French Minister of Higher Education Frédérique Vidal has pledged that “everything will be done” to identify and capture those responsible for antisemitic and anti-Zionist graffiti daubed on the entrance to Scienes Po, the elite political science university in Paris. “Hatred has no place in our Republic,” she said.
Three inscriptions, including the words “Mort a Israel” (“Death to Israel”), were daubed in large black painted letters.
“This morning, hateful inscriptions, some of an anti-Semitic nature, were discovered on the walls of … the main entrance to the Sciences Po campus in Paris. Management strongly condemns this heinous and cowardly act,” Benedicte Durand, the provisional administrator of Sciences Po in Paris, said in a statement.
“Faced with these attacks, Sciences Po will continue its fight more than ever against all forms of discrimination and attacks on human dignity,” he added. “Sciences Po also reiterates its values of openness, debate and plurality of points of view, which will always be at the heart of its university training project, its research and its student life.”
Francis Kalifat, president of CRIF, the umbrella representative group of French Jewish institutions, said it was “decidedly anti-Semitic” and the “weapon of the weak.”
According to Combat Anti-Semitism, which reported on the graffiti on Monday, the vandals wrote anti-Semitic slogans and spray-painted the Arabic term for “infidel” at the entrance to the school.
“We are appalled by this vile vandalism and send our support to the Jewish students who are experiencing this hatred,” the group wrote on its Twitter page. “We urge academic institutions that deny the link between contemporary anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism to learn from this incident and adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in order to prevent students from experiencing such acts of hatred and bigotry on and off campus.”