Paris marks its disagreement with the words spoken by Mahmoud Abbas. Anne Hidalgo, the capital’s mayor, has decided to withdraw the city’s highest honor awarded to the Palestinian president due to a speech he recently gave. Agence France presse recalls that, at the end of August, in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, he notably affirmed that “Hitler did not kill the Jews because they were Jews”. Hitler “said he fought the Jews because they were loan sharks and tied to money.”
Adolf Hitler, at the head of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, notably implemented a policy of extermination of the Jews. THE Parisian Holocaust memorial qualifies the facts as follows: “the Shoah means the catastrophe in Hebrew. This term specifically refers to the killing of almost 6 million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the period of World War II. The term Holocaust, more commonly used in Anglo-Saxon countries to designate this genocide, means in Greek sacrifice by fire “.
In this context, Anne Hidalgo withdraws the Grand Vermeil medal from the head of the Palestinian executive power and informs him of this in a letter made public in particular by Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF). The distinction was given to Mahmoud Abbas September 21, 2015.
In a letter addressed this evening to Mahmoud Abbas, @Anne_Hidalgo tells him that he can no longer claim the Grand Vermeil Medal of Paris.
This important decision honors Paris and the city’s ongoing commitment against anti-Semitism. pic.twitter.com/7Dy2ImXfDS
— Yonathan Arfi (@Yonathan_Arfi) September 7, 2023
“You recently justified the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War with a clear desire to deny the genocide of which the Jewish populations of Europe were victims on the part of the Nazi regime and its allies”, writes the mayor of the capital. “I condemn your comments in the strongest terms, no cause can justify revisionism and negationism,” she adds.
Anne Hidalgo also recalls that “the Shoah is part of the history of Paris”. She thus evokes the “tens of thousands of children, women and men of the Jewish faith who were rounded up, deported and then exterminated in the death camps”.
Faced with what she considers to be remarks “contrary to our universal values and historical truth”, Hidalgo then lets Abbas know that she is withdrawing his medal. “You can therefore no longer claim this distinction.”