Paris taxi driver faces charges for antisemitic threats against a Jewish family at Orly Airport amid a surge in hate incidents.
by Ben Cohen, The Algemeiner
A taxi driver in Paris has been charged with discrimination and making death threats after he refused to drive a Jewish family who arrived on a flight from Israel at Orly Airport in the French capital.
French media reported on Friday that the family of two parents with their three children were subjected to vicious antisemitic abuse from the driver as they waited in a taxi line outside the airport after disembarking a flight from Tel Aviv on Oct. 11 — four days after the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel in which more than 1,200 people were murdered.
As the family tried to enter the taxi, the driver told the father, “I am not taking you, dirty Jew.” He then added in both French and Arabic, “If I did take you, I would kill you, your wife, and your children.”
A police investigation into the 28-year-old driver, who has not been named, was launched after the father reported his family’s ordeal to the local authorities. A report from the Paris Prefect of Police specified that he had not pursued a complaint “for fear of reprisals.”
The driver appeared in a court in the Paris suburb of Creteil on Nov. 9. charged with making “repeated death threats” based on ethnicity and religion. His trial will not commence until May 6 next year.
One of the taxi companies which uses the driver’s services announced that he had been suspended.
The company, G7, said that while the incident at Orly was not the result of one of its bookings, it had suspended the driver “to show absolute firmness towards all forms of violence and discrimination.”
French Transport Minister Clement Beaune condemned the incident, calling it an “act of absolute gravity” and pledging, “we’re not going to let anything pass.”
Earlier this month, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced that 1,518 acts of antisemitism had been recorded since the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7 — a national record, and more than three times the 436 acts reported during the entirety of 2022.