French writer Michel Welbeck has apologized to the Muslim community in France after racist remarks sparked widespread outrage on social media platforms.

In an interview with the "Big Library" program broadcast on France 5 television, the writer and novelist Welbeck apologized to all Muslims in France, following his remarks made at the end of last year.

Last November, Welbeck said in an interview with the intellectual Michel Onfray that "the desire of the original French, as they say, is not for Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop stealing and attacking them. Otherwise, there is another solution, that they leave."

Welbeck admitted during the interview devoted to the presentation of his new book, "A Few Months of My Life," that during his interview with Michel Onfray, he was drawn to a kind of "collective stupidity."

The French writer added that "there is a wrong discourse linking Islam and deviation, although they are two parallel lines that never meet, and the challenge now can be in fighting the second, not restricting the first, because a person's practice of his religious belief diligently does not lead to deviation, but the deviants only invoke the cover of religion."

Welbeck was previously accused of advocating racial hatred after offensive remarks to Islam and the Koran, and his novel "Submissiveness" talks about the fall of France in 2022 to Islamist rule following the presidential election.

According to press reports, the French novelist's attitudes towards Islam made him subject to permanent security protection.

In 2015, the author answered the Guardian's question about whether he had Islamophobia: "Of course, but the word 'phobia' suggests fear rather than hate, fear of terrorism."

Who is Michelle Welbeck?

Welbeck was born in Saint-Pierre on the French island of La Réunion in 1956 to a communist family, where his father worked as a mountain guide, and his mother, Lucy Secaldi, is a doctor who graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Algiers.

His parents separated shortly after his birth, so his maternal grandmother in Algeria took care of him, then his father managed to restore him and assigned his paternal grandmother to take care of him.

He started his career working in IT at Wenlog in 1983, then became a contractor in the IT department of the French Ministry of Agriculture, where he stayed for 3 years. Welbeck touched on this period of his life in a romantic way in his novel Expanding the Field of Struggle.

In 1990 he passed the competition test for the position of administrative assistant in the information technology department of the National Assembly (French Parliament), and in 1996, he resigned and devoted himself to writing.

In 1992, Welbeck received the Tristan-Tzara French Literary Prize for his poetry collection The Quest for Happiness, published in 1991.