The French interior minister has strongly condemned the anti-Semitic insults directed against the finalist of the Miss France 2021 pageant, which is of Israeli origin.
I am “deeply shocked by the rain of anti-Semitic insults,” Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on Twitter, adding that police have already opened an investigation.
April Benayoum, 21, finished second in the televised competition on Saturday, but her moment in the spotlight was quickly affected. When, during an interview, she described herself as Italian-Israeli, the comment sparked an avalanche of outbursts on Twitter. Some insults mentioned the Holocaust.
Benayoum, who was Miss Provence before competing nationally, was born to a Serbo-Croatian mother and an Israeli father.
“It is sad to see this kind of behavior in 2020,” Benayoum told Var-Matin after receiving the insults. – But it doesn’t affect me at all.
The organizers of the contest hurried to condemn the insults and said that it is “totally contrary to the values of the channel, production and competition”.
The Jewish Students’ Union of France said that “Miss France 2021 is no longer a beauty pageant, it is an anti-Semitism pageant.”
The winner of Miss France, Amandine Petit, told BFM television that the comments were “inadequate” and “extremely disappointing”.