The French government has decided to react to the excessive complacency of the European institutions towards organisations relaying Islamist propaganda and intends to ask the European Commission to put an end to undue funding to these lobbies, which disseminate messages and values that are in clear contradiction with European values.
The alarm was sounded in April by a report from the European Court of Auditors, denouncing the total opacity with which €7.4 billion in subsidies have been granted to NGOs between 2021 and 2023. Additional documents, consulted by Le Figaro, reveal that the beneficiaries of these funds include organisations notorious for defending radical political Islam.
On paper, two conditions must be met in order to benefit from European funds. First, the target organisations are supposed to “respect the values of the European Union.” In addition, once selected, they must be registered in the FTS (financial transparency system), which guarantees the proper use of the funds. However, it would appear that neither of these conditions is currently being met for a number of projects that have received copious amounts of funding from the EU.
Among the beneficiary organisations is the Turkish university of Gaziantep, part of the Erasmus + exchange programme, whose most recent rector is spreading Hamas propaganda by calling for a “global intifada.” There is also the Islamic University of the Gaza Strip, which has welcomed Hamas executives, and the international NGO Islamic Relief Worldwide, which provides humanitarian aid but is classified as a terrorist organisation by Israel, which suspects it of funding Hamas. In 2020, one of its leaders was forced to resign for having said that Jews were “the grandchildren of apes and pigs.” The European Qu’ran initiative is another controversial project.
The list is long. For the past six years, French UDI senator Nathalie Goulet has been working hard to expose these scandals, both at the national and the European level, to the best of her ability. “It can’t go on like this. This issue has not escaped the vigilance of certain parliamentarians, but they are incapable of stopping the system,” she laments.
It seems that this time, the French government has decided to take action. The minister delegate for Europe, Benjamin Haddad, intends to refer the matter to the European Commission to call for an end to these “regular scandals.” In a note seen by Le Figaro, he calls on Europe to avoid “any funding to entities and individuals hostile to European values.” The consequences are serious in the medium term, because “these failings are likely to seriously damage our fellow citizens’ support for the European project,” the document points out. The finger of blame is pointed directly at the Commission. These scandals demonstrate “a lack of vigilance on the part of the Commission and the ability of Islamist organisations to play on its naivety.”
The French government’s memo proposes a number of concrete courses of action: putting in place screening procedures for projects and values, and checking the identity and background of people associated with entities applying for funding. The absence of checks on the profiles of recipients was already criticised in the April report from the European Court of Auditors.
The memorandum will first be presented to the Austrian federal minister for European affairs, Claudia Plakolm, at a meeting in Paris on Monday, May 26th, which interior minister Bruno Retailleau and Benjamin Haddad are due to attend. It will then be presented to the General Affairs Council (GAC), which brings together the European affairs ministers of the member states and representatives of the Commission.
On April 24th of this year, the Rassemblement National delegation to the European Parliament sent a letter to Ursula von der Leyen calling on the Commission to put a “definitive end to subsidies for any association, NGO, university or other structure closely or remotely linked to Islamism.” The letter went unanswered. It remains to be seen whether Minister Haddad’s document will suffer the same fate. At the moment, the EU seems more intent on putting its energy into fighting Hungary’s supposed ‘homophobia’ than Islamism.
