Marine Le Pen Takes a Stand against Holocaust Denial

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front (FN), called for banning her father, the party’s founder, from running for regional office after he engaged in rhetoric of implicit Holocaust denial. The elder Le Pen, who has a long history of anti-Semitism, at first refused to back down but then withdrew his candidacy. His decision, writes Nicholas Farrell, is a sign that the daughter may finally be succeeding in distancing the FN from the ugliest aspects of her father’s legacy:

When Jean-Marie Le Pen says, as he so often does, that the Holocaust is “a detail of history,” he tries to justify the remark by saying that he is stating a fact rather than expressing an opinion—but it does not wash: it is, of course, an opinion. His real target, I am convinced, though, is not the Jews but the big banks and of course Israel. This puts him in perfect tune with standard left-wing anti-Zionism: it’s not the Jews (good); it’s the Israelis (bad). . . .

Whatever. For someone like Jean-Marie Le Pen even to mention the Jews is fatal. This is why his daughter has insisted that the FN abandon all discussion of the Jews unless positive. What Marine Le Pen has not abandoned, though, is the FN’s hostility to rampant immigration and radical Islam. Indeed, she defends the Jews against Muslim anti-Semitism.

Read more at Spectator

More about: Anti-Semitism, France, French Jewry, Holocaust denial, Marine Le Pen, Politics & Current Affairs

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society