While MP David Guiraud finds himself accused of relativizing the atrocities committed by Hamas after asserting that Israel had committed comparable acts of barbarity in the past, the coordinator of La France insoumise (LFI), Manuel Bompard, denounced on Sunday November 12 “unacceptable trial” made to the deputy.
“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, Mr. Bompard declared on BFM-TV. However, he recognizes that this LFI deputy “made a factual error” by wrongly attributing direct responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila 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 indeed made by Israel, the disembowelled mother was made, it’s true, by Israel”. Then after a hesitation: “I think it was in Sabra and Chatila. »
Several threats of complaints
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.
The Macronist MP from the North Violette Spillebout announced on X (formerly Twitter) then in the newspaper The voice of the North that she was going to contact the public prosecutor for these “negationist comments”. 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 “putting into perspective” Hamas’ war crimes, which we have clearly condemned. Let me be clear, I never doubted the massacre, nor the atrocity of the acts committed against civilians”he wrote.