Samuel Sandler calls for apology from Zemmour

Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters

POLÉMIC – “Everyone talks about the Sandlers, but not in the way I would like.” At 74, Samuel sandler has been fighting for nearly ten years to keep the memory of his family alive, he who lost his son Jonathan and his two grandsons Arié and Gabriel under the bullets of Mohamed Merah, March 19, 2012 in Toulouse. Except that in 2021, it is alongside the terrorist that he sees his name appear. The fault of a certain Eric Zemmour.

In his latest book, the one who is still not officially a candidate for the 2022 presidential election evokes the Sandler family. Not to praise or pay homage to them, but to serve its future program and its ideas. Comparing the attempt of the Merah family to have the terrorist buried in Algeria, to the Sandler children buried in Israel, he writes: “Murderers or innocents, executioners or victims (…) they especially did not choose France, foreigners above all and wanting it. stay beyond death. ”

A phrase noted in particular by Léa Salamé on the set of “On est en direct”, the Saturday evening debate program of France 2.

The starting point above all for a controversy. Because after the sequence between Léa Salamé and Éric Zemmour, journalists asked Samuel Sandler if he felt French, when editorialists and polemicists took advantage of the breach thus opened to evoke the feeling of belonging and the attachment to a nation.

“I’m waiting for Zemmour to call me”

“Everyone talks about the Sandlers, but not as I would like”, laments Samuel Sandler this Saturday, November 13 in the columns of Parisian. And to add to wait for explanations from the one by whom the controversy was invited into his life: “I am waiting for Zemmour to call me and apologize to me. It’s difficult for me.”

Above all, the septuagenarian explains how such a controversy can send him back to an unimportant past. Always at Parisian, he relates in this regard a sentence that his parents repeated to his sister: “If you are first (in class), you will be Lea Sandler. Otherwise, you will remain the little Jewess in the class. ” “A reporter the other day asked me if I felt French. It hurts me. I have an identity card, a passport. What more do you need? ”He also wonders.

On a daily basis, he explains now working in schools where he finds himself in contact with young people whom he hopes to awaken to tolerance. A mission that recently led him to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the high school where he taught Samuel paty. “I was shocked to hear a teacher say that she was afraid of the consequences of her teaching. I told him that, in this case, the terrorists had won, and then we discussed again. ” All without having a message to want to convey to the world. “I just want to testify how bad it is, the extremists.”

See also on the HuffPost: Zemmour fans take back his anti-Islam discourse without filter