MADRID – The French Government has once again detained an Iranian citizen residing in the country, accusing her of publicly expressing support for Palestine and condemning what rights bodies have described as the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime in the Gaza Strip. 

Mahdieh Esfandiari, 39, had been living in France for the past eight years and worked as a translator. Alongside her, another individual — whose identity has not been disclosed — was arrested on similar charges. Authorities have not clarified whether the two jointly managed the social media accounts under investigation or operated independently.

According to the Paris Prosecutor’s Office, the investigation was launched in November 2024 and focused on several active accounts on platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram. Prosecutors deemed the content published on these platforms as incitement to terrorism and the dissemination of hate speech based on religious or ethnic grounds.

Radio France Internationale reported that the activity on these accounts drew the attention of the Interior Ministry roughly three weeks after the Hamas attack on the occupied territories on October 7, 2023. 

For several weeks, there was no official information regarding Esfandiari’s whereabouts. With no news forthcoming, Esfandiari’s family alerted Iranian authorities, prompting the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to begin following the case through diplomatic channels.

Esfandiari disappeared in early March 2025 without a trace. The institutional silence from the French side heightened concern in Tehran. Eventually, through diplomatic efforts, the Iranian government was able to confirm that she was in the custody of French police, although the specifics of her case remained vague and limited.

On April 12, the French weekly Le Point revealed that, after nearly a month of silence, French authorities had finally released information regarding Esfandiari’s legal situation.

Esmail Baghaei, spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, publicly addressed the case for the first time on March 10. “Unfortunately, we have been informed that an Iranian citizen disappeared a few days ago on French territory. So far, we have not received any precise information from the relevant authorities in that country regarding her situation,” he said during a press conference.

Baghaei added that a conversation had taken place the previous day with the French embassy in Tehran, and that the consular department of the ministry had been following the case “continuously.” “We hope to receive concrete information as soon as possible to alleviate her family’s concerns,” he stated.

A week later, on March 17, the spokesperson offered an update: “Regarding the disappearance of this Iranian citizen, whose family had no news of her for some 12 or 13 days, our efforts unfortunately did not yield immediate results. At the very least, we now know she is being held by French police.”

Baghaei further emphasized that the reasons behind her arrest were still unclear. “We understand that this respected lady was an activist in support of the Palestinian people and had apparently published content expressing solidarity with the oppressed population of Gaza,” he concluded.

This is not an isolated incident. In the name of a secularism presented as a guarantee of neutrality between religion and politics, many European democracies have increasingly hardened their stance against public expressions of empathy with the Palestinian cause — particularly when such expressions come from Muslim citizens. As anthropologist Saba Mahmood warned, secularism is far from impartial: rather than ensuring equality of voices in the public sphere, it operates as a disciplining apparatus that defines which forms of suffering are deemed legible and which ethical commitments are considered acceptable.

Within this framework, pro-Palestinian activism is not read as a legitimate political stance, but rather as a potential threat to the liberal democratic order. The logic at play in Mahdieh Esfandiari’s case is telling: while freedom of expression is protected when causes align with Western geopolitical priorities, the language of national security is invoked when voices denounce the Israeli regime or express solidarity with the victims in Gaza.

Yet what is most troubling about Esfandiari’s case is not merely the glaring asymmetry in how democratic principles are applied, but what it reveals about a deeper, structural mechanism of exclusion. The French theologian Gil Anidjar has termed this phenomenon “the politics of blood,” a concept that describes how Western modernity has organized systems of belonging and exclusion. For Anidjar, blood — beyond its biological dimension — functions as an epistemic and political category, shaping religious, racial, and national hierarchies that determine who may be part of the political community and who must remain outside its boundaries.

Rather than truly separating religion and politics, secularism reproduces and reinforces this distinction as a mechanism of control. Those who do not conform to the mold of the “ideal citizen” — like Mahdieh Esfandiari, marked by her origin, her Muslim identity, and her political views — are systematically relegated to the margins of the democratic space.

In this context, secularism becomes an instrument of biopolitical management: it regulates who may appear and be visible in the public sphere, determining which forms of speech deserve protection and which must be silenced. Solidarity with Palestine — especially when voiced by those identified as Muslim — is thus perceived as a form of radical dissent, a challenge to the dominant narrative that threatens to destabilize the religious and geopolitical hierarchies underpinning the liberal order.

This apparatus of exclusion is not merely a theoretical abstraction. It has concrete effects. Esfandiari’s detention, her initial disappearance, and the prolonged silence from French authorities reveal how, under the rhetoric of counterterrorism, secularism can operate as a punitive apparatus — one that systematically marginalizes those who challenge the state narrative, particularly when their ethical and political demands contradict the strategic interests of Western powers.

Ultimately, what is at stake here is not simply freedom of expression, but the very possibility of articulating an alternative political subjectivity — a way of inhabiting the world outside the identity logics imposed by the modern nation-state, grounded in property, cultural homogeneity, and symbolic control. It is in this terrain that Anidjar’s critique reaches its full significance: the politics of blood is not merely a metaphor, but a structure of power that links violence, exclusion, and sovereignty.

Far from being an anomaly, Mahdieh Esfandiari’s case lays bare the limits of liberal democracies to uphold their own principles when confronted with discourses that challenge their moral and political hegemony. What is revealed is not the strength of secularism as a principle of inclusion, but its fragility as a framework for coexistence. And with that, the liberal project itself emerges as a failed universalist promise — unable to accommodate the multiplicity of voices and experiences that define our contemporary world.