The announcement of their summons, in the middle of the European election campaign, was forcefully denounced by the “rebels”. Mathilde Panot, president of the La France insoumise (LFI) group in the National Assembly, and Rima Hassan, candidate of the same party for the European elections, will be heard on Tuesday April 30 by the judicial police as part of investigations for “apology of terrorism » after comments related to the war in the Middle East.
A support rally is organized by LFI at 8:30 a.m. during which Ms. Panot is scheduled to speak. The member for Val-du-Marne is summoned to explain a press release published by her parliamentary group on October 7, the day Hamas carried out an unprecedented attack against Israel.
This text had been criticized by the opponents of the “rebels” and even within the left – then ratifying the end of the New Ecological and Social Popular Union in the Assembly – because it paralleled the attack of the Islamist movement, described as “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces,” and “the intensification of Israeli occupation policy” in the Palestinian territories.
The Franco-Palestinian activist Rima Hassan, seventh on Manon Aubry’s LFI list for the European elections on June 9, is summoned for comments made between November 5 and December 1. The 32-year-old lawyer is criticized for having said, in an interview given at the end of November to the media Le Crayon, that it was “true” that Hamas was taking legitimate action. The person concerned denounces a misleading editing of her response.
Complaint against Jean-Luc Mélenchon
In a press release published by Le Crayon and Ms. Hassan on Monday evening, the media announced that it had given “this entire interview” to the candidate “so that she can rely on it in the exclusive context of the legal actions that she will have to lead.” “The judicial summons are at the initiative of the European Jewish Organization” (EJO), lamented last week the coordinator of LFI, Manuel Bompard. Like several representatives of the movement, Ms. Panot was the subject of a complaint from the OJE concerning comments made after the attack on October 7.
The “rebels”, who describe the situation in Gaza as “genocide” and have made the defense of the Palestinian cause the main focus of their campaign for the European election, denounce an “authoritarian drift” and an instrumentalization of justice to achieve silence pro-Palestinian voices.
Also in their sights is the double cancellation around ten days ago of a conference that Ms. Hassan and Jean-Luc Mélenchon were to give in Lille on the situation in the Middle East. They also castigate the complaint for “public insult” announced by the Minister of Higher Education, Sylvie Retailleau, against Mr. Mélenchon, who had drawn a parallel between the president of the University of Lille and the Nazi Adolf Eichmann after the cancellation of his conference.
“Madam Minister, I did not call the president of the University of Lille a Nazi. I don’t think he is. Otherwise I would say it without fear of your complaints. I denounced the example of his cowardice which leads to evil, as described by Hannah Arendt,” explained on X, in response, the one who was a three-time presidential candidate. This legal action “is a pointless diversion to make people talk about you and forget the crime we are fighting: the genocide of the Palestinians,” he said. Ms. Hassan deplored on Monday “a criminalization of the voices which express themselves on the Palestinian question”, while recognizing that “the investigators are simply doing their job” after the “abusive recourses” of pro-Israeli organizations.
