French President François Hollande announced tough new measures to combat anti-Semitism on Tuesday as he marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp with a visit to Paris's Holocaust memorial, reports FRANCE 24.
"France is your homeland", Hollande told representatives of the Jewish community gathered at the Shoah Memorial in central Paris, Europe's leading Holocaust documentation centre, which uses the Hebrew term "Shoah" (catastrophe) to refer to the Nazi genocide of European Jews.
The French president said the rise of anti-Semitic acts in France was "an unbearable reality", after new figures showed these doubling last year.
He said new measures would be implemented to fight anti-Semitism and racism in France, which has also witnessed a growing number of verbal and physical attacks aimed at France's large Muslim, black and Arab communities.
“The government is taking measures to make sure synagogues, as well as Jewish businesses and schools, are protected,” he said.
“But I want to go further than this,” he added, saying that racist and anti-Semitic comments, so far dealt with under media laws, would become criminally aggravating acts written into the French penal code.