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We, the undersigned, express our solidarity with our colleague François Burgat, a prominent academic who stands trial for apology for terrorism in France. His first court date was on April 24, 2025, a few days after French president Emmanuel Macron, in reaction to the Trump administration’s war on academic freedom, called international researchers to “choose France.”
François Burgat, an internationally acclaimed specialist of the Middle East, is accused by the French police of praising Hamas in a series of tweets, some of which are literal reprints of results he published years ago in an academic volume. On April 24, 2025, the French prosecutor requested an eight months suspended sentence, a 4,000 euros fine, a two year ineligibility, and a ban from social media. The court will render its decision on May 28, 2025. We express our support to François Burgat and others who have similarly been targeted by unprecedented levels of repression against pro-Palestine speech in France. We also note that putting a social scientist on trial for speaking out on his expertise does not bode well for those researchers who might “choose France” to escape the U.S. administration’s wrath.
The source of the White House’s ire toward universities is a wave of pro-Palestine student protest against Israel’s current war on Gaza. Through his Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, the U.S. president has accused Harvard, Columbia, and other institutions of higher education of violating the civil rights of Jewish students. This move opened the floodgates for a punitive campaign on science and scientists, accused of being too liberal or too “woke” by the current U.S. leadership. Coupled with unlawful detentions of pro-Palestine foreign students, large cuts — or threats of cuts — in federal research funding have caused turmoil in U.S. academia and beyond. Middle Eastern studies, and those studying Palestine-Israel, were the canary in the U.S. academic coal mine.
“France is committed to standing up to attacks on academic freedom across the globe,” the French National Agency for Research (ANR) said a few days ago. Yet the French territory, where the executive has repeatedly attacked academic freedom and the freedom of expression, seems to be an exception to this principled stance. On October 9, 2023, the French higher education minister pressed university presidents to signal any apology for terrorism to prosecutors. The next day, the justice minister asked all prosecutors to “firmly and swiftly” bring charges against “public statements praising the [October 7, 2023] attacks, presenting them as legitimate resistance to Israel, or the public dissemination of messages leading to a favorable opinion of Hamas or the Islamic Jihad because of the attacks they organized”. As a result, hundreds of apology for terrorism charges were filed against students, activists, academics, and other citizens, including 626 between October 7, 2023 and January 30, 2024 alone.
Before 2014, apology for terrorism was seen as a freedom of expression abuse and was included in the press law, which made it procedurally harder to prosecute or repress it. A November 13, 2014 antiterrorism law made prosecution faster and easier, extended the statute of limitations from three months to three years, allowed police forces to keep suspects in custody, and punished apology for terrorism — along with incitement to terrorism — with long prison terms (up to seven years) and hefty fines (up to 100,000 euros, or about $115,000). That the 2014 law is now used to repress political opinions, and in particular those favorable to the Palestinians, reportedly shocked even its author, the former French interior minister.
We find it deeply concerning that a social scientist who spent most of his career studying the mechanisms of Islamist radicalization be prosecuted for apology for terrorism. We believe that this dangerous curtailment of basic academic freedoms threatens French academia as a whole. Beside discouraging foreign researchers who may “choose France,” it could also scare away those scientists who, currently working in France, might find other academic environments less punishing. Above all we fear that, if the hard right wins the next French presidential elections, the absurd shift from fighting antisemitism to defunding science, which in the United States started with a full on attack on Middle Eastern studies, might also happen here. If this is the case, more than presidential wooing will be needed to lure foreign academics to a place where “a single tag in support for Palestine may land you in jail.”