Over 5,500 people, including prominent French politicians, scholars and clergymen, have already signed a petition against attempts to ban ritual circumcision of boys in Europe. Titled “No to a ban on circumcision,” the petition was published on October 16 by CRIF, the umbrella organization representing France’s Jewish communities, following the October 1 passing by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe of a resolution that calls religious circumcision of boys a “violation of the physical integrity of children.”
Among the co-signatories of the petition are former Justice Minister Robert Badinter, Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist Party’s candidate in next year’s Paris mayoral elections, and her conservative challenger Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. Also signed up are film director Claude Lanzmann, Patrick Dubois, a French Catholic priest and scholar about the Holocaust, and Alain Massini, a well-known Protestant pastor.
The petition alleges that the non-binding resolution “targets European Jewish communities that are already exposed to the unprecedented resurgence of anti-Semitism. It is inconceivable to those who survived the Holocaust” and “dangerous because it stigmatizes Jews.”
In the resolution, “female genital mutilation and the circumcision of young boys for religious reasons” are listed together as examples of “violations of the physical integrity of children, which supporters of the procedures tend to present as beneficial to the children themselves despite clear evidence to the contrary.”
On Thursday, the petition was published in a full-page ad in the leading French newspaper ‘Le Figaro’.