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Posted on 04/22/2002 7:06:36 AM PDT by truthandlife
The stunning second-place triumph of anti-immigrant populist Jean-Marie Le Pen in French elections has sent tremors of fear through a Jewish community already buffeted by a wave of anti-Semitic attacks.
Pollsters said President Jacques Chirac would handily defeat Le Pen in a presidential runoff vote on May 5.
But French Jews and Muslims alike pointed to the victory for Le Pen, who once dismissed the Holocaust as a "detail" of history, as a dangerous sign of French intolerance of minorities.
Finance Minister Laurent Fabius denounced the victory of the National Front leader as "a cataclysm of terrifying proportions" and added: "Tonight, on the left but not only on the left, many people are simply crying. This is not the France we love."
Anger and concern rippled across the country that is home to Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities but which waited more than half a century before officially admitting that France helped the Nazis persecute Jews during World War Two.
Pockets of protest sprouted in Paris, with dozens of youths wearing T-shirts reading "I'm ashamed" in one part of the city while elsewhere Parisians burned Le Pen banners. Other anti-Le Pen protests grew in Lyon, Grenoble, Lille and Strasbourg.
"There is a slippery slope to greater violence and we have not seen the worst of it," Shimon Samuels of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre told Reuters.
Samuels blamed the government of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, knocked out of the race by Le Pen, for inaction following the torching of synagogues and desecration of Jewish tombs in France since Israel launched an offensive on the Palestinian territories on March 29.
"Had they taken measures, that could have been a valuable tool against what we saw tonight," Samuels said.
"Chirac is going to be influenced by this election. He has to respond to Le Pen's constituency in dealing with minorities. Many are xenophobic."
Samuels said an increasing number of fearful Jews were leaving France to set up their lives elsewhere and Le Pen's electoral success would provide more incentive.
SHOCK AMONG JEWS
Le Pen, a 73-year-old former paratrooper, surged ahead in recent weeks as Chirac and Jospin focused their campaigns on fighting crime -- one of Le Pen's favourite populist issues.
Le Pen toned down his usual anti-immigrant rhetoric this year as law and order, his other main issue, came to the fore with both Chirac and Jospin calling for a tough line on crime.
"I am very shocked that people could actually vote for a man like Le Pen," Joel Davide, 48, said from the food shop he co-owns in the Marais district of Paris, home to many of the city's Jews.
His business partner, Joel Bivita, was as angry at the French for voting for Le Pen as he was at the candidate himself.
"I don't like Le Pen at all because he is anti-Semitic," Bivita said. "He doesn't like Jews. He doesn't like Arabs. He doesn't like anybody else except the French. This shows that the French are two-faced. They say one thing and they go and vote for somebody like Le Pen."
Alex Durois regretted that he joined the droves of French who abstained from voting on Sunday and wished he had cast his ballot against Le Pen.
"If Le Pen wins (the second round), I will go to Israel," said Durois, 23, who works in a mobile phone shop in the Marais. Born and raised in France, Durois said the situation for minorities was "very dangerous in France today."
Members of the Muslim community viewed Le Pen's showing negatively but were more reticent to comment before the candidate expanded on his policies.
"It is France which has lost today. It's difficult to believe that many French people voted for Le Pen," hospital worker Sami Fitouri said. "He has never presented any ideas about the economy or his social programme. He has just been campaigning on xenophobic ideas."
Fouad Imarraine, manager of the Tawid cultural centre in Seine Saint Denis, north of Paris, said: "I hope this is a protest vote but I am not sure. In any case these elections reinforce our determination to work to change things."
Those who attacked synagogues and cemetries are the ones who hate Le Pen or support Le Pen ?
(Discreet cough)...aren't the Jews who were born and live in France French? Aren't the Arabs who were born and live in France French? Who exactly IS French?
I would bet this is merely a smear tactic against JM LePen.
The current french president has done very little to prevent anti-semitic violence lately, and the current administration is always sucking up to Iraq, Iran and working against Israel.
JM LePen is called an anti-semite the way Buchanan - in a smear campaign to try to convince the naive liberals of the world that it would be "unenlightened" to even consider voting for such a man.
Remember, this is from Reuters - the same people who refuse to call Al-Quaida and Hamas and Hizballah terrorists and who hate Israel.
They - the Islamic mobs are the ones LePen wants to kick out of France.
In the long run, Chirac, the incumbent, also not the cleanest politician around (but, this is Europe), was going to win. French voters can send a message in each estage. So, instead of having the tired leftest prance about in the finals, the voters rejected him AND ALL HE STANDS FOR, and paired LePen in the finals. LePen will lose badly and Chirac will win in a landslide, riding France of Jospin and the leftists, who have "co-governed" for 5 years. Without the extreme leftists (who, in France, are called Dakotans d' Sur), maybe Chirac can control immigration and reduce crime. I'm hoping that the whole thing gives a chill to our communist lunatic party, especially, in the Senate as the cleansing elections approach.
The object in France is to be far away from everybody else politically, I suppose. If 70% of voters in France were Conservative, and 30% liberal. But there were a bunch of conservative parties, and only 2 socialist/liberal parties, the runoff could easily be between the 2 liberal sides, who capture combined less than 30% of the vote.
It's shoddy, biased journalism like that which drives people toward candidates like Le Pen. They get sick of being manipulated.
From the news reports I've read, I honestly can't tell if Le Pen is truly a nutcase, or just someone who resists the socialist/internationalist new order and is being subsequently demonized. I've seen the press cry wolf too many times to take their warnings seriously.
Comparing LePen to Buchanan? Now that's a smear!
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