French Town Ordered To Yank ‘Terrorist’ Plaque

Majdi Al Rimawi, right, was convicted of plotting to assassinate an Israeli minister. Image by getty images

By JTA December 24, 2014

A Paris suburb must remove a plaque honoring a convicted Palestinian terrorist, a French judge ruled.

Municipal authorities in Bezons were ordered to take down the plaque for Ihrima Majdi Al Rimawi, who was convicted in the 2001 assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi in Jerusalem.

The judge told the Communist Party-dominated Bezons Council on Dec. 19 that it had one month to remove the plaque dedicated to Rimawi, who has been associated with several terrorist attacks and is serving a life sentence plus 80 years in an Israeli jail.

In response to a complaint filed by Sammy Ghozlan of the National Bureau for Vigilance against Anti-Semitism, the judge also invalidated the Bezons Council’s February 2013 decision to grant Rimawi honorary citizenship.

Rimawi’s murder of Zeevi in October 2001 was carried out in the name of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the group that claimed responsibility for last month’s terror attack at a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem.

At the Bezons ceremony to honor Rimawi in February 2013, Dominique Lesparre, the town’s Communist mayor, said that Israel is waging a “genocide” against the Palestinians.

Rimawi’s wife is Fathia Barghouti, a former mayor of Bani Zeid, a village in the West Bank where Rimawi lived until he was imprisoned in 2002. Barghouti attended the plaque ceremony last year.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO