An association has filed a complaint in Paris for discrimination against the advertising agency Mediatransports: it accuses it of not having agreed to display a campaign in support of Hamas hostages in the Paris metro, AFP learned on Thursday from a source close to the matter. .
The attack by the Palestinian movement Hamas, perpetrated on October 7 in Israel, resulted in the death of 1,206 people on the Israeli side, according to an AFP count. Of the 251 people taken hostage on October 7, 97 are still detained in the Gaza Strip, 34 of whom were declared dead by the Israeli army.
October 7, 2024 marked one year since the massacres. The “Tous 7 Octobre” association explained that it contacted Mediatransports, France’s leading public transport authority, at the beginning of September to purchase “around ten digital screens in order to broadcast the faces of the 101 remaining hostages” in the Paris metro, according to the complaint, filed Tuesday and of which AFP became aware.
Except that Mediatransports refused to broadcast “the posters of 99 of the 101 hostages”, invoking the “principle of neutrality” and explaining that it could only display French hostages. However, the association recalls representing “indiscriminately all hostages held by Hamas”, regardless of nationality. And therefore accuses Mediatransport of discrimination. “The broadcast of the visuals represented too great a risk of disturbing public order in the current national and international geopolitical context,” Mediatransports explained to AFP on Thursday. “This is the reason why we indicated to the association that only visuals concerning French hostages could have been broadcast,” added the management, citing in particular a campaign by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (Crif), showing the French hostages.
The “principle of neutrality” is “a smokescreen”, accuses the association, represented by lawyers Robin Binsard and Rebecca Childs: the management, belonging “in no way” to the public service, is not required to do so , and above all Mediatransports has already “promoted certain militant messages”, such as an old campaign to alert about the more than 5,000 Colombian hostages then held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).
“The comparison with previous operations does not allow us to make an analogy,” defended the management, estimating that the campaign of support for the FARC hostages “did not raise a risk of disturbance to public order”.
