Organisers canceled a conference at a Paris university featuring an address by Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut following the threat of protests.
“Security is our top priority and it’s preferable to take no risks,” organisers of the event at Sciences Po university said.
The conference on Europe’s future was to include other speakers, but they were not named in the letter threatening protests. Finkielkraut was accosted recently on a Paris street during a yellow vest protest for being a “Zionist,” in an incident that drew widespread condemnation.
In their statement, the authors of the call to demonstrate outside the conference at Sciences Po wrote: “We cannot accept Finkielkraut’s ‘modern Europe’ and his islamophobic, racist, sexist and homophobic rhetoric.”
The university recently cancelled an event on “Israeli apartheid,” which the protesters alleged as showing a pro-Israeli bias by faculty.
The protesters were from a group named for Clement Meric, an anti-fascist activist killed by skinheads in 2013.
Finkielkraut is a centrist thinker who has criticised the far right, as well as Muslim communities and far-left activists, for failing to integrate. A best-selling author, Finkielkraut entered the pantheon of French academia in 2016 when he was admitted into the Académie Française, a council of 40 greats elected for life.
A Zionist supporter of Israel, he is a member of the dovish J Call group styled after the J Street lobby in the United States.
