French students call to make Oct. 7 ‘world day against antisemitism’

The petition warns that antisemitism has returned with a vengeance.

By Ben Cohen, The Algemeiner

One of France’s leading Jewish intellectuals is promoting a petition initiated by a group of students, several from Muslim backgrounds, calling for Oct. 7 — the date of the Hamas terrorist pogrom in southern Israel in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and over 200 taken hostage — to be named as the “World Day Against Antisemitism.”

Marek Halter, a Polish-Jewish novelist and film-maker, announced his support for the petition over the weekend. “I was contacted by a few young people, mostly from immigrant backgrounds,” Halter said, according to the news outlet Valeurs Actuelles. “Upset by the events of Oct. 7 on the Gaza border, they wished to launch an appeal for this date to become a world day against antisemitism.”

Added Halter: “I admit I was embarrassed not to have thought of it myself.”

The petition’s main initiator, 23-year-old French Muslim student Hichem Mouttaki, explained in an interview with broadcaster CNews that young people had little sense of the nature of Hamas.

“More and more students, middle and high school students, for lack of information or dialogue, refuse to see Hamas as a terrorist organization,” Mouttaki said.

Following the interview, Mouttaki was reportedly inundated with hateful messages and threats from supporters of Hamas.

The petition warns that antisemitism has returned with a vengeance. “The hatred of the other, the hatred of the Jew, is again at work,” the petition states. “In the absence of a collective dream capable of mobilizing our hopes, the rejection of the Jew again becomes, as before World War II, the only answer to the political and social frustrations that confront our societies.”

The petitioners said they were calling on “all international organizations to declare Oct. 7 ‘World Day Against Antisemitism.’”

Among the signatories to the petition are actor Juliette Binoche, screenwriter Yvan Attal, and French-Tunisian comedian Michel Boujenah.

Halter earlier endorsed a separate call to recognize Oct. 7 as a day of “mass feminicide” because of the crimes of rape and sexual torture inflicted on an as yet inconclusive number of women captured by the terrorists. In a statement co-authored with actors Charlotte Gainsbourg and Isabelle Carré, Halter asserted that the “violence committed against these women corresponds in every respect to the definition of feminicide, i.e. the murder of women or girls because of their sex.”