The B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC), has registered its deep concern and dismay at the remarks made by French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen that France was not responsible for the rounding up and deportation of Jews during the second World War. During a radio interview, the candidate of the far-right National Front stated, “I don’t think France is responsible for the Vél d’Hiv. I think that generally speaking if there are people responsible, it’s those who were in power at the time. It’s not France.”
Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the ADC, issued the following statement:
“By undermining the historical record of her country’s shameful part in the Vél d’Hiv roundup, and engaging in contemptible historical revisionism, Marine Le-Pen might be trying to cynically recycle her father’s reprehensible rhetoric, in which he dismissed the Holocaust as “a detail of history”, so as to appeal to her core base of far-right supporters. She offensively sidesteps the fact that previous French governments have rightly admitted and recognised the crimes of the Vichy regime in rounding up 13,000 Jews and keeping them in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Nazi occupied Paris and that President Chirac and Hollande have apologised for the role French police played in the roundup. It is also indisputable that most of those detained were sent to their death in Auschwitz, and that ultimately, nearly 76,000 French and foreign Jews were deported and exterminated in the Nazi death camps. We hope that the French people reject her whitewashing of those dark years as well as her inflammatory and divisive remarks.”
The B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, founded in 1979, is Australia’s leading organization fighting racism through educational programs that combat bigotry, prejudice and all forms of hatred.
For further information please contact Dr Dvir Abramovich on 9272 5677.