A French senator has called for Karim Benzema to be stripped of his French citizenship after Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin claimed the football star is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Valerie Boyer made the claims in an interview on broadcaster French TV, without providing evidence to back up his assertion.
“Benzema is notoriously linked with the Muslim Brotherhood, we all know it,” said the French minister.
“If the minister’s comments are true, we have to consider sanctions against Karim Benzema,” said Valerie Boyer, in a statement on X.
This backlash comes days after Benzema showed his public support to Gaza.
Boyer proposed that revoking Benzema’s Ballon d’Or could be a “first symbolic sanction.”
He further recommended the possibility of “withdrawal of his nationality” as a subsequent punitive action against the Franco-Algerian player.
“We cannot accept that a world-famous French binational can dishonour and even betray our country,”Boyer’s statement read.
Benzema’s lawyer, Hugues Vigier, quickly refuted this claim.
“This is false! Karim Benzema never had any relation with this organization,” Vigier told French daily Le Parisien.
He also mentioned that his team was contemplating legal action against the French minister.
Hugues Vigier (Karim Benzema’s lawyer): “Everything is false. Benzema never had any relationship with ‘Muslim Brotherhood’. We are thinking about prosecutions against this minister in application, for example, of the law on the manipulation of information dear to our government… and defamation or even public insult.”
Benzema is a committed Muslim who practices fasting during Ramadan and openly shares his faith on social media.
The Frenchman currently resides in Saudi Arabia after his move from Real Madrid to Al-Ittihad last summer.
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He explained that his religion had played a role in the move.
“It’s important to be in a Muslim country where I already feel that people love me, it’s going to give me a new life,” he said. “I’m a believer, so it’s important for me.”
In response to an inquiry from the French radio broadcaster seeking clarification on Darmanin’s statement, the minister’s cabinet expressed that they had noted a “gradual shift in Karim Benzema’s positions towards a strict, uncompromising form of Islam, characteristic of the Brotherhood’s mission to promote Islamic values.
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The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist party that rose to power in Egypt after the Arab Spring but was later ousted by a military coup in 2013.
It is financially supported by Qatar and is classified as a terrorist organization in various Middle Eastern nations, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have complex relationships with Doha.
