French Balladeer Releases Elegy to Kosher Market Terror Victims
A French singer-songwriter who compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Armenian Holocaust released a song about the murder of four Jews at a Paris kosher supermarket last year.
Renaud Sechan, a gravel-voiced balladeer who has sold millions of copies from his 16 albums, released “Hyper Cacher,” the name of the store, on his latest album, “Renaud,” which hit stores earlier this month.
“He fired all around with hate-filled eyes on anyone wearing a kippah, on children, old, some cried, their eyes held up high, others hid where they could,” reads one of the song’s verses.
In his 1985 song “Miss Maggie,” a diatribe against the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Renaud wrote: “Palestinians and Armenians testify from their graves that a genocide is masculine, like the SS, a bull fighter.”
But in “Hyper Cacher,” he struck a more conciliatory note, acknowledging Jerusalem and Israel as being the Jewish homeland.
“May they rest in Jerusalem, on their ancestral home, in the sun of Israel, I want to devote this poem to them, tell them they are dear to us, that we will never forget them,” the lyrics read.
The Jan. 9, 2015 killings following a day after a police officer was killed by the same Islamist gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, and the terrorist attack that killed 12 at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, prompted more than 1 million Frenchmen and their supporters to march through Paris to express solidarity with the French republic’s values and commemorate the dead. However, many French Jews noted with disappointment no such mobilization occurred in 2012, when four Jews were murdered by an Islamist in Toulouse.
One of the songs in the new album by Sechan — who is better known in France simply as Renaud – is titled “I hugged a cop,” about his gratitude to law enforcement officers targeted by Islamists like Coulibaly and Mohammed Merah, the killer of three soldiers near Toulouse in 2012, who later murdered four Jews at a Jewish school.
A left-wing activist who used to demonstrate with anarchists, Renaud sings in the song about police officers: “I never would’ve though 30 years ago that instead of hurling bricks at them, I would put my arms around one of them.”
Marc Knobel, a historian who runs the studies department of CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities, wrote in an op-ed Friday that although he has had disagreements with Renaud in the past, he was “deeply moved” by the song about Hyper Cacher and the policemen.
“You made me weep,” Knobel wrote in the Huffington Post op-ed, which he addressed to Renaud, “because Hyper Cacher and the cops needed to be sung about, and you were the only one who did, because no one else would have dared to.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
