Interview on Gaza: BFMTV and RMC journalists (SDJ) and RMC are asking to end the presence of Barbara Lefebvre on the antenna

In a joint statement made public this Wednesday, BFMTV and RMC journalists’ companies (SDJ) firmly ask their respective directions to cease any collaboration with the columnist Barbara Lefebvre. They denounce a “hateful” speech and repeated positions which, according to them, “tarnish the reputation and the image” of the two editors. A situation which they describe as “shameful”, while the columnist continues to intervene regularly on the air despite several controversies.

“We expressly ask our respective directions to put an end to its presence on our branches,” write the SDJs in this text, broadcast after its passage in BFM Story Wednesday June 11. For journalists, the remarks made by Barbara Lefebvre go far beyond the opinion debate.

The columnist had notably declared on i24 news: “Civilians in Gaza are as responsible as members of Hamas and Islamic jihad. (…) The Gaza Strip must become a virgin area. These people have to go live elsewhere. An exit deemed particularly serious by the RMC SDJ, which had already published a press release in February. The management had briefly suspended the columnist.

But Barbara Lefebvre continued to appear publicly without denying his remarks. On May 20, she declared that she attended the concert of Israeli singer Eyal Golan, known for having called to “erase Gaza”,. On May 27, she co-animated a gala of support for the Israeli army, punctuated by a quiz where the public was asked to guess the share of civilians Gazaouis killed since the start of the war. “She hosted a” quiz “during which it was offered to the public to guess the share of Gazan Civilians who have been dead since the start of the war,” the SDJ are indignant.

“Freedom of expression is also accompanied by respect for the law, human dignity as well as the prohibition to disseminate false information on the branch,” recall journalists in their text. For them, Lefebvre’s word is no longer an opinion, but a discourse that feeds prejudices and hatred.

Editor’s note: at this stage, the words of Barbara Lefebvre can no longer be considered as simple provocations. When it collectively qualifies the civilians of Gaza as officials, which she calls to “make the Gaza virgin band” and that these ideas are followed by a claim that “these people must live elsewhere”, we dangerously approach a discourse that justifies ethnic cleaning, the erasure of a people, even its elimination. These are no longer out of the outrageous political comments, but a rhetoric that carries the marks of an apology for crime against humanity – and in this case, a genocide.

The media, as a democratic actors, are responsible for drawing clear lines. Tolerating this type of remarks on the antenna amounts to trivializing the unthinkable. The maintenance of Barbara Lefebvre in the audiovisual landscape, despite the repeated alerts of the journalists themselves, constitutes not only an editorial error, but a serious ethical breach.