Last week, the leaders of France, the UK, and Canada issued a joint statement slamming Israel for its handling of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, demanding that it halt military action in Gaza, and even threatening to implement sanctions on Israel if it doesn’t heed their orders.

A day later, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot sharpened the rhetoric against Israel, claiming that it is turning Gaza into “a place of death, if not a cemetery.”

“He who sows violence reaps violence,” Barrot said about Israel, and threatened to reevaluate the EU-Israel trade agreement.

He also reiterated France’s commitment to recognizing a Palestinian state. “We can’t leave Gaza’s children with a legacy of hate and violence,” he said. “That has to stop — which is why we’re determined to recognize a Palestinian state.”

In response to Barrot’s statements, the Chief Rabbi of Strasbourg, Rabbi Harold Abraham Weill, who was the Rav of Toulouse in 2012, when four Jews, including three children, were murdered in an Islamic terror attack at the Otzar Hatorah school, sent him a sharply worded letter.

Rabbi Weill wrote: “Mr. Minister, there are sentences that we express as if we were throwing a stone in a pool, hoping for newspaper headlines, but some of them become bullets. Your recent words about Israel, ‘He who sows violence reaps violence,’ are not only a diplomatic mistake—they constitute a most serious moral, historical and political error.”

“I am the former rabbi of Toulouse. On March 19, 2012, I did not ‘read’ about the horror in a ministerial report or in the press. I heard the screams, I felt it, I saw children being murdered in front of my eyes. On that day, Mohammed Merah, an Islamist terrorist fueled by hatred of Jews, coldly shot to death Yonatan Sandler, H’yd, his two sons Aryeh, six, and Gabriel, three, and Miriam Monsonego. The massacre was carried out at the Otzar HaTorah Jewish school.”

“And to justify his action, he chillingly mentioned what you said, the same repulsive rhetoric: ‘Israel kills children, I kill children.'”

“Whether a country like Israel, which has been hit by rockets and bereaved by the pogrom on October 7, can still be criticized is a legitimate matter for discussion. But to establish a moral symmetry between those who slaughter children and those who mourn them, between fanatical murderers and a people rooted in survival, is no longer blindness. It is contempt.”

“I implore you to retract these words, not out of political interest, but out of human decency.”

It should be noted that Merah, who claimed allegiance to Al-Qaeda, not only targeted Jews but also fired at French soldiers, justifying his attack by citing France’s ban on Islamic face veils and its role in the war in Afghanistan. Before attacking Otzar HaTorah, he shot an off-duty French Army paratrooper and killed two off-duty uniformed French soldiers and seriously wounded another.

The Muslim population in France is the largest in Europe.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)