The Paris region has stripped a French journalist and anti-Islam activist of an award after she shared a controversial post comparing Israel's bombing of Gaza to the Holocaust, AFP reported.
In 2019, Zineb El Razoui received the Simone Weil Prize, named after the French journalist, Holocaust survivor, and feminist politician, for her work "in defense of the secular beginning, the fight against all forms of obscurantism and for equality between women and the men".
The Moroccan-born writer and television commentator published a statement in X accusing Israel of "genocide" and describing its policies against the Palestinians as similar to those of the Nazis against the Jews during World War II.
The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas carried out the deadliest attack in Israel's history on October 7, killing 1,200 people according to Israeli figures, and taking about 240 hostages in Gaza. Israel responded with a relentless military offensive that reduced much of Gaza to rubble and killed nearly 18,000 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Last month, UN experts warned of a "genocide in the making" in the besieged and occupied Palestinian territory.
In response to Razoui's post, Simone Weil's grandson, Aurelien Weil, said he was concerned that she was contributing to the "downplaying of the genocide carried out by the Nazis" and called on the Paris region to act. Valerie Pecres, head of the Ile-de-France region, said she was withdrawing Razoui's prize for "fighting Islamism" because the comments she shared in X had deeply hurt French Holocaust survivors. "Her recent statements ... including the post in which she drew a parallel between Auschwitz and Israel's retaliation against Hamas terrorists in Gaza are outrageous and shocking," Pekres said.
Razui responded in X that in her view honoring Vale's memory means "confronting the death of ALL civilians, regardless of their nationality or religion". "In condemning both the mass crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the crimes committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians, I honor the legacy of Simone Weil more than ever," she wrote.
Razoui was a columnist for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 when his offices were stormed by two Islamist brothers who killed 12 people in revenge for the magazine's publication of cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad. She left in 2016.
In 2019, there was controversy surrounding her receipt of the Simon Weill Award after she called for a tougher police response, including with "live ammunition," to protesters outside Paris. /BGNES
