“This tweet is anti-Semitic, there’s no doubt about it. […] he should have recognized it. In an interview with AFP on Friday, Green MP Sandrine Rousseau wanted the rapper Médine, invited to the EELV and FI summer universities, to “recognize the anti-Semitic nature” of his tweet against by essayist Rachel Khan. “Anti-Semitism is not an opinion, it’s a crime, there’s no squirming about it. »
For her part Marine Tondelier, leader of the Greens, spoke of an “insidious anti-Semitism”, exercised by people “who do not realize the scope of their words”. “It can be by clumsiness, it can be by mimicry, it can be by lack of culture on the subject, by lack of training, by stupidity, also by ignorance”…, she developed, concluding: “for me Medina is in this case”.
Rousseau “not comfortable until the correct words are put down”
The controversial artist is due to participate in a debate next Thursday with the president of Europe Ecologie Les Verts, Marine Tondelier. But his message on X (ex-Twitter) qualifying Rachel Khan – Jewish and granddaughter of a deportee – as “resKHANpée”, has been controversial for a week, even if he apologized for it.
Without asking for the deprogramming of the rapper, Sandrine Rousseau considered that “there is still a condition for him to express himself, it is that he recognizes that it was a crime”, or at the very least ” a fault”, saying to himself “not comfortable until the correct words are put down”.
“It would make it possible to fall back on a slightly healthier debate”, she added, while fearing that “the summer days would be reduced to that”, especially since Medina had been “invited at the start to talk about the fight against the extreme right”.
Half-heartedly criticizing the organizers of the event, Sandrine Rousseau judged that “her arrival should have been better prepared” and lamented that “we (have) all been presented with a fait accompli”.
“I will be extremely attentive to what Medina says”
“I will be extremely attentive to what Medina says on August 24 and to what he says every day that follows,” said the environmentalist official on France Inter, about the “explanation of text” to which the rapper is invited.
Recalling the existence within EELV of a working group on anti-Semitism, Marine Tondelier insisted that “we must condemn [l’antisémitisme] and fight it everywhere and all the time”.
She recalled that the rapper had been “able to explain that he felt as a racialized rapper, raised in the working-class neighborhoods of Le Havre (…) a convergence of oppressions with people who are victims of homophobia”. “I want him to be able to say that too about anti-Semitism and I want everyone to realize the impact it would have if they were able to do that,” she insisted.