The Ugly Truth
Zionism, Jewish extremism and a few other nasty items making our world uninhabitable today
French National Front heads to Israel to stump for support ahead of election
Louis Aliot, partner of rightist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, is in Israel to persuade those eligible to vote in the French presidential election to give their vote this spring.
Haaretz
The National Front has its roots
in French fascism and it has always had a racist and anti-Semitic image,
but one of its representatives is in Israel to recruit supporters.
Louis Aliot, the partner of
National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, is in the country
trying to persuade those eligible to vote in the French presidential
election to give her their vote in this spring’s balloting and to boost
her image en route to the Elysee Palace.
“For us this visit is a
precedent,” Aliot told Haaretz. “This is the first time a National Front
leader has visited Israel. It’s true that relations were tense for a
time, but it’s time to warm up the atmosphere.”
Aliot is on a 48-hour trip and on Monday visited the Western Wall.
On Monday, he also met with “a
few elected officials and political figures who prefer not to be named.”
When pressed, he confirmed that none of the elected officials were
Knesset members. On Tuesday he plans to visit churches in Bethlehem.
The high point of Monday’s
activities was his meeting in a Jerusalem hotel with 40 French Jews he
said had invited him in order to hear Le Pen’s platform. Marine Le Pen
is the daughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, a far-right
nationalist and former presidential candidate who periodically made
xenophobic, anti-Semitic statements.
“They invited me so they could
hear our worldview and Marine Le Pen’s platform, particularly in the
face of the Arab Spring,” Aliot said. The group comprised “Frenchmen who
live in Israel, many of them of Algerian origin.”
What did he think of them?, we
asked. “What was interesting was that it’s not important what position
you have on Israeli politics, you will always have strong ties to the
land. We share that position,” he said. “Just as the Jews are defending
their right to Israel, we in France are fighting to defend our identity
and our land.
“We don’t always see eye-to-eye
on Israel’s foreign policy but we have the same position on the dangers
posed by radical Islam, which exists in Europe and also threatens
Israel, which we call ‘the western island,’” Aliot said.
Does he think that Jews are
antagonistic toward the senior Le Pen and his ideas? “Marine is a
different person,” Aliot replied. “She belongs to a generation that
never knew war, any war. Her perspective is different from that of
people who went through wars.
“Today there is a global problem
of immigrants, and here there is a specific problem of the rise of
religion, what we call Islamization. Here there are deep differences of
opinion. Alain Juppe, France’s foreign minister, argues that there is a
moderate Islam, while others argue that there is no such thing as
moderate Islam.
“The Frenchmen we met in Israel
all strongly believe that Marine is not the monster they might have
thought. They share our stance with regard to immigrants in France,” he
said.
“By contrast, we have a very
balanced position on the peace process, while the French people we met
in Jerusalem are far more nationalistic. Sometimes they say things that
we can’t say in France.
“But I must say that we don’t
live here, we don’t have the same pressure, we don’t face the same
dangers. It’s natural that they should say things that are more
defensive. We are strangers here,” Aliot said.
