Zemmour: French Jews consider far-right Jewish presidency hopeful | Racism News

Eric Zemmour, French far right presidential candidate, has made a career out of controversy as a provocative writer and regular television commentator for nearly 20 years.

From 2019 to 2021, he organized a daily session of the conservative CNews channel, allowing far-right ideas about immigration and Islamism to enter the mainstream.

However, at his first official political rally on December 5, Zemmour was proud of his minority origins, calling himself “the same little Jew from the other side of the Mediterranean.”

Zemmour is of Jewish-Algerian descent, but his comments on Jewish history have been widely criticized as offensive and false.

Some consider the armchair historian (“historien du dimanche”) to be amusing, but most, especially from the Jewish community, have found his statements far from amusing.

Chalom Lellouche, a rabbi from Levallois-Perret near Paris, told Al Jazeera that Zemmour’s words had “insulted and worried us. We cannot rewrite our history today, the history of the Jews of France. “

Zemmour was greatly upset in September when he commented on a dark chapter in French history: the role of the Vichy government in the Holocaust.

In September, himself he repeated One theory he has been claiming since 2014 is that “Vichy protected French Jews and abandoned foreign Jews.”

This argument seeks to present Philippe Pétain, the Vichy head of state, as the savior of French Jews during the occupation of France between 1940 and 1944.

Historians have long been working on the subject and between 1940 and 1945 76,000 Jews were deported from France. Of these, 24,000 were French citizens.

Although France lost much of its Jewish population compared to other European countries, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, historians admit that it was not thanks to Pétain.

Rather, there were a number of complex factors at play, including, according to American historian Robert O Paxton, the lack of resources from Nazi Germany.

As Zemmour’s ahistorical argument about Vichy was revived, it became clear to foreign and French historians.

Paxton told Le Monde that “Vichy law targeted all Jews, without exception,” and that French historian Laurent Joly told Franceinfo that Vichy’s policy was to collaborate and pursue an anti-Semitic policy aimed at eliminating as much as possible the elimination of Jews. a lot. ‘

The French Grand Rabbi, Haïm Corsica, said in October that Zemmour was “sure” anti-Semitic and “obviously” racist.

Zemmour once again wrote that Mohammed Merah, a six- and three-year-old Jewish child of Arié and Gabriel Sandler, who died in Tolosa in 2012, and Myriam Monsonego, an eight-year-old, “were foreigners above all else and wanted to continue like this beyond death.” Because they buried him in Israel.

Zemmour has previously suggested that French citizens with “non-French” names should be renamed in order to assimilate, and analysts believe that he used the example of the Tolosa bombing to question the grieving feelings of bereaved families. To France.

“He uses this story to say,‘ We love the country where we are buried, ’and as a result, he sows doubt,” said Marc Knobel, a French Jewish historian who studies anti-Semitism.

Knobel explains that Zemmour tries to manipulate history into political points and that the spread of his ideas “hurts”.

“My father, who was French, at the age of 10, wore a yellow star. He had to hide. He endured what others suffered, namely discrimination, exclusion from school and all work, arrests, then concentration camps, then deportations. So it’s not a joke about that. “

Despite being Jewish, Zemmour said he admires anti-Semitic figures such as the French novelist, journalist and politician Maurice Barrès, who died in 1923, and Charles Maurras, a patriot and scholar.

Zemmour’s political party for the 2022 election is called “Reconquête”. Critics see the name as a gesture to the Spanish “Reconquista”, a historical period in which Christian forces expelled Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula.

For Knobel, Zemmour’s faith matters little; What connects Zemmour with anti-Semitic history is his far-right ideology.

“His words are very harsh on minorities, immigrants, refugees, because there is a political continuum,” the historian said. “He leads his ideology and turns him into a far-right man.”

Another French far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of Marine Le Pen, said he was more likely to vote for Zemmour than his daughter.

Marine Le Pen, who challenged Emmanuel Macron in the second round in 2017, plans to run for next year’s vote.

Old Le Pen told Le Monde: “The only difference between Eric and me is that he is Jewish. It’s hard to call him a Nazi or a fascist. That gives him more freedom. ”

Under French law, the collection of ethnic data is illegal, so it is impossible to know whether Zemmour is allowed by a minority.

Leading figures in the French Jewish community have said that Jewish voters are confident not to elect a far-right expert.

A recent poll suggests that Zemmour could get about 15 percent of the vote in the April 2022 election, not enough to run in a second round.

Despite his work, political analysts are concerned that Zemmour’s far-right views and distortions of history have become part of the main debate.

On December 8, President Emmanuel Macron was the first French leader to visit Vichy in 1959 from Charles De Gaulle, the central town where Pétain established his collaborationist government.

Although Macron has not yet officially announced his candidacy for the election, the visit was highly symbolic and calculated in light of Zemmour’s statements a month earlier.

Macron did not specifically mention the French expert, but said that history is “written by historians, and it is a good thing to hold on to it. Let’s not manipulate it, let’s not disturb it, let’s not revise it.”

With me the possibility of rising far-right figures In France, Rabbi Lellouche believes that dialogue between religions will be strengthened.

He said he was particularly “angry” with Zemmour’s Islamophobia; Zemmour has previously said that Muslims are “colonizing” French neighborhoods and that Islam is a religion of “terrorism”.

“I don’t have the same conception of Judaism as Eric Zemmour. For me, humanism and universalism are inherent conditions of Judaism. We don’t close the doors, we welcome him. ‘