Interior Minister Christophe Castaner announced Wednesday the creation within the gendarmerie of a "national office of fight against hate", during a visit to the Alsatian Jewish cemetery in Westhoffen where 107 tombs were desecrated. "I decided this morning, in connection with the director general of the national gendarmerie, to create with him (...) a national office of fight against hatred," said the minister, accompanied by the former president of the Constitutional Council Jean-Louis Debré, many of whose ancestors are buried in this cemetery.
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This office "will be responsible for coordinating for the national gendarmerie both the investigation (on this desecration) so that all means are mobilized, but also all investigations on anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Christian acts that we know about our territory in gendarmerie zone ", continued the Minister of the Interior. "He will also be responsible for accompanying all actors in all territories and for making the link with the police, justice, so that the perpetrators of these despicable acts are condemned," he said.
"It's the Republic that is profaned"
With the desecration of the cemetery of Westhoffen (Bas-Rhin), "it is the Republic which is desecrated", underlined Christophe Castaner after having long walked the alleys of this Jewish cemetery of the XVIe century, of which more than a hundred of graves were found Tuesday smeared with swastikas, drawn with black paint. In addition to the burials of the Debré family, this cemetery is also home to the families of Karl Marx or former President of the Socialist Council Léon Blum.
Alsace has been confronted for several months with a proliferation of graffiti and degradations of anti-Semitic and / or racist nature. Before Westhoffen, 96 graves at Quatzenheim's Jewish cemetery, some 10 kilometers away, had been covered with anti-Semitic tags on 19 February. Earlier, on 11 December 2018, the Jewish cemetery in Herrlisheim, north-east of Strasbourg, was also targeted. The author or perpetrators of these profanations have not yet been arrested.