Re: It is worth noting that the leader of France's extreme-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, now hurls most of his abuse at Muslims, not Jews.
Of course, Jewish Pieds-Noirs have an old score to settle.... Algerian/Tunisian Jews hate North African immigrants ever since Algeria kicked them out in 1962 --hence their love-hate relationship with J.-M. Le Pen, himself a veteran of the Algerian war.
Le Pen's Next Target?
Nicholas Simon/ Paris
The radical right presidential challenger rode into the second round on an anti-Arab wave. His success may help make the lives of French Jews safer for now, but they're not dropping their guard.
"You want me to tell you the truth?" asked Jewish pharmacist Didier Assouline. "Le Pen's success was good for the Jews -- just as long as he doesn't do any better in the next round of voting." The 42-year-old, Algerian-born Assouline was speaking outside his business in a leafy, middle-class southern Paris suburb after the shock vote that catapulted extreme rightist and veteran Jew-baiter Jean-Marie Le Pen into the May 5 run-off in France's presidential election.
As if to prove the pharmacist's point, aides to Jacques Chirac rushed to assure Jewish leaders that the outgoing president would crack down on the spiraling street crime, most of it by young Arabs, who have conducted a campaign of harassment against French Jews since late 2000, and the Paris police increased security at Jewish institutions. Exit polls suggested that most of Le Pen's 16.8 percent of the vote came from blue-collar ethnic French, who live in the same neighborhoods as the poorer Muslim and Jewish North African immigrants and despair at the violence which has made their lives miserable too.
"I deplore Le Pen's success but I understand it," said Roger Cukierman, president of CRIF, the umbrella body for French Jewry. "The burning of synagogues contributed to the pro-Le Pen vote, together with acts affecting the whole of the French people -- burning cars, attacking people on public transport and women fearing to go out at night."
Jewish liberals cautioned, however, against gloating over the anti-Arab message contained in the pro-Le Pen vote, saying Jews could be the next target. "Let's not forget Le Pen first got to where he is by uniting lots of tiny extreme rightist parties whose only point of accord was hostility to Jews," said Olivier Guland, editor of the Jewish bimonthly Tribune Juive.
All the polls indicated that the 73-year-old Le Pen would be crushed by the center-right Chirac in the second round. But the combative Le Pen could bounce back when France holds general elections for the lower house, the National Assembly, on June 9 and 19. If all the people who voted Le Pen on April 21 back his National Front candidates, the party could win as many as 10 of the 590 seats, six in the southeast and four in Alsace-Lorraine. It holds no seats in the outgoing Assembly. The last seat it won was in a by-election near Paris in 1989.
Le Pen hit a peak in 1986, when he won 35 seats under a proportional representation system which was abolished two years later. Chirac has said repeatedly that, unlike his Austrian counterpart Wolfgang Schuessel who came to terms with Joerg Haider's Freedom Party, he will never bring the radical right into a coalition government. But France's two-round election process might tempt local center-right candidates to make a deal as the only way to keep their seats.
A main reason Le Pen made it to the presidential finals was that the left fielded eight of the 16 first-round candidates. Unwittingly, this ensured no single one, including the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, had enough votes to be among the two finalists. The left's total number of votes, however, reached more than 40 percent and the mainstream right's more than 30 percent. If the two main camps succeed, as they are now trying, in presenting respective single candidates in each constituency for the general election, the National Front could yet be frozen out of parliament.
A small number of Jews are reported to have voted for Le Pen. Michel Zerbib, an editor on the Jewish radio station Radio J, estimated that between 1 and 5 percent backed him. That could mean up to 20,000 votes. They will probably think twice about doing so again after the reports provoked an angry backlash among other Jews.
There is no love lost between Le Pen and the 600,000-member French Jewish community, the world's third largest. Le Pen is notorious for such comments as: "Nazi gas chambers? I never saw them myself. In any case they were just a detail of World War II." He said it first in 1987, but has repeated it frequently since then.
The Jews who voted for Le Pen hit the headlines when Jo Goldenberg, the 79-year-old former owner of a famous Paris Jewish eatery bearing his name, strongly hinted on television that he had cast his ballot for the National Front candidate. "Le Pen," he said, "is best for France, and that's what counts." Goldenberg was pitilessly dragged over the coals the next morning by a Jewish radio interviewer, who reminded him of his family's losses in the Holocaust and bullied him into saying sheepishly: "No, I did not vote for Le Pen and I will not vote for him in the run-off." The current owners of the restaurant, where six diners were killed by terrorists two decades ago, put up posters denouncing the old man as "quasi-senile."
Other Jewish Le Pen supporters were reluctant to give their names. A 23-year-old shop clerk in the Sentier garment district told The Jerusalem Report: "What Le Pen said about the Holocaust was 15 years ago. If he was voted in, he would raise salaries, cut taxes and throw out the Arabs." A Jewish customer in an electronics store added: "I'm fed up with synagogues being burned. Only Le Pen will know how to clean up the Arabs."
In the past two years, Le Pen has steered clear of Jew-baiting and made approving noises about Ariel Sharon's responses to Arab terrorism. Publications connected to his party have not, however, ceased their steady beat of anti-Jewish comments and innuendo, always carefully crafted to avoid falling foul of strict French anti-racism laws. The National Front has no official newspaper, but the daily Present (circulation around 10,000) is the main ideological mouthpiece aimed at the party faithful. It has its own code words, which they understand. "The lobby" and the "the cosmopolitan plot" mean respectively the Jewish leadership and B'nai B'rith.
But party publications are read by only a small coterie of fanatical ultra-rightists obsessed with denouncing the French Revolution, praising the wartime Vichy regime and regretting the end of colonialism. Most Le Pen voters don't even know such publications exist. In exit polls, they simply identified him as the candidate whose campaign was aimed at ridding the streets of delinquents.
According to some pollsters, it was the latest spate of anti-Semitic attacks in April that provided the final straw and convinced even more people to vote for Le Pen, who has long blamed local Arabs for many of France's woes. "It wasn't an election, it was a demonstration by the people of France against insecurity and violence," said Moise Cohen, the Moroccan-born president of the Paris Jewish religious board, the Consistoire.
Like Cohen and the pharmacist Assouline, most French Jewish community activists are Sephardim from North Africa who make up about 60 percent of French Jewry. But they are in no hurry to answer a call by Israel's Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, to pack up and move to Israel. "Aliyah is a personal question," said Moise Cohen. "Those who want to can go. But we are in 2002 and not in 1940. We don't need the advice of those who don't understand the situation in France."
Avi Kadoch, spokesman for the Jewish Agency in Paris, said there had not been a particular rise in inquiries since the vote, but calls to Agency offices had risen sharply in past weeks after the latest outbreak of anti-Semitic attacks. "We are getting about 350 to 380 calls a day," he reported. "The number of people who immigrated last year was about 1,200, compared to an average of 1,500 in other years. I think this year we will be well into the higher figures."
The rest, like Didier Assouline, prayed that Le Pen would be defeated on May 5 -- and that Chirac would act on the message of his first-round success. "One thing's for sure," the pharmacist said. "All my clients -- most of whom are not Jewish -- say that if Chirac does not crack down on Arab delinquency now, Le Pen, or another like him, will certainly be voted in next time round."
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