Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. He decrypts current events for FigaroVox every week. He has just published *Journal de guerre.
C’est l’Occident qu’on assassine* (Fayard). We are a free and democratic country. We cannot stop the “Insoumis” from refusing to consider Hamas as a terrorist movement, even though it is classified as such by all democratic countries, including France.
We cannot prevent their members of Parliament, elected members of the Republic’s Parliament, from attending a republican ceremony in tribute to the victims of terrorism. We couldn’t prevent Danielle Obono from describing Hamas as a resistance movement on Sud Radio. Many MPs from France Insoumise welcomed a member of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) as a hero at Roissy, despite it being considered a terrorist by France and being convicted by Israeli justice after admitting to attempting to assassinate a rabbi.
If we cannot legally prevent this ultimate and cynical hypocrisy, I suggest turning our backs on the hypocrites. Their party leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, could not be prevented from holding the Chief Rabbi of England responsible for the electoral defeat of his friend Jeremy Corbyn. This same Jean-Luc Mélenchon who claimed that the Jewish people were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
The behavior of many of its members has revived the most traditional anti-Jewish discourse, held yesterday by the far right. Personally, I reject the idea that this is only electoral baseness. The Jew is no longer seen as an eternal victim but as a privileged white.
Furthermore, he is a settler in Palestinian territory. Therefore, any violence against the latter by the former is a sanctified act of resistance, regardless of the inevitable consequences. The attitude of France Insoumise will not only have violated the most elementary morality or the most natural sense of compassion.
It will have legitimized the Islamist anti-Semitism in the suburbs, which has repeatedly massacred French Jews. To worsen the current climate, the President of the Republic, probably frightened by the law of numbers and burned by the recent violent riots, believed he had to justify his absence from the otherwise very wise demonstration against anti-Semitism by his desire to protect national unity and not offend the Muslim community… And now the MPs from the “Insoumis” party, against the wish expressed by many victims’ parents, intend to impose their offensive presence at the ceremony. A bit like the last spit on the graves.
And if we cannot legally prevent this ultimate and cynical hypocrisy, I suggest turning our backs on the hypocrites.