PARIS (EJP)---The French Jewish community has expressed outrage after people desecrated Muslim graves in France's biggest war cemetery, hanging a pig's head from one tombstone and daubing slogans insulting France's Muslim Justice Minister Rachida Dati.
Two men and a youth have confessed to desecrating the gravestones in the cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette, near Arras, in northern France, where the remains of many thousands of soldiers killed in World War I are buried,
the local prosecutor announced.
The men, both aged 22, and a 16-year-old, admitted carrying out the attack for racist reasons, prosecutor Jean-Pierre Valensi said.
The graves of 52 soldiers were daubed with swastikas and Nazi slogans like "Heil Hitler".
In a communiqué released on Sunday, France’ chief rabbi Joseph Sitruk expressed his indignation. “I condemn these racist, odious and unacceptable acts,” he said, calling for exemplary sanctions against the authors.
"Exemplary sanctions expected for the authors of the desecration would not ease our bitterness," he added.
"All our feelings of solidarity and brotherhood are to the hard-hit Muslim community,” the statement said.
CRIF, the umbrella representative body for French Jewish organizations, expressed its solidarity and support to the Muslim community and said it is "disgusted" at such odious actions "which undermine the basic feelings of respect that we owe to our deaths."
“Whether they involve Muslim, Jewish or Christian tombstones, these actions demonstrate the same ignominious intolerance,” CRIF said.
The National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, a group monitoring anti-Semitic incidents in France, condemned the desecration. "This racist crime and the outrage against a minister of the Republic are grave acts which unfortunately tend to keep recurring."
"We often warned that the new anti-Semitism, which burst on our soil since 8 years, by using revisionist and neo-Nazi slogans, has prepared the bed of the well-known racism of the extreme right which spreads in our country in a worrying manner,” the bureau said.
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