"Mortified," Léa Salamé returns to Thierry Ardisson's comparison between Auschwitz and Gaza made on the set of "Quelle époque!"

The clarification comes two weeks after the controversy. Léa Salamé returned this Saturday to the comments made on the set of the show Quelle époque! on May 10 by Thierry Ardisson, where he compared the Gaza Strip to the most infamous of concentration camps. "It's Auschwitz, that's it, that's all there is to it," he said about the of the Palestinian territory, which has been constantly bombed and deprived of humanitarian aid since the beginning of the Israeli response to the October 7 massacre.

"I know that this sequence shocked, I know that it hurt people" and "it mortifies me because I reject any trivialization of the ultimate abomination that was the Holocaust," declared the presenter, who acknowledges that the segment of this recorded program should have been cut in the editing.

However, she rejected any "trivialization of the Holocaust," as the League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism had put it the day after the broadcast, the organization denouncing "outrageous comparisons and the prevailing confusionism." For his part, CRIF president Yonathan Arfi commented on Thierry Ardisson's remarks, recalling on X that "no criticism of Israel justifies Nazifying it."

The man in black retracted his remarks the next day, apologizing to "his Jewish friends" while recalling his stance against anti-Semitism. On Saturday evening, Léa Salamé presented herself as a "voice of peace" and assured that she had never "ceased here and throughout [her] career as a journalist to recall the absolute evil that was the Nazi genocide, and to have the last survivors testify."

The presenter, who recalled her family history - "from the Armenian genocide in my maternal family to the Middle Eastern wars of my childhood," took advantage of the sequence to broadcast another part of Thierry Ardisson's intervention, in which he expressed his concern about the fate of the Jews of France, while the number of anti-Semitic acts has exploded since October 7.