Despite His Disturbing Pronouncements on Zionism and the Holocaust, French Jews Are Ready to Vote for Eric Zemmour

Dec. 13 2021

In America, one thing most Jews and most adherents of the political right agree on is support for Israel. But in France, things are very different, as evidenced by the case of Éric Zemmour—a media personality and author of such books as The Suicide of France—who recently declared his candidacy for the presidency, and appears committed to outflanking the far-right National Front from the right. Michel Gurfinkiel writes:

Since Marine Le Pen took over the National Front in 2011, she has been eager to distance it from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extremism and to shear it of neo-Fascist or anti-Semitic undertones. Yet M. Zemmour has happily done the opposite. . . . Zemmour’s drift to the far right was compounded by his awkward—or even bizarre—stand on Jewish issues. On the one hand, he is the most traditional Jew ever to have entered French politics. Until college, he was educated only at Jewish schools, and he raised a somehow observant Jewish family.

On the other hand, Zemmour disclaims many of the political attitudes associated with Judaism: not just human-rights liberalism, but Holocaust awareness, Zionism, and pro-American conservatism as well. This led him to controversial, or even at times scandalous, statements on the Dreyfus case, the Vichy regime’s handling of French Jews during World War II, or even the right of the Sandler family, as French Jews, to bury in Jerusalem their children murdered by a jihadist terrorist in 2012.

Whether Zemmour did this tactically, to strengthen his image as a French patriot, or out of deeply held convictions remains to be seen. In the meantime, many conservative French Jews—and French Jewry is quite politically conservative nowadays—are ready to vote for him no matter what, even if many of the right-wing Gentiles who like his books may be unprepared for a Jewish president.

Read more at New York Sun

More about: Eric Zemmour, France, French Jewry, Israel & Zionsim, Marine Le Pen

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict