The coordinator of La France Insoumise (LFI), Manuel Bompard, denounced on Sunday the “unacceptable trial” of MP David Guiraud, accused of putting Hamas atrocities into perspective by asserting that Israel had committed comparable acts of barbarity in the past. “I don’t see why I would sanction a person who recalled a historical context in which the horrors of October 7 took place”, perpetrated by Palestinian Hamas in Israel, declared Manuel Bompard on BFMTV.
He recognized, however, that MP Guiraud “made a factual error” by wrongly attributing direct responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila massacres in 1982 in Lebanon to the Israeli army. David Guiraud has been at the center of a political storm since the broadcast on social networks on Saturday of a video captured during an intervention in Tunis. We hear him pronounce the following sentence: “The baby in the oven was made, in fact, by Israel, the disembowelled mother was made, it’s true, by Israel.” Then after a hesitation: “I think it was in Sabra and Chatila.”
Elected from the North, David Guiraud is, among the rebellious deputies, one of the most fervent defenders of the Palestinian cause and one of the most severe detractors of Israel. The massacres of Sabra and Chatila, in 1982, were committed by Lebanese Christian phalanxes allied with Israel during a military intervention by the Jewish state in Lebanon. But Israel was also held responsible for not having prevented these massacres which left between 800 and more than 2,000 dead in these Palestinian camps. David Guiraud’s statements sparked a flurry of indignant reactions and threats to file a complaint against the MP.
“Abject”
“There is a competition it seems in rebellious France over who will be the most abject. For the moment, he has just climbed onto the first step, but he could be dethroned, knowing him, by another of her colleagues”, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the deputies of the National Rally (RN), declared on Saturday during a trip to Pas-de-Calais. These comments “shock everyone,” she added.
“Rebellious France covers itself a little more with shame and dishonor every day. History will record that French deputies took the side of the Hamas terrorists,” said the head of the senators on the X platform (ex-Twitter). The Republicans (LR) Bruno Retailleau.
The Macronist MP from the North, Violette Spillebout, announced in the newspaper La Voix du Nord that she was going to refer these “negationist remarks” to the public prosecutor. Meyer Habib, LR deputy for French people abroad, announced that a denunciation would be made “to the Paris prosecutor under article 40 of the code of criminal procedure” against him “for advocating terrorism and inciting racial hatred.
In a long series of messages on X, David Guiraud admitted to having been wrong about Sabra and Chatila and denied any minimization of the October 7 attack. “No, I was not ‘relativeizing’ the war crimes of Hamas, which we have clearly condemned. Let me be clear, I have never doubted the massacre, nor the atrocity of the acts committed against civilians,” he said. -he writes.