Sarko-fascist Jew-baited as Franco-Intifada erupts again

CounterVortex

Six days before President Nicolas Sarkozy is to visit Algiers, the Algerian veterans’ minister Mohamed Cherif Abbas was quoted in the daily Al-Khabar Nov. 26 attributing Sarkozy’s rise to a “Jewish lobby” that holds sway over French politics, and implying the president—whose maternal grandfather was Jewish—exploited family connections. (AFP, Nov. 28) The comments came as the new violence in Paris’ suburbs reached a height—and spread to Toulouse, where a library was set on fire and a dozen cars were torched. The riots, sparked by the deaths of two teenagers in a police car collision with a motorbike Nov. 25, this time saw North African youth firing on police with shotguns. “This is a real guerrilla war,” senior police union official Patrice Ribeiro told RTL radio. (AFP, NYT, Nov. 28)

While cabinet ministers are said to be developing a “Marshall Plan” for the suburbs, Sarkozy’s most concrete initiative in dealing with youth violence has been punitive—the passage of a law last July that requires a minimum sentence for repeat offenders and allows minors between 16 and 18 to be tried and sentenced as adults. (NYT, Nov. 28)

As is usually the case, Algeria’s Abbas mixed up his vulgar Judeonoia with legitimate points—on French failure to own up to atrocities of the colonial era. “While France fails to recognize the crimes committed in Algeria, we can envisage neither reconciliation nor normalization,” he said in the interview. Sarkozy has antagonized Algerians by saying France should no longer “repent” for its colonial past. Despite a tentative rapprochement in recent years, relations between France and Algeria remain sensitive. Last year, a friendship treaty was scrapped over Paris’ refusal to meet Algerian demands for an apology for the crimes of colonialism. (AFP, op cit; Algeria Events, May 20, 2006)

See our last posts on France, Algeria and restive Maghreb.

  1. “The Zionists” blamed for Sarkozy’s misdeeds
    From the British Marxist website Workers’ Liberty:

    The left-wing website Indymedia seems to have allowed itself to be manipulated by the anti-semitic right again. A recent report on the site, citing the Iranian-government-sponsored Press TV (for which Yvonne Ridley works) as source, claims that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a former agent of the Israeli secret police Mossad.

    The Indymedia posting adds: “This would explain the country’s new alignment with the ‘Neo-Cons’.”

    So if Sarkozy were a proper French bourgeois politician, he couldn’t be “neo-con” inclined, or friendly to the US administration? Only the secret intrigues of “the Zionists” can explain why bourgeois politicians of second-rank countries might want to keep “in” with the world’s superpower?

    Presumably the person posting on Indymedia would want to blame Sarkozy’s attacks on union rights and on pensions on the hidden hand of “the Zionists”, too.

    A quick check on Google reveals that the story has gone round the web like wildfire.

    The Indymedia version is:

    Sarkozy was ex-Mossad secret agent

    A report reveals that French President Nicolas Sarkozy worked for Israeli intelligence for a long time before he was elected president.

    French daily Le Figaro has revealed the French leader once worked for the Zionist regime as a sayan, Hebrew for ‘collaborator’…

    “Sarko the Sayan” has also followed in the footsteps of the White House by choosing a hostile approach toward Iran and its peaceful nuclear activities.

    There was a report in Le Figaro, on 12 October 2007. Le Figaro, a conservative paper, far from crediting what it called “the strange accusations” against Sarkozy, quoted a French government official as saying that the anonymous accusations looked like a gambit by some far-right group.

    The lines, unfortunately, are getting fuzzy. Tradional right-wing anti-Semitism is being echoed more and more on the ostensible “left”—e.g., in Venezuela.