In a France ten days before the legislative elections that could bring the extreme right to power, the rape last Saturday of a minor in Courbevoie, near Paris, has shocked the country and inflamed the electoral campaign. The indictment of two 13-year-old boys and the details of the anti-Semitic attack suffered by the 12-year-old victim touch sensitive points in French society: sexist violence, juvenile delinquency and anti-Semitism.
Repeated episodes of violence have marked the pace of news in France for years and fuel the feeling of insecurity in a part of the population. They are a key factor in explaining the electoral success of the National Regrouping (RN), the party that, with the banner of law and order and the promise of a tough line on immigration, starts as a favorite for the June 30 elections and on July 7. Many of these events have had teenagers as protagonists, in a process that President Emmanuel Macron has described in the past as “decivilization,” a term that is inspired by the German sociologist Norbert Elias, but that the extreme right uses to denounce the alleged social disintegration in the face of immigration.
The attack in Courbevoie also happens in a country where, last year, there were 84,000 victims of sexual violence outside the family framework, according to a report from the Ministry of the Interior, 6% more than the previous year. And another sensitive point, and no less worrying, related to the Courbevoie crime is the constant increase in anti-Semitic acts in France, which has accelerated after the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli bombings on Gaza. .
This is the story of a personal and social tragedy. And inevitably political, given the electoral context and a long tradition of anti-Semitism to which no one wants to be associated. There are leaders and candidates of a party, France Insoumise (LFI) of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused of promoting anti-Semitism to capture the vote of French people of Arab origin. And another, Marine Le Pen’s RN, accused of instrumentalizing anti-Semitism in the opposite direction, to gain votes by presenting itself as the party defending French Jews, despite being heir to the National Front, founded—among others—by notorious anti-Semites and collaborators. of Nazi Germany.
The facts
The events occurred on June 15 at 3:00 p.m. The victim had gone out to see a friend. On her way home, she was assaulted by two boys. A third called her a “dirty Jew,” according to the girl’s testimony, cited by the newspaper. Le Parisian. After her, according to her own testimony, they took her to an abandoned building, beat her, threw her to the ground, photographed her and threatened to burn her by putting a lighter to her cheek. Le Parisian She explains that then the attackers “imposed vaginal and anal penetrations on her, as well as fellatio,” and threatened to kill her if she reported it. The same Saturday, the victim reported him. On Monday, the two attackers were arrested and on Tuesday night, charged with “gang rape, death threats and insults and violence of an anti-Semitic nature.”
Join Morning Express to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
In the Council of Ministers this Wednesday, Macron denounced “the plague of anti-Semitism”, and ordered the Ministry of Education to organize “a time of exchange” on the issue in schools in the coming days.
Mélenchon, who a few days earlier had received harsh criticism for saying that anti-Semitism in France was “residual,” was among the first to react. He declared himself “horrified” by what the Courbevoie rape “illuminates about the conditioning of criminal male behaviors from an early age, and about anti-Semitic racism.” He also urged “not to transform this crime or the suffering it engenders into a media spectacle.”
The Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, responded. “How do you dare? Wow face. Leave this girl and her family alone.” He blamed her for minimizing the rise in anti-Semitism. And he added: “Shame on those who agree with you to save the day.”
Dupond-Moretti, who should leave the ministry if the forecasts are met and the Macronists lose their majority at the polls, intended to put his finger on one of the supposed contradictions in the left-wing coalition, which brings together very disparate sensitivities. To the Mélenchon party and the Socialist Party. To politicians who on October 7 refused to call the attack “terrorist” and to others who defended Israel’s right to respond, although they later criticized the response. To those who use the slogan “From the river to the sea” to demand the freedom of Palestine, and to those who disapprove of it, as is the case of the socialist MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, victim of anti-Semitic insults during the campaign for the European elections. In a radio interview last week, and in response to a left-wing Jewish listener concerned about the LFI deal, Glucksmann promised to be “inflexible” on this issue and said there will be “no downplaying.” In the program of the so-called New Popular Front there is a reference to “the disturbing, unprecedented explosion of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic acts in France.”
Le Pen’s reaction
What is significant in this campaign is that it is the party whose historical roots come from French anti-Semitism, that of the late 19th century and that of World War II, that today presents itself as the protector of the Jews. Le Pen declared this Wednesday: “The stigmatization of Jews for months by the extreme left through the instrumentalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a real threat to civil peace.” The RN has received the support, more or less explicit, of figures such as Serge Klarsfeld, historian, Nazi hunter and authentic moral authority in France. Klarsfeld has said that, in the event of a duel between a candidate from the left and another from the RN in the second round, his option is clear: “Between an anti-Semitic party and a pro-Jewish party, I would vote for the pro-Jewish party.”
Le Pen has been distancing herself from this part of her past for years, but in these elections there was still an RN candidate, Joseph Martin, who had written an anti-Semitic message on social media about the gas chambers in the Holocaust. When the message was aired, the party said it was withdrawing its support.
Follow all the international information onFacebook andxor inour weekly newsletter.
.
.
_
