Jewish Leaders Call for Protection of Muslim Children Amid French Terror Investigations

"Muslim children must be protected like the others" indicated in l’Obs the signatories, including the former president of Médecins sans frontières Rony Brauman, Professor Sonia Dayan Herzbrun, journalist Dominique Vidal, Rabbi Gabriel Hagaï or the legendary Adolfo Kaminsky, following the high-profile case in Albertville, Savoy, explaining that "childhood is not a matter of suspicion, but of protection" and "this is precisely what hundreds of children reported and/or prosecuted for apology for terrorism are deprived of," reported Saphirnews.

Thus, "the surveillance, in fact targeted at Muslim children, wanted by the Minister of National Education, has been followed by part of the staff of National Education and has resulted in differentiated treatment for hundreds of children," they said. Furthermore, "if it was possible to deliver thousands of Jewish children to barbarism, it was because anti-Semitism was sufficiently rooted in the French collective imagination for this not to raise more resistance in society," they declared, hammering that "it is obviously not a question of comparing very different historical sequences".

Faced with the worrying scale that the stigmatization of Muslim communities in France is taking, the signatories call on the government to play its role in eliminating a "deadly logic". At the same time, they congratulated the teachers "who have been able to hold firm and have denounced the incitements to pursue the government’s policy in their establishments" and all the actors in popular education and child protection "mobilized in supporting children in these difficult times".