French soccer star Karim Benzema at the 2023 signing ceremony for hs move to Saudi club Al-Ittihad. Photo: Reuters/Handout

A leading French soccer star is suing the country’s interior minister for accusing him of retaining links to the Muslim Brotherhood — an international Islamist network created nearly a century ago that now includes the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.

Karim Benzema, 36, announced on Tuesday that he was bringing a defamation case against French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin over a television interview last October in which the politician charged that the player’s links with the Muslim Brotherhood were common knowledge.

“Benzema is notoriously linked with the Muslim Brotherhood, we all know it,” Darmanin claimed during an interview with the conservative broadcaster C-News. In the same interview, he argued, “We are fighting the hydra that is the Muslim Brotherhood because it creates an atmosphere of jihadism.”

Darmanin’s remarks were triggered by a posting written by Benzema on X/Twitter in which he said, “Our prayers for the people of Gaza, victims once again of unjust bombardments that spare neither women nor children.” The interior minister pointed out that Benzema — a former Real Madrid striker who won the coveted Ballon d’Or in 2022 — had failed to condemn both the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and over 200 kidnapped amid atrocities including rape and mutilation, and the gruesome decapitation in Oct. 2020 of Samuel Paty, a high school teacher in Paris who was targeted by an Islamist student after he showed his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the course of a class on freedom of speech.

In a 92-page complaint, Benzema — a practicing Muslim who now plays soccer in Saudi Arabia, where he captains Pro-League side Al-Ittihad — said that he was “aware of the extent to which, because of my notoriety, I am being used in political games, which are all the more scandalous given that the dramatic events since Oct. 7 deserve something quite different from this type of statement.”

The complaint also noted Benzema’s alarm that he is seen as “a symbol of urban youth — immigrant, Muslim, hostile to France, and antisemitic.” It went on to insist that he “never had the slightest link with the Muslim Brotherhood organization, nor knowledge of anyone who claims to be a member of it.”

Benzema’s announcement comes just two weeks after the Algerian international Youcef Atal, who plays at right-back for Nice, was handed an eight-month suspended sentence and a $49,000 fine for posting a video the day after the Oct. 7 massacre that featured a Palestinian cleric calling for “a black day over the Jews.”

No stranger to controversies off the field, Benzema was ejected from the French national team over accusations that he had tried to blackmail a teammate, Mathieu Valbuena, over an amateur sex video. In 2021, he was fined $75,000 and handed a one-year suspended sentence for his part in the scandal. The following year, Benzema failed in a legal attempt to sue the far right activist Damien Rieu over a photo the latter posted on social media showing the soccer star delivering a middle-finger gesture alongside an image of jihadists doing the same.