At the commemoration of the Liberation of Toulouse, the charge of the mayor against “the new anti-Semites”
Citing Cardinal Saliège’s letter, Jean-Luc Moudenc denounced this Friday, during the commemoration of the Liberation of Toulouse, “the new forms” of anti-Semitism.
In the aftermath of the roundups in the summer of 1942, the Archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-Géraud Saliège ordered, on August 23, the reading in the pulpit, throughout his diocese, of a letter condemning the anti-Semitic deportations and persecutions. “A simple letter of 23 lines” to affirm that “humanity does not suffer from exception” between his people, underlined this Friday August 19, during his speech for the commemoration of the Liberation of Toulouse, in front of the monument to the glory of the Resistance, Jean-Luc Moudenc. And this letter, added the mayor of Toulouse, opened the way: “These few lines have freed many minds” and favored “actions to protect the Jews”.
“Extremist forces”
By thus summoning, eighty years later, the memory of the one who will be made Companion of the Liberation, Righteous among the nations and cardinal, and to whom Toulouse will also pay homage by baptizing a school at the start of the school year, Jean-Luc Moudenc intends, as usual during this ceremony, place the subject in the realm of current affairs. “Anti-Semitism has not disappeared and is experiencing a worrying resurgence,” he said. Before denouncing, by mentioning them one by one, “the new forms”, like the “new alibis”, of this anti-Semitism. Without forgetting the extreme right, always present, with the eruption, during the presidential election, “of the revisionist campaign of a candidate”. This scourge has tried “in all directions”: “on the far left with Corbyn tendencies”, in the “anti-Zionist” discourse, of “delegitimization of the State of Israel”, in “Islamism”, within the ” movements of yellow vests and antivax processions”, as in “Islamo-leftist thought”.
The first magistrate thus stigmatized a “sneaky” anti-Semitism, and “passive attitudes, made of ambiguities, accommodations”. These attitudes, he notes in particular in “the ranks of extremist forces will now be present in the National Assembly. Without assimilating them to anti-Semitism, should we not talk about them, not denounce them? »
Before him, the new president of the Departmental Council of the Resistance, Jean-Paul Brèque, had sharply denounced, excluding his words, the contemporary indifference “of the peoples” for whom, at the time of the war in Ukraine, “the great problem of the day seems to be the shortage of mustard. »