Two French politicians proposed a law to make „renewed forms of antisemitism” illegal in the country. The law would make terrorist apologism, denying Israel’s existence, and the comparison of Jews or Israel to the Holocaust punishable.
French MP for the Eighth constituency for French residents overseas, Caroline Yadan, and former Equality Minister and National Assembly member Aurore Bergé filed the bill on last Wednesday, October 30, reports The Jerusalem Post.
It proposes a new law that would codify renewed forms of antisemitism, which manifest in three axes: terrorist apologism (the veneration of Hamas), denying Israel’s existence or right to exist, or calling for the destruction of Israel, and the comparison of Jews to Nazis or Israel to the Holocaust.
Former president François Hollande also reportedly agreed to co-sign the bill, which was co-signed by 90 other deputies.
Yadan said she wants to make all rhetoric like “From the river to the sea,” especially where maps of Israel have been replaced with Palestine, punishable by the law.
“So that Rima Hassan can no longer consider Hamas a resistance group and go unpunished or that one could no longer post a Nazi flag accompanied by a Star of David on one’s social networks,” she explained.
In her conversation with Le Point, a French weekly political and conservative news magazine published in Paris, Yadan highlighted the hypocrisy that holds Israel to a different standard than other countries. She pointed out that this behaviour is codified in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which says that “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” is a form of antisemitism.
Moreover, it is also mentioned in the “three Ds of Antisemitism,” a criteria formulated as a model to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. It argues that delegitimization, demonization, and double standards are the three tests for differentiating between criticism and antisemitism.
Yadan explained that she put her experience as a lawyer into developing a bill that would not be punishable by the Constitutional Council.
She said she wanted to address the issue of comparing the Jews to the Holocaust without going into technical legal details, adding that she realized that such an amendment would pose difficulties given that many are attached to the laws concerning freedom of the press.
Therefore, she based the bill on the ground of the Gayssot Law, enacted in 1990, which made it a criminal offense in France to question the existence or extent of the crimes of the Nazi party. This made it illegal in France to deny the Holocaust.
“As a result, comparing the State of Israel to the Nazi regime would be punished as an outrageous trivialization of the Holocaust,” Yadan said.
Yadan’s proposal is not new, as it is already codified into French law. The new detail is the denial or call for the destruction of Israel.
Yadan referenced the words of French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, who said that “Anti-Zionism is simply justified antisemitism finally made available to all. It is the permission to be democratically antisemitic.”
Photo credit: REUTERS/Johanna Geron
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