Rima Hassan Doesn’t Want to Risk Your Having Sympathy for the Jews

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Rima Hassan is a French-Palestinian, a French citizen, and a member of the European Parliament, representing the far-left anti-Israel and pro-Islam political party, La France Insoumise (LFI), in Strasbourg. She has shown herself to be not terribly concerned with the welfare of Europeans, or even of the French. Her abiding passion Is the “colonial-settler ethnic-cleansing genocidal state of Israel,” and the surpassing need to replace that country in its entirety with a “state of Palestine” extending “from the river to the sea.” She also, and not surprisingly, refuses to accept the figures on antisemitic acts in France, as compiled by the French Ministry of the Interior, believing them deliberately exaggerated to win undeserving sympathy for Jews.

More on Rima Hassan can be found here: “French Lawmaker Under Fire for Pro-Hamas Comments, Questioning Antisemitic Attack Figures,” by Ailin Vilches Arguello, Algemeiner, September 4, 2025:

European Union lawmaker Rima Hassan is drawing criticism after spreading pro-Hamas rhetoric and questioning the reported surge of antisemitic attacks targeting France’s Jewish community, renewing concerns over her promotion of hateful ideology.

In a Tuesday interview with French outlet Thinkerview, Hassan defended the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and asserted the Palestinian terrorist group is justified in denying the Jewish state’s right to exist.

“Historically, Hamas has maintained that Israel has no right to exist, arguing that it has taken our lands and settled on them. In this regard, they are correct,” said Hassan, a 33-year-old lawyer and activist who last year became the first French-Palestinian member of the European Parliament, the EU’s law-making body.

“Oct. 7 is something that must be punished, yes, but it should be put into context before being condemned,” she continued.

By “putting into context” the October 7 attack, Rima Hassan means we should understand that the Gazans have been held prisoner in the Strip, under suffocating conditions, apparently forgetting that every last Israeli had left Gaza in 2005. She claims that the Israelis continue to “occupy” the land they stole from the Palestinians, not just in Gaza, but also in Judea and Samaria, again choosing to ignore the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine. She claims that out of desperation, Hamas was engaged in justified “resistance” against an overwhelmingly more powerful enemy when it attacked on October 7, 2023. That puts the Hamas attack, according to the terror group’s apologist, MEP Rima Hassan, into the proper “context.”

This is not Hassan’s first instance of seemingly endorsing Hamas’s violence against Israelis.

The politician, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, has repeatedly faced controversies and investigations for promoting hateful speech.

“We have over 100 years of colonization, we are being massacred, we have over a million martyrs, and these French people don’t seem to understand that we want our independence,” Hassan said during the interview….

What “100 years of colonization”? Is she referring to the British who administered the Mandate for Palestine set up by the League of Nations in 1922, for the express purpose of creating a Jewish state in all the land “between the river and the sea”? Or does she mean that the Jews who settled on state and waste lands in Mandatory Palestine, as they were encouraged to do by Article 6 of the Mandate, and on lands they bought, at exorbitant prices, from Arab landowners, are “colonizers”? Can Jews be accused of colonizing land on which they have lived for 3500 years, some 2000 years before a single Arab appeared in that land?

What does Hassan mean when she says “we are being massacred”? Has the IDF been “massacring” people in Gaza? Of course not. Instead, it has made tremendous efforts to warn Gazans to leave areas about to be targeted, dropping millions of leaflets, sending millions of text messages, making millions of robocalls, all to minimize civilian deaths? Out of a total population of 2.2 million, fewer than 20,000 Gazan civilians have died from combat-related causes.

It is the Palestinian Arabs who have been guilty of massacres of Jews, in Jerusalem during the Nebi Musa riots in 1920, in Hebron in 1929, during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1938, in Jerusalem in April 1948, with the attack on the Hadassah Medical Convoy’s doctors and nurses as they made their way from Jerusalem to Mt Scopus, during both the First and, especially, the Second Intifada, where more than a thousand Israeli civilians were murdered. And, of course, there is the massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the greatest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust.

Hassan also claims “we have over a million martyrs.” More nonsense. In the 1948 war, fewer than 10,000 Palestinian Arabs were killed. In 1967, a total of 15,000 Arabs — not Palestinians but Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians — died during the Six-Day War. In the 1973 Yom Kippur war, 15,000 Arabs — Egyptians and Syrians — were killed. Again, no Palestinian deaths. Even if we were to count Egyptians and Syrians as “Palestinian Arabs,” the total comes to less than 40,000. And if we were to limit our count to Palestinian Arabs, the total would be fewer than 10,000. Yet Rima Hassan wants us to believe that the Palestinians have had a “million martyrs.” She hopes no one will bother to count.

.She expressed distrust in the figures reported by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) – the main representative body of French Jews – on antisemitism.

“Yes, there have been more antisemitic acts, but honestly, I do not trust the CRIF’s figures at all,” the French lawmaker said….

But the CRIF figures Hassan says she “doesn’t trust” come directly from the French Ministry of the Interior. Does she also distrust the French government?

What does Rima Hassan have to say about the upsurge in antisemitic violence by Muslims in France? Nothing. Nor has she said anything about the murders of French Jews by Muslims in the recent past —not a word of sympathy for Ilan Halimi, Mireille Knoll, Sarah Halimi, Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two sons Arye, 6, and Gabriel, 3, Miriam Monsonego, 8, and many more. Why does she claim that the statistics on antisemitic acts, though compiled by the Ministry of the Interior, must be exaggerated? She is worried, of course, that if the numbers become widely known, it will increase sympathy for “the Jews.” And for Rima Hassan, that would never do.