08-08-2025
French police open investigation after Israeli rabbi threatens Macron
The Paris prosecutor's office on Friday said it had opened an investigation following threatening remarks directed at French President Emmanuel Macron by an Israeli rabbi in an online video.
Rabbi David Daniel Cohen's remarks against the French president were apparently motivated by the decision to formally recognise a Palestinian state.
The rabbi "made several abhorrent threats, notably against the President of the Republic," Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau wrote on X, denouncing the "totally unacceptable remarks".
Retailleau said he had contacted the French government's online Pharos platform monitoring dangerous and criminal online content and "also reported these remarks to the justice system under Article 40 of the criminal procedure code".
In the YouTube video, the rabbi stated: "This French president, he needs to know – he better prepare his coffin. God will show him what it means to want to be so brazen and to want to make statements against God."
By recognising a Palestinian state, which the French government has now slated for September, Cohen says Macron is expressing his "profound anti-Semitism" and "declaring war on God".
Strongly condemning "the abhorrent and intolerable remarks by Daniel David Cohen", France 's Chief Rabbi Haïm Korsia clarified on X that Cohen "has never held any rabbinical position in France, was not trained by nor graduated from France's rabbinical school".
