SOS Racisme was created one year after the
March for Equality and Against Racism, considered to be the first national anti-racist movement in France, which took place in 1983. Most participants were young people from North African immigration, who protested against racist crimes. In 1984, a second march was organised, led by
Farida Belghoul. That same year, the socialist government helped to create SOS Racisme, a more moderate anti-racist organisation, without the main leaders of the two marches, who denounced a "hijacking" of the movement by the
Socialist Party. The
UEJF, a Jewish student organisation, also played an important part in the creation of SOS Racisme. The guiding principle of the association, brotherhood, is represented by the yellow hand logo upon which is written
Touche pas à mon pote. This slogan, which means "Hands off my pal!", was adopted upon the creation of the organization in October 1984. SOS Racisme benefitted from open support from the PS in the 1980s, and many members of SOS Racisme became high-level PS politicians:
Harlem Désir, president of SOS Racisme from 1984 to 1992, is today a
Member of the European Parliament for the PS; Fodé Sylla, president of SOS Racisme from 1992 to 1999 was at that time a member of the PS (and later a Member of the European Parliament for the
Communist Party, PCF); his successor,
Malek Boutih, was national secretary of the PS in charge of social issues (including immigration-related issues); another president of SOS Racisme, , started political activism in the UNEF-ID socialist student trade-union, before taking membership in the youth organisation of the PS. SOS Racisme believes that, to put an end to racial discrimination, changes must be made to methods of
urban planning and to education. Since the early 1990s, it has denounced the
ghettos that are on the outskirts of big cities. The association advocates
integration, and often cites examples of successful
immigrants or their descendants. At the turn of the century, SOS Racisme declared support for the
Israeli–Palestinian peace process that was interrupted by the
Second Intifada. It also denounced a resurgence of
antisemitism in a book jointly published in 2002 with the
UEJF, a Jewish student organization. Since then, the two organizations have continued to collaborate. Their
Rire contre le racisme event (Laughing against racism) is held annually since 2004 at the
Zenith concert hall in
Paris, where it has featured performances by comedians such as
Michel Boujenah,
Dany Boon,
Jean-Marie Bigard and
Gad Elmaleh. In 2003, they also founded a joint student association called FEDER (
Fédération des Enfants de la République) which runs for office in university elections. In February 2006, during the
Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, SOS Racisme organized public meetings to defend their publication.
Bankruptcy and criminal proceedings against Norwegian branch Its Norwegian branch SOS Rasisme was by far the largest chapter of SOS Racisme and claimed to have 40,000 members and 270 local branches. SOS Rasisme was closely affiliated with and largely controlled by the
Workers' Communist Party and later by the Maoist party
Serve the People – The Communist League (the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist faction which split from the Workers' Communist Party in 1997 as a result of an internal conflict), and was widely described as a
front organization for those communist parties. SOS Rasisme went bankrupt in 2013 after being convicted of defrauding the government by exaggerating its membership, and 8 of its leaders, including its last President and its last Secretary-General, were indicted for
fraud,
embezzlement and
money laundering in 2015 and subsequently convicted and sentenced to prison in 2016. SOS Rasisme faced strong criticism from the media in Norway and from all mainstream political parties over several years due to its dominance by Maoists, and SOS Racisme has been widely considered politically extreme in Norway and was shunned by some other anti-racist organisations. == Presidents of French chapter ==