PARIS: Several hundred people protested against anti-Semitism and “rape culture” in Paris on Thursday after the gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl at the weekend sparked nationwide outrage.
Various anti-racist, rights and feminist groups had called for the demonstration following Saturday’s gang rape.
Dominique Sopo, president of anti-racist group SOS Racisme, said it was “an anti-Semitic crime that chills our blood.”
Anne-Cecile Mailfert, the president of the Women’s Foundation, said the incident reflected a rise in anti-Semitism since the start of the Gaza war.
But it also highlighted “a rape culture to which young people are more likely to subscribe,” having been “bottle-fed pornography,” she added.
Ner Sfez, a 24-year-old Jewish woman, said she had come to protest a crime “at the intersection of sexism and anti-Semitism.”
Hundreds had already protested on Wednesday in Paris and Lyon in central-eastern France after the incident was reported in the news.
The Jewish girl told police three boys aged between 12 and 13 approached her in a park near her home in the northwestern Paris suburb of Courbevoie on Saturday evening, police sources said.
She was dragged into a shed where the suspects beat her and “forced” her to have sex “while uttering death threats and anti-Semitic remarks,” one police source told AFP.
The rape was filmed by one boy and another threatened to kill the girl if she told authorities about her ordeal, police sources said.
Two boys, both aged 13, were charged on Tuesday with gang rape, anti-Semitic insults and violence, and issuing death threats. They have been taken into custody.
A third boy, 12, was charged with anti-Semitic insults and violence and issuing death threats, but not with rape. He was allowed to return home.
France has the largest Jewish community of any country outside Israel and the United States.
At Thursday’s protest, Arie Alimi, a lawyer known for tackling police brutality and the vice president of the French Human Rights League, said anti-Semitism, racism and sexism were “everywhere.”
In the run-up to snap parliamentary polls on June 30 and July 7, he urged voters to prevent the far right from seizing power and “installing a racist, anti-Semitic and sexist policy.”
But he also said he was sad to hear “anti-Semitic remarks from a part of those who say they are on the left.”
President Emmanuel Macron called the parliamentary elections after the far right thrashed his centrist alliance in European polls.
His surprise move has seen part of the right ally itself with the far right and the left form a new alliance, with both sides accusing the other of being anti-Semitic.
Hundreds in Paris protest ‘anti-Semitic’ gang rape
https://arab.news/mnbnv
Hundreds in Paris protest ‘anti-Semitic’ gang rape
- The rape was filmed by one boy and another threatened to kill the girl if she told authorities about her ordeal, police sources said
Germany blames Russia for cyberattack on air safety, election interference
- “We have been able to clearly identify the handwriting behind it and prove Moscow’s responsibility,” said the spokesman
- “Our intelligence findings prove that the Russian military intelligence service GRU bears responsibility for this attack“
BERLIN: Germany on Friday accused Russia of a cyberattack targeting its air traffic control and spreading disinformation ahead of February’s general election, charges dismissed by Russia as “absurd” and “baseless.”
A German foreign ministry spokesman said security services had proof that hacker groups run by Russia’s military intelligence service GRU were responsible for the attack and influence operations.
“Based on comprehensive analysis by the German intelligence services, we have been able to clearly identify the handwriting behind it and prove Moscow’s responsibility,” said the spokesman.
“We can now clearly attribute the cyberattack against German Air Safety in August 2024 to the hacker collective APT28, also known as Fancy Bear,” he told a regular press briefing.
“Our intelligence findings prove that the Russian military intelligence service GRU bears responsibility for this attack,” added the spokesman.
He also said Russia had sought to influence February’s parliamentary election, which was won by the conservatives of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with the far-right AfD scoring its best-ever result in second place.
“Second, we can now state definitively that Russia, through the Storm 1516 campaign, sought to influence and destabilize the most recent federal election,” he added at a press conference.
The spokesman said a GRU-supported Moscow think tank and other groups had spread artificially generated or deepfake images and other content, and that the goal was to divide society and “undermine trust in democratic institutions.”
The Russian embassy in Berlin said in a statement sent to AFP that it “categorically rejected” that Russia was behind any of the activity.
“The accusations of Russian state structures’ involvement in these incidents and in the activities of hacker groups in general are baseless, unfounded and absurd,” the statement said.
According to security sources, much of the material spread by the Storm 1516 campaign involved spurious claims about Merz and other prominent politicians such as former foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and former vice chancellor Robert Habeck, both prominent Greens party members.
AFP’s German Fact Check service debunked two of the other claims in the campaign aimed at subverting trust in elections; namely that the AfD had been left off ballots in the city of Leipzig and that votes for the party in Hamburg were destroyed before they could be counted.
- ‘Pay a price’ -
The foreign ministry spokesman said Germany had “absolutely solid proof” that Russia was behind the operations but added that he could not go into detail because this would involve discussing the work of German intelligence services.
The head of the BfV domestic intelligence agency Sinan Selen said in a statement that “the ‘Storm-1516’ campaign shows in a very concrete way how our democratic order is being attacked.”
“This disinformation ecosystem includes pro-Russian influencers with a wide reach, conspiracy theories and right-wing extremist circles,” Selen said.
The German foreign ministry spokesman warned that Berlin would take “a series of countermeasures to make Russia pay a price for its hybrid actions, in close coordination with our European partners.”
Germany would support “new individual sanctions against hybrid actors on a European level,” he said, without saying who they were.
He added that from January, EU countries would “monitor cross-border travel by Russian diplomats within the Schengen Area. The aim is to facilitate better information exchange and minimize intelligence risks.”
Governments across Europe are on high alert over alleged Russian espionage, drone surveillance and sabotage activities, as well as cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns.
Germany has been Ukraine’s second-biggest supplier of aid since Russia launched its 2022 full-scale invasion and has accused Moscow of being behind drone flights near several European airports in recent months.
