Liberal America was belatedly shocked by Donald Trump’s order to arrest and deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card–holding US resident who has been one of the chief leaders of the Palestine solidarity movement at Columbia University. Is the stripping of nationality for critics of US support for Israel coming next?
That, at least, is the call that has been directed in recent weeks against Rima Hassan, a Franco-Palestinian jurist and member of the European Parliament (MEP). She today finds herself in the crosshairs of a campaign of character assassination.
Elected to the European Parliament last June on the France Insoumise ticket, Hassan rapidly became a leading spokesperson for the left-wing party’s push for a cease-fire to the Israeli invasion and blockade of the Gaza Strip. For that, she has also become one of the most controversial figures in French public life — and the political establishment’s favorite straw man for the supposed excesses of new left-wing forces’ stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
On February 27, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau announced that Hassan would again be put under investigation for “terrorist apologism” charges, in reaction to statements made the same day on Sud Radio. Hassan faced police questioning over the same charges last spring, and repeated complaints against her have been filed by pro-Israel pressure groups.
But in a rhetorical escalation, governmental colleagues of Retailleau soon went out ahead of the hard-line interior minister. François-Noël Buffet and Patrick Mignola, also members of the cabinet of centrist prime minister François Bayrou, were soon arguing that the left-wing MEP’s latest dalliance with “terrorist apologism” meant that the stripping of her French…
Auteur: Harrison Stetler
