By saluting the "memory" of the victims of the Vel d'Hiv roundup, the president of the RN, Marine le Pen, "took a step forward to align with the republican values", estimates, this Friday, the historian and defender of the cause of the Jewish deportees, Serge Klarsfeld.
"From the moment when the President of the National Rally condemned in the strongest way the roundup of Vel d'Hiv organized by the police of the French State of Vichy, she denied her father, the praise of Philippe Pétain", declares, in a press release, the president of the association of Sons and daughters of Jewish deportees from France.
" Duty of memory "
Thursday evening, on Twitter, Marine Le Pen paid tribute to the victims of the largest arrest of Jews during the Second World War in France. "The commemoration of the Vel d'Hiv roundup reminds us of the duty to remember in the face of the most abject and abominable expression of anti-Semitism," wrote the president of the RN.
The Commemoration of the Vel d'Hiv roundup reminds us of the duty to remember in the face of the most abject and abominable expression of anti-Semitism.
- Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) July 16, 2020"It obliges us to the most firm and intractable determination in the fight never ended against this scourge and these new preachers of hate who, today in France, target and attack our fellow Jews", she said added.
The RN president had sparked a controversy in April 2017 during the presidential campaign, saying: "France is not responsible for the Vel d'Hiv", making a distinction with "those who were in power at the time". Emmanuel Macron, then a candidate in the same ballot, saw it as "a serious political and historical mistake".
Chirac recognizes France's responsibility
"To be sure of his determination to fight against anti-Semitism he still has to approve the speech of Jacques Chirac in 1995 and the Gayssot law which protects from Holocaust victims of the Shoah", adds Serge Klarsfeld, in his press release.
On July 16, 1995, Jacques Chirac, during a speech at the Square des martyrs du Vel d'Hiv in Paris, was the first president to recognize France's responsibility for the deportations of Jews during the Second World War.
13,000 Jews arrested
On July 16 and 17, 1942, some 13,000 Jews were arrested at their home by French police and gendarmes before being gathered at the Winter Velodrome to be then sent to concentration camp, from which many were not expected to return.
At the head of the far-right movement since 2011, Marine Le Pen succeeded her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, whom she excluded from the party in 2015 after her repeated comments on the gas chambers, "details "Of the history of the Second World War according to him. "Point of detail" which earned him a conviction in court.
Society
Serge Klarsfeld denounces the same “anti-Jewish hatred” in Europe and America
Politics
Benjamin Griveaux commits a blunder by publishing the photo of collaborators, during the commemoration of the Vel 'd'Hiv' roundup
- Memory
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- Negationism
- History
- Marine Le Pen
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