The parents of the young girl who was gang raped in France by a group of youths reportedly after they found out she was Jewish said that the attack “mimicked” the Hamas terror attacks in Israel on October 7th.
Earlier this month, the Jewish community in France was left horrified as a 12-year-old girl in Courbevoie was subject to antisemitism-inspired gang rape by a group of boys, who are alleged to have dragged her to an abandoned building where they anally and vaginally raped her.
Speaking for the first time since the horrific attack, her parents said that their daughter has been suffering “flashbacks” preventing her from sleeping since the rape. “She is very shocked. The attackers stole her childhood,” her father said in comments reported by Libération.
“Our daughter has experienced antisemitism in her flesh,” the parents said, while arguing that the attack suffered by their daughter was related to the “import” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into French society.
“There is a mimicry between the acts perpetrated by Hamas terrorists in the kibbutz and what our daughter suffered downstairs from us in Courbevoie,” they added.
The decision to sexually assault and rape the young girl was reportedly in retaliation to the girl hiding that she was Jewish and even apparently suggesting that she may have been Muslim. When finding out about this, one of the attackers was reportedly enraged and decided to carry out the assault.
Her parents said that their daughter had hidden her Jewish faith to avoid being deemed as being “anti-Palestinian”, even though they said that they were all in the “camp of peace”.
“After October 7, she suffered harassment in her school and because of her religion. It began in November with Nazi salutes, swastikas on the tables at school or jokes about the Holocaust. She lost several Muslim friends in this way,” they said.
The parents also expressly rejected comments made by far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has been accused of trying to downplay the rise of antisemitism in France to curry favour with Muslim voters. In a June blog post the socialist leader said that “contrary to what official propaganda says, anti-Semitism remains residual in France.”
The parents said in response: “We don’t live in a residual anti-Semitism but heavy, visible, palpable anti-Semitism, explains the mother. Our daughter lived it in her flesh at school before the unthinkable on June 15.”
They said that because Israel is seen as oppressing Palestinians, “Jewish French who are therefore singled out and denounced for events which take place several thousand kilometres [away].”