On December 9th and 10th, the new piéce will be staged in Mont-Saint-Aignan. Meanwhile, the pièce had a fairly successful run at the Avignon festival that ended last week.
In France, where 40,000 Jews left for Israel in ten years, where the kippah is becoming a forbidden symbol in the streets, where 12 Jews have lost their lives in five years of terror attacks, where the relatives of the murdered Jewish woman named Sarah Halimi are waiting for justice, a butcher of innocent Jews becomes the symbol of the excluded and the victims of the French society.
The pièce “Moi, mort, è l’aime, comme vous aimez la vie”, written by Algerian Mohamed Kacimi and produced by the Rouen National Drama Center, tells of the last hours of Mohammed Merah, the terrorist who killed in cold blood three French soldiers, before gunning down two Jewish brothers, their father and a seven-year-old girl at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev wrote to her French counterpart, Françoise Nyssen, asking to ban the work on the Jihadist. “We should forbid performances and theatrical performances that encourage feelings of forgiveness and sympathy for terrorists”.
The relatives of Merah’s victims also requested the cancellation of the work, while Latifa Ibn Ziaten, the mother of a soldier killed by the Jihadist, told the France Presse: “I am for the freedom of music, theater, but not in that way”. The subtext of the pièce is clear: “It is urgent to reflect on the causes of violence in a society that is its source and victim.”
In the text on Merah there is a question: “Why does our society today create such monstrosities?”
Meyer Habib, a deputy of the Republic and a prominent exponent of the French Jewish community, condemned the theatrical. Speaking with Le Figaro, he said: “Humanizing the murderer is already an excuse [for hid deeds]”.
The prestigious Avignon festival welcomed this scandalous text but censored “The letter to the Islamophobia Frauds”, Charlie Hebdo’s late director’s book, Stephane Charbonnier, excluded this summer from Avignon. In a letter to Libération on July 30, the authors of the pièce on Charbonnier slammed the play on Merah as a “fragile and alienated victim of the ‘racist system’”.
You are not allowed to turn the killing of three trivial Jews, followed by the massacre at the Hyper Cacher, into a reason for meditation on racism and marginalization in French society. It is pure anti-Semitism travested as art.