French singer releases song about Hyper Cacher Jewish murders
Published April 18, 2016
Members of France’s Jewish community wave Israeli and French flag, and light memorial candles at a ceremony outside the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris, a year after four Jewish shoppers were killed in a terror attack on the store. (Flash90 photo/Serge Attal)
(JTA) — A French singer-songwriter who compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Armenian Holocaust released a song titled “Hyper Cacher,” 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 and who in 2004 received the prestigious “grand medal of the French chanson” from the Acadmie Francaise, released the song about the Hyper Cacher store in his latest album, titled “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 his song about 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.
Islamist Amedy Coulibaly on Jan. 9, 2015 killed Yohav Hattab, Yohan Cohen, Philippe Braham and François-Michel Saada at the kosher supermarket, a day after he killed a police officer south of Paris. He carried out the attacks in coordination with Said and Cherif Kouachi, who earlier that week killed 12 people at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The killings prompted more than a 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.”
