France’s Yellow-Vest Protests Have Become a Vehicle for Anti-Semitism https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2019/03/frances-yellow-vest-protests-have-become-a-vehicle-for-anti-semitism/

March 29, 2019 | Michel Gurfinkiel
About the author: Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute and a contributing editor at the Sun. He served as editor-in-chief of Valeurs Actuelles from 1985 to 2006.

In an in-depth analysis of the causes of the protest movement that spread throughout France in November and has continued since then, Michel Gurfinkiel notes the anti-Semitic currents flowing through it. He takes as one example the comedienne known as La Bajon, who a few years ago turned from conventional stand-up fare to political YouTube videos often laden with anti-Semitism:

[La Bajon] intuited quite correctly that a very large constituency in France—which coalesced as the Yellow Vests—relishes [the] mixture of anti-capitalism, tax revolt, religious nostalgia, tales of murderous or suicidal violence, and—last but not least—conspiratorial anti-Semitism [she presents in her videos]. . . .

The extent to which anti-Semitism has pervaded the French protest movement is appalling. A photograph taken on December 20 from a car window, and then circulated on social media, showed a typical highway interchange squatted by Yellow Vests. Two large banners had been posted for the benefit of the passing traffic. One said: “To Disobey Unfair Laws Is Everybody’s Ethical Duty.” The second and more prominent banner, was just a list of names: “Macron=Drahi=Attali=Banques=Media=Sion.”

Which is shorthand for: “President Macron is the puppet of Patrick Drahi, the French-Israeli high-tech tycoon who was one of his earliest supporters, and of Jacques Attali, a pop philosopher of Jewish descent who once served as the socialist president François Mitterrand’s chief of staff and currently writes an influential pro-Macron column at L’Express, one of the weekly press flagships; both Drahi and Attali are in turn creatures of the Jewish banks that rule the world and the media from their stronghold in Israel, as explained in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” To make things even more graphic, the A’s were drawn as Free-Masonic triangles, and the S’s as runic Nazi letters. Three more fantastic strata are thus added to the existing anti-Semitic slogans: Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, Judaism as the new Nazism, and, by implication, the Holocaust as a hoax. . . .

On March 16, during extremely violent riots on the Champs-Elysées, Palestinian flags were prominently displayed. According to [a] poll . . . released on February 11, 44 percent of the Yellow Vests believe in a “worldwide Zionist conspiracy” compared with 22 percent of average French citizens.

Read more on Standpoint: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/7466