The footage captured by neighbors is extremely violent. The sound is just as disturbing: The thud of Mourad’s skull hitting the door of a building, as punches rained down on his head. A few minutes earlier, at 10:45 pm on June 26, the 37-year-old man (who requested anonymity) from Cessy, close to the border with Switzerland, stepped out onto his balcony to try to calm down some drunken individuals in the street. But the situation quickly escalated: “Come down, if you’re a man.” Mourad complied, then the racist insults began: “Dirty Arab,” “We are at home here, you’re not. I’m French, it’s my home,” shouted one of the individuals.
The violent words quickly turned into physical assaults when the man in his thirties was caught off guard. “I was in this world before them. I’ve been French longer than they have,” said Mourad, born in France of Tunisian parents, defiantly. On Monday, July 1, the attackers, two men aged 25, were tried and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for racially-motivated violence by the local criminal court.
In recent weeks, in the highly volatile context of the European elections won by the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party on June 9 and the potential victory of the RN in the second round of snap legislative elections on July 7, reports of attacks have multiplied together with racist and homophobic rhetoric. In Avignon, a bakery was set on fire and its walls tagged with the French equivalent of the n-word, “faggot,” and “get out of here,” targeting a 17-year-old apprentice of Ivory Coast origin working there.
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