-thinkers, deists," or Christian converts, he had "chosen to defend" a single group, the "militant Islamists":

"Those are the ones who, given the reality of French laïcité, have no other choice than to cry racism, a tear in their eye and a hand on their heart, on the pretext that their 'religious feelings' have been mocked by a drawing in Charlie. Among them you will find many who stand for laïcité in France but vote Ennahda in Tunisia, who do their shopping at a Parisian halal butcher but would cry scandal if an eccentric decided to open a charcuterie in Jeddah. Who are outraged when a day care center fires a veiled employee but say nothing when someone they know forces his daughter to wear the veil. They are a minority. But they are the standard to which you have chosen to align the identity of all of us."

She further claimed that Cyran, in condemning her work as racist, had in fact omitted to give her name, indicating either that he did not "want to let Charlie Hebdo’s detractors (who can only subscribe to your thinking if they never read the paper) know that the author of these racist ravings belongs precisely to the Muslim 'race,' or you simply didn’t think that, as a person, I was worth naming, since in a fascist rag like Charlie I couldn’t be anything but the house Arab." She concluded that the notion of someone named "Zineb who spits on Islam" was "beyond" Cyran. For him, she stated, "a 'white person' who spits on Christianity is anticlerical, but an Arab who spits on Islam is alienated, an alibi, a house Arab, an incoherence that one would prefer not even to name."

This, in her opinion, suggested that in Cyran's view "people of my race, and myself, are congenitally sealed off from the ubiquitous ideas of atheism and anticlericalism," or, perhaps, that "unlike other peoples, our identity is solely structured by religion." Noting that Moroccan laws "do not grant me a quarter of the rights you acquired at birth," and that if she were raped "the websites that posted your article will definitely say I was asking for it because I don’t respect Islam," she observed that Cyran himself had implicitly endorsed all of this by embracing the "whole moralizing discourse about how one must 'respect Islam,' as demanded by the Islamists, who do not ask whether Islam respects other religions, or other people. Why the hell should I respect Islam? Does it respect me? The day Islam shows the slightest bit of consideration to women, first of all, and secondly toward free-thinkers, I promise you I will rethink my positions."

The author has been very critical of Israel. She had her Simone Veil Prize revoked after she shared a thread -originally posted by journalist Benjamin Rubinstein- on the X social media platform comparing the unfolding Israeli war on Gaza to Nazi Germany's holocaust. Rhazoui issued the following statement: Monday December 11, 2023 To Mrs. Valérie Pécresse, President of the Ile-de-France Region in charge of awarding the Simone Veil Prize of the Elles de France Trophies. I return your Simone Veil Prize, because it is now stained with blood Madame, It is with immense honor that I write to you today to return the Simone Veil Prize that you awarded me in 2019 following the public vote. Far from sanctioning me for my opinions as you wish, by withdrawing from me what was attributed to me by vote, it is above all your conception of democracy that you reveal. Since this price means, according to you and according to Simone Veil's beneficiaries, to remain silent about the actions of Netanyahu's far-right government and his clique of war criminals, then I gladly return it to you. Since this Prize, supposed to reward my commitment to freedom of conscience and expression, only recognizes my ability to criticize Muslim extremism and intends to deprive me of my ability to denounce Jewish extremism or any other hateful ideology, then it does me no honor to keep it. There are crimes of such magnitude that they do not forgive those who stand on the wrong side of History. This is the main lesson of the Shoah. A lesson that you do not seem to have learned. "Never again" is what the survivors of the Nazi extermination camps have left to all of humanity. But it seems, Madame Pécresse, that your lack of empathy for those you exclude from humanity - the Palestinians whose murderers you have never denounced - prevents you from understanding that the legacy of the Shoah is universal. You were rightly outraged at the crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other Palestinian armed factions against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. I express to them here all my compassion, because for me, any attack carried out against civilians, whether the act of a militia or a regular army is a terrorist act. It is according to this same principle and in the spirit of justice and equality that I equally express my compassion to Palestinian civilians and condemn the atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli army. How can we consider these crimes other than terrorist acts? It is also out of respect for international law that I denounce the colonization and occupation carried out by the State of Israel in Palestine, in violation of United Nations resolutions. On November 16, 2023, you expressed your compassion for the Israeli and Palestinian victims, which we can only welcome on your part, in a country where many voices have fallen into a nauseating hierarchy of the victims and their suffering. However, if you are right to name and unequivocally condemn the perpetrators of the crimes of October 7, you neither name nor condemn those of the crimes which have continued to take place for more than 2 months in the Gaza Strip. You also mention the unbearable fate of Israeli hostages still held by the various Palestinian armed factions, but you fail to mention the thousands of Palestinians, including children, who have been detained for years in Israeli internment camps, without trial and without access. to a lawyer. This invisibility of Palestinians is one of the sources of their dehumanization. The Palestinian people certainly need humanitarian aid, but above all they need justice. I can also only applaud you when you show yourself faithful to the French values of liberty, equality and fraternity by denouncing all forms of anti-Semitism which is rife in our country, and I add my voice to yours in defending the right to our Jewish compatriots to live in peace and security at home in France and everywhere else in the world. However, I deplore the fact that you have not condemned with the same firmness the intimidation and racist attacks to which our compatriots of Palestinian or Muslim origin have been subjected since the start of this dirty war. Do you denounce the innumerable racist taunts that encourage me to renounce my French passport and label me as an Islamist terrorist because I have openly supported the Palestinian people's right to life and freedom? I am saddened to see the memory of Simone Veil reduced, by you and those who claim the hereditary monopoly on interpreting her work, to the impunity of a government that has broken every rule of international law and human morality by mercilessly massacring over 18,000 Palestinians to date, by killing more than 60 journalists, by killing more than a hundred humanitarian personnel, by bombing schools and hospitals, by cutting off electricity to the same hospitals where premature babies died in their incubators... It is long, Madame Pécresse, very long, the list of crimes that you have not condemned. Rather than showing yourself shocked by these atrocities, by the blood of innocents which continues to flow as I write these lines, you have used as a pretext for your decision to withdraw this Prize a "tweet" that I shared. This tweet is that of an American author of Jewish faith, Mr. Benjamin Rubinstein, who fights anti-Semitism and denounces the genocidal policy carried out in Gaza by the far-right government of Netanyahu and Jewish extremists Ben Gvir and Smotrich, the same people who arm civilians and accelerate the illegal colonization of Palestinian lands in the West Bank. This tweet, far from denying the horrors committed by the Nazis during the Shoah as you claim, evokes the two- state solution as the best way out of the murderous drift of the Israeli state. He analyzes the Nazi genocidal motives and compares them to the methods of the messianic gang which commits these mass assassinations, which does not hide its intention to exterminate the Palestinian people by their physical elimination or by their expulsion outside the borders of Palestine. The same Netanyahu who assassinated the poet Rifaat Alareer, as Franco assassinated Federico Garcia Lorca, Pinochet Pablo Neruda, or Hitler Robert Desnos and Max Jacob. A regime that kills poets, the freest beings among us, does not deserve your support, Madame Pécresse. What an irony to discover that Mr. Aurélien Veil, grandson of Simone Veil (who asked you to withdraw this Prize from me under the pretext that I shared a tweet from a Jewish author who refers to the Shoah) himself wrote a tweet on November 21, 2023, the text of which I transcribe here: "Unlike the Nazis, Hamas terrorists recorded the massacres they committed. The war is also a war of images. We must win it and overcome the denial of terrorism without giving in to voyeurism. ". Should we deduce, according to his own logic, that the crimes of Hamas are more perverse and voyeuristic than those of the Nazis? Ignorance is human, Madame Pécresse, but when it is associated with political power, it becomes dangerous. By what right, you, who are a French politician, do you dare to dictate to others what they should think about a mass crime taking place before their eyes? On what basis do you grant the right to say who are the good and bad Jews? In what capacity are you attempting to exercise censorship that the law does not impose? By establishing the narrative of Netanyahu's far-right government and his clique of fascists as the sole narrative, you consent to the dangerous pitfall that claims that current Israeli leaders are the sole legitimate representatives of the Jewish people. This should have been a lesson in humility for you. For me, it was definitely a lesson to discover to what extent people like you, as well as many so-called allies in my fight for freedom, are really just cynical opportunists for whom the life of a Palestinian child is not worth the life of an Israeli child, for whom the right to life and liberty is reserved for some to the exclusion of others. By taking this award from me, you are only removing your own mask.

As for me, I reaffirm here that my fight for freedom, in particular freedom of conscience and expression, is a universal fight which is addressed to all, whatever their nationality, their beliefs, their skin color or their language. The same humanist values which pushed me to denounce the excesses of religious extremism among certain Muslims are those which make me denounce the genocidal excesses of Israeli leaders moved by a no less narrow conception of religion. Abuses that you lamentably associate today with the Simone Veil Prize. I deplore that at a time when hundreds of millions of human beings across the world are demanding an immediate ceasefire and justice for every civilian victim, Palestinian or Israeli, you were busy carrying out this witch hunt against a woman like me who stood up to denounce these monstrous crimes. All I wish for you, Madame Pécresse, is to know the infinite grace of interior freedom, the one which dictates me today to obey only my conscience, the one which makes me feel compassion towards you. I therefore return your Simone Veil Prize to you, because it is now stained with blood.