The silent decorum of a march on Wednesday to honor an 85-year-old woman who survived Nazi horrors only to be stabbed to death last week in an alleged anti-Semitic attack was shattered, with crowds shouting “Nazi, Nazi,” and other insults at French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
Mireille Knoll’s death had taken on national importance, reminding France of both historic anti-Semitism and its resurgence in the past few years.
Thousands of people — Jews, Muslims and politicians on the left and right — had joined in the evening march from the Place de la Nation to Knoll’s Paris apartment, where she was killed on Friday last week and her home set ablaze.
Photo: Reuters
The tribute was one of many held in cities across France to honor Knoll and denounce racism.
However, divisions soon surfaced at the Paris march, which both Le Pen and far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon had insisted on attending, despite warnings from France’s leading Jewish group, the CRIF, that they would not be welcome.
CRIF president Francois Kalifat justified their exclusion by saying the political extremes had anti-Semitics in their ranks.
“They should first clean out their own house,” he said.
The bid to exclude the two politicians was firmly opposed by Knoll’s son, Daniel.
Le Pen and Melenchon, political rivals and not in the same spot in the march, both were pushed and insulted with cries of “get out” and “go home.”
Shouts of “Nazi” were hurled at Le Pen, whose father and the founder of her National Front Party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been convicted of anti-Semitism and racism.
She has since broken ties with the elder Le Pen.
Marie Le Pen’s bodyguard and her entourage formed a protective ring around her before riot police cut a corridor for her to leave.
Noting that Daniel Knoll had said he wanted to encourage national unity and that everyone “without exception” was welcome at the march, Marie Le Pen said of the insults: “I find the behavior here undignified toward the [grieving] family.”
“Her son said he wanted everyone there, so we are here,” she said.
Daniel Knoll, looking sad and tired, later bemoaned the hateful divisions at a march meant to unite.
“Today, we all should have been united, all of France,” he said on BFM-TV. “Who cares which party? I couldn’t care less ... It’s inadmissible.”
Melenchon said “we did our duty” by coming to show compassion, adding that the real subject of the march was “this woman killed barbarically.”
The march followed Mireille Knoll’s funeral, where French President Emmanuel Macron had showed up unannounced.
The president had already mentioned Mireille Knoll in a speech at a military ceremony to honor a gendarme as a national hero for saving the lives of hostages in a Muslim extremist attack last week.
Macron decried the “barbaric” views that fueled Mireille Knoll’s killing, as well as the extremist who killed four people in a rampage in southern France.
Mireille Knoll’s attacker, he said, “murdered an innocent and vulnerable woman because she was Jewish, and in doing so profaned our sacred values and our history.”
Earlier, vandals scrawled anti-Israel graffiti and ransacked the offices of a Jewish student group at the University of Paris.
French Jewish Students Union president Sacha Ghozlan said it was unclear who was behind it.
Prosecutors have filed preliminary charges against two people for murder with anti-Semitic motives in Mireille Knoll’s slaying.
Authorities have not released the names of the two men in custody, but have said the chief suspect is a 29-year-old with a past conviction who lived in the same building.
Mireille Knoll was forced to flee Paris with her family aged nine to escape a notorious World War II roundup of Jews. After the war she returned to Paris and spent most of her life in the apartment where she was killed, Daniel Knoll said.
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