Trial for Glorifying Terrorism: When MEP Rima Hassan Is Backed by Rabid Antisemites

*This article was originally published in French

The far-left member of the European Parliament is portrayed as the victim of a “crime of Palestine”: prosecuted for her opinions by a government supposedly criminalizing solidarity and curtailing civil liberties. The letter denounces the erosion of the rule of law and presents her case as the symbol of a voice that the authorities are attempting to silence. The hearing has since been postponed until October 19 and 20. But the letter remains—and so does its list of signatories.

That list deserves to be read.  

Let us begin with what the letter carefully avoids saying. It refers to a tweet, to a quotation that supposedly restates a principle enshrined at the heart of international law, and to a voice that someone is trying to silence. It contains neither the name nor the facts.

So let us restore them.

On March 26, 2026, Rima Hassan posted on X—accompanied by Japanese and Palestinian flags—a tribute to Kōzō Okamoto. Okamoto is not a theorist of the right of peoples to self-determination. He is the sole surviving member of the commando that, on May 30, 1972, opened fire with automatic weapons and threw grenades inside the arrivals hall of Lod Airport, near Tel Aviv, killing 26 civilians and wounding nearly 80 others, including a group of Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims. The attack was carried out on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

That is what the trial is about. Not a “crime of Palestine,” but the glorification of a mass murderer.

Once that is established, the meaning of the letter changes. Signing a text that minimizes this tribute and disguises it as a principle of law is not a defense of an oppressed people. It amounts to condoning the glorification of a terrorist attack.

The question, therefore, is no longer why the justice system has taken an interest in Rima Hassan. It is who agreed to sign alongside her—and what the company she keeps reveals about her. For a thread runs through this list, discreet but persistent, and it is the same thread that runs through the case itself: terrorism, renamed “resistance.”

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is not an abstraction in this affair. It is Okamoto’s organization. It is also the organization that reappears from one signatory to another, like a signature within the signatures.

Take Salah Hamouri. He is invariably presented as a French-Palestinian lawyer and human-rights defender subjected to Israeli arbitrariness. What is generally omitted is that he was sentenced to seven years in prison by an Israeli court in 2008—a fact reported by AFP and by the French press itself—for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Ovadia Yosef, Israel’s former Sephardic chief rabbi and the founder of the Shas party.

The plot was devised within the ranks of the same PFLP. Hamouri maintains his innocence and says that he pleaded guilty only to avoid a 14-year sentence. He has nevertheless subsequently been suspected on several occasions by the Israeli security services of renewing his ties with the organization.

This is one of the people now coming to Rima Hassan’s defense, when she is being prosecuted precisely for glorifying a member of the PFLP.

Further down the list is Mohammed El-Kurd. We will return to his antisemitism, but one detail should be noted here because it is no detail at all. Among the figures publicly celebrated by the young Palestinian writer is Leila Khaled, a PFLP member who participated in two hijackings of civilian aircraft, in 1969 and 1970.

The same PFLP, for a third time.

People do not accidentally sign alongside individuals who all orbit the same terrorist organization. They sign because they share something—and here, that something has a name.

Add Omar Al Soumi, co-founder and spokesman of Urgence Palestine, a collective against which the French Interior Ministry has initiated dissolution proceedings. In its notice of intent, the ministry accuses the organization of promoting rhetoric that glorifies the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, calling for an intifada on French soil and inciting hatred against Jews. The collective disputes those allegations.

Al Soumi himself is being prosecuted—although he has not yet been tried—for glorifying terrorism after calling for an “Al-Aqsa Flood” to be spread through France, using the name Hamas gave to its October 7 massacre.

These people did not sign by mistake. Rima Hassan’s cause is theirs, almost word for word. Their presence is not a scandal. It is a matter of consistency.

Widen the circle beyond France and the same face appears again, from one country to another, like a tune one recognizes without having looked for it.

First comes Ilhan Omar, the Democratic representative from Minnesota—in many respects America’s Rima Hassan—with the same ability to flirt with the red line and then plead misunderstanding.

As early as 2012, she wrote that Israel had “hypnotized the world,” reviving the ancient fantasy of the Jew who casts a spell over and manipulates entire peoples. In 2019, she summarized lawmakers’ support for Israel with a phrase that became notorious: “It’s all about the Benjamins”—in other words, about hundred-dollar bills—before naming, in a single word, the organization supposedly buying Congress: AIPAC.

She then accused supporters of Israel of demanding allegiance to a foreign country, reviving the centuries-old suspicion of dual loyalty that has followed Jews throughout the diaspora. The House of Representatives was compelled to pass a resolution condemning antisemitism, and Nancy Pelosi, then the Democratic leader, demanded an apology.

In 2023, Omar was removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee because of this history of remarks deemed antisemitic. Her signature on the letter is therefore anything but insignificant.

Cross the English Channel. Zarah Sultana, a British member of Parliament and co-founder with Jeremy Corbyn of a new radical-left party, has campaigned for a boycott of Israel since her student days.

In June 2025, as Britain prepared to ban Palestine Action under counterterrorism legislation following a series of violent actions against British military facilities, she declared on X: “We are all Palestine Action.” The British Parliament considered the statement serious enough to remove it from the official record.

The mechanism never changes: identify as closely as possible with an organization designated as terrorist by the state, then wrap oneself in freedom of expression the moment anyone objects.

Cross the Atlantic again. Mohammed El-Kurd, now 30, has become the darling of part of the Western left and the first Palestine correspondent for the American magazine The Nation.

At a meeting in London in January 2024, he made remarks that caused an uproar. Some interpreted them as a call to normalize massacres; he maintains that he intended to say the opposite. The controversy alone speaks to the ambiguity surrounding him.

The rest is less open to dispute. In his writings and on social media, he attributes to Israelis an insatiable thirst for Palestinian blood and accuses them of harvesting organs from the dead, reviving the oldest anti-Jewish poison of all: the medieval blood libel, now repackaged for audiences at literary festivals.

He hailed the escape of six terrorists from Gilboa Prison as “a light at the end of the tunnel”; celebrated the Second Intifada and its “martyrs”—the wave of suicide bombings that killed more than a thousand Israeli civilians; and defended, explicitly and in writing, the right to hijack airplanes and throw Molotov cocktails.

El-Kurd denies any antisemitism and insists that his target is Zionism alone. It is exactly the same device used by Rima Hassan.

Remain on the other side of the Atlantic, but move one rung higher on the ladder of respectability, and you find Judith Butler. The American philosopher, a leading figure in gender studies and progressive academic thought, lends the letter her intellectual authority.

She also brings a precedent.

Asked during an event at Berkeley about the relationship between the left and Islamist movements, Butler said it was important to understand Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive” and part of the “global left.”

Faced with the resulting uproar, she argued that the quotation had been taken out of context and said that she did not endorse violence. But the context does not alter the words. She did place two terrorist organizations within the camp of progress—and she is now coming to Rima Hassan’s aid.

Consistency, once again.

And presiding over the whole affair is the veteran: Roger Waters. The former Pink Floyd musician also rejects every allegation of antisemitism.

But a 2010 email, revealed in a 2023 documentary, showed him proposing that the giant inflatable pig used at his concerts should bear a Star of David alongside various slogans, including an anti-Jewish slur. The pig did indeed float above an audience in Belgium bearing the Star of David.

In 2023, in Berlin—the very city from which tens of thousands of Jews were deported—he appeared on stage in an outfit evoking the uniform of an SS officer, brandishing a replica weapon. He also displayed the names of Anne Frank and the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh side by side, prompting German police to open an investigation into alleged Holocaust distortion.

He rejects these interpretations and argues that they are politically motivated. Yet this is another of the international voices summoned to the defense of the member of the European Parliament.

All these people belong on this list. They are at home there.

Their signatures do not show that they made a mistake. They show who Rima Hassan is. People do not gather around a name by accident. They gather because they resemble one another. And what they share here is the allegation itself: the same uninhibited relationship with terrorism, the same way of referring to Jews without ever quite naming them.

Amid this company, however, there remain a handful of names that should never have been there.

Christiane Taubira, the former justice minister, once held the seals of the French Republic and knows better than most what the glorification of terrorism means under French law.

Annie Ernaux, the Nobel Prize-winning author, had already lent her name to the petition opposing the dissolution of Urgence Palestine.

These are the legitimizing figures: the respectable names enlisted to cover for the rest, so that the list appears to be an outpouring of conscience rather than what it really is. Whether they signed negligently, without reading to the end, or in full knowledge of what they were doing, the result is the same. They lent their credibility to a text that trivializes a tribute to a murderer of civilians.

It is appalling, and it does them no honor.

But let us not be mistaken. These respectable signatures are the exception—the packaging. The heart of the list lies elsewhere: in this international coalition of transgression that recognized itself in Rima Hassan and, by rushing to her defense, produced the most accurate portrait of her.

The organizers of the letter wanted to prove that she was an isolated victim, singled out by a government seeking to criminalize speech.

They proved the opposite.

She is not a French exception. She is one link in a chain—and the list of her supporters is less a defense than a confession.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).