France’s Shoah memorial vandalised on Holocaust Remembrance Day

SARAH CHEMLA

Emmanuel Macron, candidate for the 2017 presidential election, looks at some of the 2,500 photographs of young Jews deported from France during WWII, as he visits the Shoah Memorial in Paris, France, April 30, 2017 / (photo credit: REUTERS)

As the world commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day on Wednesday and the six million Jews killed by the Nazis, France’s Holocaust Memorial was vandalized with pro-Uighur graffiti, the Agence Press (AP) reported.

Paris police discovered the graffiti early on Wednesday morning, the AP reported, as ceremonies were planned around the world to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on the day of the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on January 27, 1945.

The Israeli Embassy in France tweeted a photo of the graffiti written on one of the walls where the names of tens of thousands of French victims of the Holocaust are written. The embassy expressed its shock and anger at the vandalism in such a symbolic day.

Ambassade d’Israël en France
#WeRemember

Some of the graffits read “Uighurs 2021=Jews 1941.”
The number of antisemitic incidents recorded in France in 2020 has dropped by 50% from 2019, yet physical assaults have remained almost unchanged despite COVID-19 lockdowns, French Jewry’s security service said on Wednesday.

The Uighurs are a Muslim minority group in China that has been repressed by the Chinese authorities and held in internment camps. They have also been used for slave labor. The Chinese government alleges they are there voluntarily for “re-educational purposes.”

China has been widely condemned for complexes in Xinjiang that it describes as “vocational training centers” to stamp out extremism and give people new skills, but which others have called concentration camps. Beijing denies accusations of abuse.