French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday walked back his statement that a shooting apparently targeting Muslims was the first time French citizens had been attacked because of their religion. The comment prompted criticism by Macron’s political rivals and leaders of French Jewry.
A gunman opened fire in a heavily Muslim area in Trappes, west of Paris, on Friday, killing one person and wounding five.
“I also want to recall an essential truth and avoid any controversy: in recent years, our country has experienced attacks that targeted Christians because they were Christians and Jews because they were Jews. None of these victims must be forgotten,” Macron wrote on X.
Speaking in Trappes on Friday, Macron had said it was “the first time that there has been a planned terrorist act to kill our compatriots, our children, because of their skin color or the religion they are given.” The suspected gunman, Kevin T., is reportedly a far-right extremist.
Macron stressed the word “our” in his remarks.
France has experienced several deadly terrorist attacks targeting Jews, including the 1982 massacre at a Jewish restaurant on Paris’s Rue des Rosiers, which killed six people, the 2012 Toulouse Jewish school shooting, in which an Islamist terrorist murdered a rabbi and three children, and the 2015 Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket attack in Paris, which left four Jewish men dead.
Other killings recognized by the French judiciary as having had antisemitic motives include the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi, the murder of Sarah Halimi in 2017 and that of Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll in 2018.
Yonathan Arfi, the president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities and organizations, wrote on X on Friday that Macron should correct his remark.
“Unfortunately, it is not ‘the first time’,” Arfi wrote, adding: “We do not forget the four victims murdered at the Hyper Cacher in 2015 and the three victims of the attack on the Basilica in Nice in 2020. They were all targeted by terrorism driven by this hatred of the other because of their origins or their religion.” Arfi added: “There is no hierarchy among the victims of terrorism.”
Among Macron’s political rivals who called him out on the omission was Jordan Bardella, head of the right-wing National Rally Party. He urged Macron “not to forget the Jewish victims of the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse and the Hyper Cacher supermarket, Father Hamel murdered in his church, the Catholic worshippers at Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice, and all the other innocent victims.”
Jérôme Guedj, a lawmaker for the Socialist Party, who is Jewish, described Macron’s remark as “factually false and therefore politically problematic.”
