French President Francois Hollande delivered a ringing condemnation of anti-Jewish feeling Sunday at a memorial service to the four Jewish victims of radical Islamist gunman Mohamed Merah on the first anniversary of the Toulouse and Montauban attacks, as he recalled the French Republic’s complicity in Nazi persecution of Jews and insisted the crime that struck the Ozar Hatorah school must be called by its proper name of anti-Semitism.
Invoking the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust which feel the preceding day, he recalled the largest single deportation of French Jews, commonly known as the Velodrome d’Hiver, as he concluded that the “Jews of Toulouse died for the dame reason as the Velodrome d’Hiver or Drancy, because they were Jews”, as he stressed that the lessons of the Holocaust, which he deemed “the worst of all crimes against humanity itself”, “should destroy not the victims but anti-Semitism itself making it impossible, inconceivable and forever inexplicable”.
Declaring war on the internet as a tool for incitement and distributing hate propaganda, he invoked the launch of an interministerial committee last month to combat racism and anti-Semitism, nit he aftermath of last year’s attacks in Toulouse and Montauban, as he called anti-Semitism an affront to the values of the Republic, concluding that “whenever a Jews is insulted it is an outrage to an entire country”.
Merah’s shooting spree had revealed “the real face of terrorism and brutality, the lowest form of cowardice; terrorism, the blind violence that claims the lives of innocent people”. “The fight against terrorism requires no slacking, no weakness, no negligence,” he added, as he vowed to continue the enquiry into how to avoid a similar tragedy in the future, in the names of the victims’ families.
Heralding the adoption of a French law to allow the prosecution of French nationals implicated in terrorist activity abroad, he insisted that the law would be exercised unceasingly and radical Islamists would be “tried and convicted”. The law and judiciary, however, were not sufficient in themselves to staunch the flow of incitement, as he contended that “we also need to mobilise all spiritual forces, the forces of the nation, because each and every one has to make an effort to fight against the rhetoric of fundamentalism, radical Islamicism and the language of hatred, which are a danger to the Republic”.
This, he argued, was France’s debt to the victims and their families of the Montauban and Toulouse tragedies, as he concluded that the “cities will remain a symbol of tragedy, but also – and this is the purpose of our gathering today – a symbol of France’s resilience, a France that can never be diminished, a France which will never be stopped, divided or separated” in its onward quest for freedom.
Hollande’s address followed the publication of an open letter to him from the President of the Toulouse Jewish community Arie Bensemhoun in which he spoke of French Jewry’s “indescribable pain” at the attack on their members, which he said served as a stark reminder “of the darkest hours of our history, from the Pharaohs of Egypt to the Holocaust, via the fires of the Inquisition and the pogroms”.
The attacks mimicked a long lien of attempts to annihilate the Jewish people by “targeting our children who represent our hope and eternity”, he added, as he paid tribute to the resilience of the Jewish community for withstanding such repeated attempts to destroy them.
Of the attacks on French territory, he said Toulouse had shown the nation that “behind the hatred of Jews and Israel, there is the desire to destroy the Republic by trampling its founding values that are the essence of citizenship and the foundation of our freedom”. Paying tribute to the French President’s “honour and dignity” in hosting a public ceremony to the Toulouse victims to coincide with a state visit to France by Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu last November, he cautioned that “much remains to be done to defeat the monstrocity that is this Islamo-Fascism”, as he called on him to honour his duty to protect the legacy of the victims and their families by ensuring that “the evil that took them will be defeated and that a Jewish child never has to fear for his life because he is Jewish”.
Elsewhere Sunday, the French Jewish umbrella organisation the CRIF hosted a religious ceremony in dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Toulouse shooting, in conjunction with the Marseille Consistory and the United Jewish Social Fund at the Great Synagogue in Marseille. The memorial service saw Rabbi Reuven Ohana lead the congregation in reciting psalms to honour the memories of Jonathan Sandler, Aryeh Sandler, Myriam Sandler and Gabrielle Monsenego, the four Jewish victims of the attack at the Ozar Hatorah school.