Friday, July 22, 2022
From Ian:
Mark Regev: Will France's National Assembly persist antisemitism?
Mark Regev: Will France's National Assembly persist antisemitism?
In June, French voters elected 577 members of the National Assembly. Of those, 131 now represent the hard-left bloc of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and a further 89 are from Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. Both have been accused of antisemitism.Anger as Resolution Denouncing Israeli ‘Apartheid’ Is Proposed by Far-Left Deputies in French National Assembly
Marine Le Pen claims that neither she nor her party harbor any hostility towards Jews. During the elections, she even proclaimed that the National Rally is best positioned to “protect French people of the Jewish faith.” Many remain unconvinced.
The political movement she leads was founded in 1972 by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, notorious for abhorrent remarks about the Holocaust. In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history.” And in 2005, he wrote that the Nazi occupation of France “was not particularly inhumane.”
Marine Le Pen has purposely endeavored to distance her political movement from the extremism and Holocaust revisionism of her father, but while some see this as a genuine ideological transformation, others fear her strategy is to sugarcoat an ultra-right agenda.
Fueling such skepticism are some of Marine Le Pen’s own comments. In 2014, she stated that “antisemitism is due to the implantation of Islamism in our country,” effectively whitewashing historic homegrown French antisemitism – from the expulsions and massacres of the Middle Ages, through to ideologues Edouard Drumont and Charles Maurras, and the collaborationist Vichy regime.
Like Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon piously denies any anti-Jewish prejudice. After all, as a radical socialist, he advocates the equality of humankind and rejects all ethnic hatreds.
Yet, when it comes to the Jews, Mélenchon also has a history of disquieting pronouncements. In 2021, he was quoted as saying that the murder of three Jewish children in Toulouse a decade earlier was “planned in advance” so as “to point fingers at Muslims.”
In 2020, Mélenchon seemed to repeat the historic deicide charge, saying: “I don’t know if Jesus was on the cross. I know who put him there; it seems that it was his own compatriots.”
Furthermore, Mélenchon has a serious problem with the Jewish state. He has espoused a radical anti-Zionist narrative that sees Israel as an illegitimate colonialist implant created at the expense of the country’s indigenous Palestinian inhabitants.
Far-left deputies in the French parliament have proposed a viscerally anti-Zionist resolution targeting Israel, accusing the Jewish state of practicing apartheid and committing war crimes against Palestinians under occupation.Melanie Phillips: The urgent need for Jewish leadership
Titled “Condemn Israel’s Institutionalization of an Apartheid Regime Against the Palestinian People,” the motion was signed by 38 members of the National Assembly who represent the newly formed far-left NUPES coalition. NUPES enjoyed a strong showing in June’s legislative elections, winning 131 of the chamber’s 577 seats.
Submitted on July 13, the 24-page motion became a subject of public debate only on Friday morning, after a dissenting NUPES parliamentarian, Jérôme Guedj, denounced its contents in a thread on Twitter.
Guedj said that he had first learned of the resolution’s existence on Thursday. “If it is always legitimate to challenge the policy of a government, I do not understand how the abolition of a state advances peace by a millimeter,” he wrote, referring to the resolution’s presentation of Israel as a colonial entity lacking in legal and moral legitimacy.
“The resolution maintains that Israel is an apartheid regime, calls for the legalization of the boycott of Israeli products and pleads for the official recognition of Palestine,” Guedj added. “If I can defend this last point, the first two are unacceptable. I condemn them.”
The resolution argues that “since its creation in 1948, Israel has pursued a policy aimed at establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and expanding its control over the territory for the benefit of Israeli Jews.”
It asserted that following Israel’s victory against a combined force of Arab armies in Six Day War of June 1967, “Israel extended this policy to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Currently, all territories under Israeli control remain administered with the aim of favoring Israeli Jews at the expense of the Palestinian population, while successive Israeli governments have continued to deny the right of return to Palestinian refugees for more than seven decades.” (h/t Rodin New York)
Two things need to change if the Jewish people is properly to defend itself. Jews need to be taught better about their own people, culture and history. And there needs to be a more effective strategy to fight their enemies by getting off the defensive back foot and onto a pro-active and aggressive front foot.
Precious little of this is done at present because the diaspora leadership is woefully inadequate: timid, servile and anxious to fit in.
In Britain, Jewish leaders publicly fought the far-left Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn because they felt safe in the knowledge that most people in the country reviled him as a dangerous extremist.
But they refuse to fight Muslim antisemitism for fear of being called “Islamophobic”. Nor will they declare the demonstrable legitimacy of Israeli residency in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria — not least because so many of these leaders are ignorant of this themselves.
In America, Jews are increasingly living in a state of siege. Jews have been murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego and Jersey City. Visibly Jewish pedestrians are beaten regularly in the streets of American cities and towns.
Jewish students are bullied and harassed on campus. The Democratic party exhibits either indifference to all this or even tolerates the virulent anti-Jewish prejudice in “The Squad” of congresswomen.
American Jewish leaders either lend support to such people and their ideologies, or else behave like rabbits frozen in the headlights. Now a grassroots movement has just launched to hold their feet to the fire
The Jewish Leadership Project has a ten-point “action list” to mobilise a more effective Jewish defence. It demands that major Jewish organisations “cease subordinating the safety and welfare of the Jewish-American community to partisan ideology”.
The project’s co-founder, Avi Goldwasser, said: “Many once-venerable Jewish organisations have primarily become front groups for progressive political interests. The significant danger the Jewish community faces today is an indictment of these institutions and their leadership.”
All over the west, people have been left left demoralised and disillusioned by an entire political establishment that appears determined to send western civilisation off the edge of the cliff.
They’ve been rising up against this using whatever opportunities come their way. In Britain, it was Brexit; in America, it was the election of former president Donald Trump.
It’s time the Jewish people told their own diaspora leaders “enough is enough”, and demand they start properly to defend the Jewish people rather than their own exalted positions.
