How does sport, a place of social diversity, supposed to be above cultural and religious barriers, suffer attacks from Islamism? A specialist was recently in Roanne to talk about it.
Médéric Chapitaux is a former police officer, specialist in issues of radicalization in the world of sport. Author of a doctoral thesis on the issue, he has just published a work, When Islamism penetrates sport (Ed. PUF), which highlights a significant and worrying phenomenon: the entry of Islamism into sports clubs. On May 24, at the initiative of “Understanding to act better”, an action by Anef Loire, the sociologist was in Roanne, at the Condorcet social center to discuss the issue.
How long did this thesis take you and who were the people you met to carry it out? I started working on this theme in 2014, but I really started my thesis in 2017 and I defended it in 2022. This therefore represents five years of work in the scientific sense of the term, plus empirical work between 2014 and 2017. I was interested in combat sports clubs, for a little more than ten clubs and their educators in Île-de-France, but also throughout the national territory in sports clubs in combat and with people from the world of sport where I was going to test my hypotheses and see the redundancy that we could have in more rural territories. This is how I constructed my work.
How can we avoid stigmatizing the sports most affected by the phenomenon, such as combat sports or football? For me, the major risk would be not to stigmatize them. I think that positive stigma, let’s call it that, can allow us to say: “We have a problem internally, so let’s go, be courageous, we deal with the subject”. Of course, the best way is to train managers and educators to avoid confusion but to nevertheless act firmly when confronted with the problem.
We are talking about Islamism today, because that is the subject of your intervention, but it seems that the extreme right is not left out? We have sensitivities on all extremes, in fact. For what ? Because they feed each other. Today, in sports clubs, the focus is mainly on Islamism, and not Islam, I insist, in particular because we have had waves of Islamist attacks and we have threats of that order. But we must not be fooled, we have the case of Agogée, in Lyon – a gym opened in January 2017 and closed in March 2019, Editor’s note- which was a club affiliated with Génération Identitaire and we could see that, in this club, we were preparing guys or girls who had a far-right ideology. Today, I am aware of one or two other possible cases, that does not mean that there are not others, but it is not at all in the same order of magnitude. However, we must remain vigilant and treat everything in the same way.
The best way is to train educators to avoid confusion
Current events require, are the Olympic Games affected by this penetration of Islamism into sport? The government responded to this question: there is no proven threat at this time, but it is a global event, we have already had attacks before and we find ourselves in an environment quite close to what the we experienced in Munich in 1972. There were already territorial conflicts between Palestine and Israel. Today, the conflict is reignited around this question. I think our intelligence services are on alert on the issue. They know how to do it. But that is the high level of alert, I think that now, it is with our populations and our children that we must be vigilant on a daily basis.
