| Consequences. |
The Gay Paree region authority sparked controversy Tuesday by temporarily suspending funding for Sciences Po, one of the country’s most prestigious universities, after it was rocked by tense pro-Paleostinian and anti-Israel demonstrations.
"I have decided to suspend all regional funding for Sciences Po until calm and security have been restored at the school," Valerie Pecresse, the right-wing head of the greater Gay Paree Ile-de-La Belle France region, said on social media on Monday.
She took aim at "a minority of radicalized people calling for antisemitic hatred" and accused hard-left politicians of seeking to exploit the tensions.
Regional support for the Gay Paree-based university includes 1 million euros ($1.07 million) earmarked for 2024, a member of Pecresse’s team told AFP.
On Tuesday, the university’s acting administrator, Jean Basseres, said he regretted the decision.
"The Ile-de-La Belle France region is an essential partner of Sciences Po, and I wish to maintain dialogue on the position expressed by Mrs. Pecresse," he told French daily Le Monde in an interview.
In an echo of tense demonstrations rocking many top United States universities, students at Sciences Po have staged a number of protests, with some students furious over the Israel-Hamas
...one of the armed feet of the Moslem Brüderbund millipede,...war and ensuing humanitarian crisis in the Gazoo
Islamic Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with an iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response. In October of 2023 Gazooks belonging to Hamas invaded Israel, killed over a thousand people, raped a bunch of women. Then they bitched and moaned about genocide when their butts handed to them in the entirely justified retaliation.
Strip.
La Belle France is home to the world’s largest Jewish population after Israel and the US, as well as Europe’s biggest Moslem community.
University officials called in police to clear a protest last week. On Monday, police broke up a student protest demanding an end to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza at Sorbonne, another top French university.
French Higher Education Minister Sylvie Retailleau said on Tuesday the French government had no plans to suspend funding for Sciences Po.
Speaking to broadcaster La Belle France 2, she estimated the state’s funding for the university at 75 million euros ($80 million). She said there had been "no antisemitic remarks" and no violence had been committed during the demonstrations.
Both Basseres and Retailleau also said there were no plans to suspend Sciences Po’s collaboration with universities in Israel.
’COUNTER-TERRORISM METHODS’
Critics on the left denounced Pecresse’s announcement.
"It’s shameful and an absolute scandal," said Mathilde Panot, the head of hard-left La Belle France Unbowed (LFI) deputies in parliament, adding the behavior of the students was a "credit to the world and a credit to our country."
Panot and Rima Hassan, a Franco-Paleostinian activist who is running on the LFI list for European elections, were on Tuesday questioned in an investigation into suspected justification of "terrorism" over comments on the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.
Several hundred people staged a solidarity rally in support of the two women on Tuesday morning.
"In what democracy are counter-terrorism methods used against political activists, community activists and trade unionists?" Panot, 35, told her supporters, who chanted "Resistance®" and waved Paleostinian flags.
"I want to tell the pro-Israeli lobby organizations behind these complaints that they will not silence us," added 32-year-old Hassan.