The president of the Hauts-de-France region requests the cancellation of a conference by Jean-Luc Mélenchon at a university in Lille. The reason: a logo on its poster.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon plans to go this Thursday, April 18 to the University of Lille to hold a conference with Palestinian activist Rima Hassan, who is on the LFI list for the 2024 European elections. Organized by the student association “Libre Palestine “, this conference should focus, according to the communication visuals announcing it, on “current events in Palestine”. The event does not please several elected officials from the North at all, who ask that it be canceled.
Renaissance MP Violette Spilletout very clearly accuses this conference of being “anti-Semitic” in a message posted on X (formerly Twitter). “In the middle of the European campaign, while the debates are becoming more radical, I am calling on the president of the University of Lille to ask him to cancel this propaganda conference, as Rennes or Bordeaux did. Yes, it is urgent to put an end to the tragedy in Gaza but it is not with those who represent the most violent anti-Semitism and the desire to destroy Israel that the debates will progress towards peace”, believes the elected Macronist.
The RN deputy Sébastien Chenu also asked for the cancellation of this conference, fearing that “our universities” will serve “as a jumping seat for a political meeting where anti-Semitic remarks will probably be made.”
The controversy has gained momentum since the speech of the former presidential candidate and current president of the Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand. This particularly targets the logo affixed to the poster announcing the event. “We cannot tolerate, in a French university, such a conference by France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Rima Hassan who, through the “Free Palestine” logo, deny the existence of the State of Israel . I ask the University of Lille and the prefect to cancel this conference,” he wrote on X.
The logo in question is the red one at the bottom right of the poster. The uniform color suggests that the association which organizes the event is campaigning for a Palestine without the State of Israel, taking up the ambiguity of the slogan “Palestine from the Jordan to the sea”.
Questioned on the subject by the media, Rima Hassan has several times denied wishing for the destruction of Israel, she has also several times condemned, moreover, the October 7 attacks by Hamas. “From the sea to the Jordan: yes for equal rights which involves freeing the Palestinians from the oppressions they suffer. As a reminder, geographically, the Palestinians already live from the sea to the Jordan, they are everywhere on the territory but with different statuses”, she explained recently on her networks.
