Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

If liberal media smear Mélenchon as akin to Le Pen, he stands far to the left of the mainstream (including Hamon) on questions of racism and Islamophobia. He strongly condemned the last Socialist government’s state of emergency, made permanent by Macron, whose measures encourage police harassment of ethnic minorities. He is also a stout opponent of French interventions in West Africa and the Middle East. "The Left should welcome Mélenchons"

The French Left's Long March to the Right An interview with Serge Halimi

France, "anti-semitism", the state, the left A good dissection. "First, it is important to establish some of the political and ideological conditions in today’s France. Aside from Germany, France is the European state in which it is most difficult to criticize Israel explicitly. It is the country in which it is possible to be prosecuted for articulating a pro-Palestine position — even a relatively moderate, two-state position. The prosecutions of the journalist  Daniel Mermet , the philosopher  Edgar Morin , the political scientist Samir Naïr, the novelist Danièle Sallenave, to cite a few instances, make this clear." The Anti-Zionism of Fools

The National Front isn't dead

How mainstream racism, the racism of the establishment, in France, made Le Pen's racism manistream, and helped her get into the second round of the elections. "Go back to September 1984, when the Socialist prime minister, Laurent Fabius,  told a TV interviewer  that the elder Le Pen, a card-carrying racist and neo-fascist, was posing the right questions but giving the wrong answers. A few years later, the Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, declared that France had reached a  “threshold of tolerance”  in terms of the impact of immigrants. In 1991, after  clashes  broke out between French police and youths of Arab and North African descent, politicians from the left, right, and center fell over one another to denounce immigration and bash French Muslims. In June of that year, for example, it wasn’t the elder Le Pen who decried an “overdose” of immigrants who brought to France “three or four wives, some 20 children,” plus “noise” and “smell.” It w...