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Friday, January 24, 2020

Palestinians interpreting Macron's speech as a slap to Israel

Of all of the speeches given at the Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem yesterday, the Palestinian Authority news agency only covered one sentence of one speech.

Macron said, "no one has the right to invoke (those killed by the Nazis) to justify division or contemporary hatred."

The PLO is choosing to interpret this as meaning that Israel cannot use the Holocaust to justify its "oppression" of Palestinians.

Here's something Macron said the previous day in a meeting with President Rivlin:

We also decided to very frankly discuss and raise the issue of anti-Zionism, which is currently very much bound up with the issue of anti-Semitism. Thank you also for speaking so clearly just now. As I’ve had the opportunity to say, anti-Zionism, when it means negating Israel’s existence as a state, is a form of anti-Semitism. Which doesn’t mean it becomes impossible to have disagreements, to criticize this or that action by the Israeli government, but negating its existence today is clearly a contemporary form of anti-Semitism. So yes, we’ve passed laws, taken initial decisions, and others in particular will follow that enable us to fight more effectively against hate speech, including anti-Semitism on the Internet. But beyond this, we must indeed resist, in a way, this erosion of conscience we too often witness, and laws are not enough to change the human soul. To do this we must remember, remind everyone what anti-Semitism led to in Europe – the Holocaust – and as well as remembering, continue to educate and train people.




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