More than 250 celebrities have signed a petition “against the new anti-Semitism” in France which is marked by “Islamist radicalization,” denouncing a “media silence” and “low-noise ethnic cleansing” in some neighborhoods of Paris.
Elisabeth Badinter, Gerard Depardieu, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, and Bernard Cazeneuve were part of the group which signed on to a platform published in Le Parisien, in which they pleaded that the fight against anti-Semitism be elevated to the rank of a national cause.
The petition was signed by political figures of right and left (Nicolas Sarkozy, Lawrence Wauquiez, Manuel Valls, Delanoe Bertrand, Jean Glavany), artists (Zabou Breitman, Charles Aznavour, Pierre Arditi,), intellectuals (Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut), journalists, and Jewish, Muslim and Catholic religious leaders.
The petition’s text, which was written by Philippe Val, the co-founder and former director of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, reads: “We demand that the fight against this democratic bankruptcy of anti-Semitism become a national cause before it is too late. Before France is no longer France. ”
“In our recent history, eleven Jews have been murdered – and some tortured – because they were Jews, by radical Islamists,” the petition states, referring to the assassination of Ilan Halimi in 2006, the killing in Jewish schoolchildren and their teachers in Toulouse in 2012, the attack on the Hyper Cacher in 2015, Sarah Halimi’s death in Paris in 2017, and, most recently, the murder of Holocaust survivor and an octogenarian Mireille Knoll in paris.
“French Jews are 25-times more likely to be attacked by Muslims than their fellow Frenchmen,” reads the petition. “Ten percent of the Jewish citizens of Ile de France (Metropolitan Paris) – that is, about 50,000 people – were recently forced to move because they were no longer safe in some towns and because their children could not frequent the public school of the Republic any longer.”
“This is a low-level ethnic cleansing in the country of Emile Zola and Clemenceau,” the signatories proclaimed.
The petition notes that “Islamist radicalization – and the anti-Semitism it conveys – is considered exclusively by some of the French elites as the expression of a social revolt.” In addition “to the old anti-Semitism of the extreme right is added the anti-Semitism of a part of the radical left that found in anti-Zionism the alibi to turn the executioners of the Jews into victims of society,” the text asserts.
“The electoral baseness calculates that the Muslim vote is ten times higher than the Jewish vote,” the petition signatories accuse.
Pointing an accusing finger at mainly this “new anti-Semitism” that rages in the Muslim neighborhoods of France’s major cities under the influence of radical Islam, the signatories are asking “that the verses of the Koran calling for the murder and punishment of Jews, Christians and unbelievers be struck by the theological authorities, as the incoherencies of the Bible and Catholic anti-Semitism were abolished by (the council) Second Vatican Council [in the 1960s], so that no believer could rely on a sacred text to commit a crime.”