Socrates George Kazolias, August 6, 2025

A Gaza Palestinian student has been deported from France to Qatar for allegedly sharing online antisemitic, even pro-Hitler, posts. Her treatment underlines the double standards in France when it comes to dealing with hate speech, racism and ‘terrorism.’

If the only Jews you have ever met have been slaughtering your family, friends and neighbors, and seizing your land for 80 years; arbitrarily detaining your people where they are tortured, raped, abused, humiliated, even murdered, with no hope of justice; and when you have been humiliated, abused, starved and beaten all those years, and it is all done “in the name of Jews everywhere,” then it is quite possible that you would end up hating all Jews.

This is certainly what happened to 25-year-old Nour Atallah, a young woman from Gaza brought to Lille, France, in early July to study at the Science Politique school there and now deported to Qatar for allegedly sharing antisemitic posts online.

The posts were taken down and I haven’t been able to see any of them myself. I am basing this  paper on the ‘hearsay‘ of the pro-Israeli mainstream media and far right outlets and French government reactions. The shared ‘antisemitic’ posts were apparently captured by pro-Israeli French in screen shots. The French government acted swiftly and has temporarily suspended taking in more refugees from Gaza until they can improve screening, the Foreign Ministry said.

Of course, the extreme right, in an extraordinary turn of strange bed fellows, where the traditional antisemites of France are now Israel’s biggest supporters, and in turn the biggest buddies of Zionists, have jumped on the Nour case to denounce Muslim migration to France. Somehow, in their minds, the genocide in Gaza is directly linked to their claims of “population replacement” in France. This marriage of convenience is not destined to last.

No, not all Jews are racist-supremacists, and genocidal sociopaths. Far from it. Some of the biggest demonstrations in the USA against the accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu are by Jews who chant “Not in our name!“

But when polls show 85% of Israelis support what Netanyahu is doing in Gaza (here and here), and a majority are in fovor of expelling all non-Jews from ‘Greater Israel,’ it is easy to understand the deep hatred Palestinians can have for all Jews. It may be wrong but it is an understandable fact.

Hate the Hand that Beats You

This was a common phenomenon among East European Jews after World War Two. The only Germans the survivors of the Holocaust had met were die-hard Nazis SS and “Erstazgruppen” thugs whose number one task was to eliminate what the Nazis called “Untermensch” (which is, ironically, what Israeli leaders are calling the Palestinians). For these people, there were no good Germans and all deserved to suffer.

The pro-Palestinians activist Norman Finkelstein speaks of his own Jewish Polish parents who survived the concentration camps and their hate for the Germans. When he asked his mother how she felt about the allies terror bombing civilians in Germany’s cities, her response was: “We felt that if we are going to die, we are going to take some of them with us.” Finkelstein added: “It was unthinkable that they would have a kind word to say about Germans. And it was unthinkable that I would quarrel with them on that point.”

It doesn’t help that in France the Jewish community, Europe’s biggest, is overwhelmingly hardline Zionist. Most Jews in France are Sephardi Jews who fled North Africa for France when the countries won their independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s.  The Sephardi held French citizenship, unlike North African Muslims, and were favored by the French administration in all facets of life. It is fair to say that they hold a grudge against their Muslim North African brethren for losing that privileged status.

It is thought that 400,000 of the estimated 500,000 Jews in France are Sephardi.¹ Their sons are most likely to go serve in the Israeli Army rather than join the French Army.  Although North African Jews were not victims of the Nazi Holocaust, they have taken the tragedy as their own and have, nearly to a person, identified with Israel.

France is not an antisemitic country even though, as elsewhere, there are antisemites. Acts of antisemitism have risen since the Gaza genocide began. Zionism seems to thrive off of antisemitism and goes out of its way to fuel it. Many fall into the trap they carefully lay to cry victimhood. Jews in France do not suffer discrimination and their numbers in positions of power and influence far outweigh their one percent in the general population.

If the words used by politicians and the media in France to talk about Palestinians were replaced by “Jews” or “Israelis,” you would find yourself in court very quickly accused of antisemitism and hate speech. This is the general case throughout the global West where the media has been weaponized by the pro-Israel lobbies.

This may be a factor that helped further traumatize a person like Nour Atalla who knew nothing but the oppression, brutality and bombs of “Israeli state terrorism” her whole life. That French media systematically condemn Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” while white-washing the Israelis as “victims“, as if this all started on October 7, 2023, could only further traumatize a victim of a murderous Apartheid regime.

1. There are no ethnic, racial or religious censuses in France. They are illegal so most statistics are just approximate guesses. But France is home to Europe’s biggest Jewish community. ↩︎

Please leave a comment and share your opinion. Writing on this subject in France, Germany, the UK and elsewhere in Europe today is a dangerous enterprise. People are being jailed and fined in Europe for simply denouncing genocide; pro-Palestinian groups like the UK’s Action for Palestine are being banned. It is important to repeat: Anti Zionism is not anti semitism.

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