Simone Rodan-Benzaquen
WSJ, Aug. 6, 2025
“France’s humanitarian duty is real. But so is its duty to protect citizens—especially Jews, who are facing hostility without recent precedent.”
A 25-year-old woman from Gaza strolled across the manicured campus of the Lille Institute of Political Studies late last month, smiling for French television cameras. Nour Atalla seemed to be the perfect story: a promising master’s student on a state scholarship, fleeing war back home, housed by the university’s director, and embraced by Sciences Po Lille, one of France’s most prestigious institutions.
But her online presence told a different tale.
In September 2024, on a now-defunct X account, Ms. Atalla shared a video of a Hitler speech and added: “Kill their young and old. Show them no mercy. . . . kill them everywhere.” These posts weren’t adolescent provocations. They were recent, public and chilling. They belonged to someone the French state chose not only to admit but to fund, protect and elevate.
Online reports also cite a post from Oct. 7, 2023, in which they say Ms. Atalla wrote: “We must do everything we can to match the amount of blood shed.” That same day, Ms. Atalla reportedly proposed online that Algerians and Moroccans in Paris “organize a party with bedbugs and insects”—which some interpreted as a bizarre yet thinly veiled incitement against Jews.
The scandal quickly became political. The French Foreign Ministry—led by Jean-Noël Barrot—had issued Ms. Atalla her visa and scholarship in March. After her posts drew attention last week, Sciences Po Lille canceled her enrollment. …SOURCE