PHILIPPE MARLIÈREÉric Zemmour, a pure product of the French establishment

 Philippe Marlière, Open Democracy, 9/12/2021

Unlike Marine Le Pen, far-Right presidential candidate Zemmour has no link to France’s fascist tradition. His meteoric rise comes from the mainstream

Éric Zemmour, France’s television pundit turned presidential candidate

SOPA Images Limited / Alamy Stock Photo

Is Éric Zemmour, the television pundit turned presidential candidate, a fascist? His ideas on immigration, Islam and gender are no doubt extreme. To date, he has been twice convicted of incitement to racial or religious hatred.

Only this November, the 63-year-old went on trial again on similar charges, over a remark made on TV in September 2020 that unaccompanied foreign minors were “thieves and rapists” and that France “must send them back”. The court case is ongoing, with Zemmour’s lawyer claiming the charges are “unfounded”.

His first electoral rally, held in the Parisian suburb of Villepinte earlier this week, was marred by scenes of violence: Zemmour supporters, some of whom belong to far-Right and Neo-Nazi groups, beat up antiracist activists who peacefully demonstrated.

Yet to put the ‘fascist’ tag on Zemmour is lazy and unhelpful: it neither sheds light on the reasons for his meteoric political rise, nor does it explain what this current breakthrough represents for French politics. 

Promoted by the media

Zemmour indeed sounds like a fascist and has the ideas of a fascist but unlike his electoral opponent Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally party, he has no direct link with the French fascist tradition. He comes from the mainstream of French politics, having spent the past 35 years in conservative journalism. In succession, he worked for newspapers and media such as Le Quotidien de Paris and Le Figaro, family-friendly radio stations such as RTL and had a popular talk-show on France 2, the main state television channel.

Between 2019 and 2021, he was the editor and diarist on a daily show broadcast on CNews, a free-to-air news channel that is under the control of Vincent Bolloré, a media proprietor and business magnate. Bolloré, a staunch traditionalist Catholic, fell out with Emmanuel Macron. The president criticised the businessman for using his media outlets to set a reactionary agenda. Now, hostile to Macron’s re-election, Bolloré is widely seen as promoting far-Right ideas and has established CNews as a kind of French counterpart to Fox News in the US. Bolloré has used Zemmour to push forward his ‘law and order’ and Islamophobic agenda.

Born in Algeria to Algerian Jewish parents and raised on the outskirts of Paris, Zemmour embodies the vacuity of the French media, which has undoubtedly made him a political star. Various mainstream television and radio stations as well as newspapers have given him a platform to exercise his vitriolic style and express his racist ideas. Zemmour has not faced a hostile environment. On the contrary, he is the creature of the French political, media and economic establishment, which has protected him and promoted him over the years.

Et le Dôme de fer s’étendit sur l’Europe/And the Iron Dome spread over Europe/Y la Cúpula de Hierro se extendió sobre Europa

 FG, Basta Yekfi, 14/5/2021

 

PALESTINE: SATURDAY MARCH IN PARIS PROHIBITED 

-PEACE
-These messages of hate are intolerable

Palestina: Manifestación prohibida sábado en París
-PAZ
-Esos mensajes de odio son intolerables
Sié

 

15 mai 2021, jour du 73^ème anniversaire de la Nakba. À Gaza, on dénombre déjà plus de 103 morts, provoquées par les missiles israéliens, tandis que les missiles palestiniens ont fait sept morts en Israël. Washington, Bruxelles, Paris et Berlin « déplorent la violence » tout en affirmant le « droit à la légitime défense »…mais seulement pour Israël. En ce samedi, partout dans le monde, des gens descendent dans la rue pour affirmer le droit du peuple palestinien à la souveraineté et à la vie. Partout, de Londres à Córdoba, de Berlin à Marseille. Partout, sauf à Paris et à Francfort-sur-le-Main. Le Préfet de police de Paris, sur ordre du ministre Darmanin, a interdit la manif prévue de Barbès à Bastille. Idem à Francfort, où le maire social-démocrate a interdit le rassemblement prévu, tandis qu’un drapeau israélien a été hissé, « en signe de solidarité avec Israël » sur le bâtiment de la Chancellerie d’État du Land de Hesse, à Wiesbaden, dirigée par une coalition de chrétiens-démocrates et de Verts. « La Hesse est un Land ouvert. Nous ne tolèrerons pas l’antisémitisme », a déclaré le Ministerpräsident Volker Bouffier. Le maire social-démocrate de Charlottenburg à Berlin, Reinhard Naumann, a,lui aussi, fait hisser le drapeau israélien sur sa mairie, tandis qu’à Vienne, le chancelier Kurz, menacé de poursuites judiciaires pour corruption, a fait hisser le drapeau bleu et blanc sur le ministère des Affaires étrangères.

À Brême et Hanovre, ces derniers jours, la police allemande a empêché des manifestants de brûler des drapeaux israéliens et engagé des poursuites contre eux. En vertu d’une loi adoptée par le Bundestag il y a un an, ils risquent jusqu’à 3 ans de prison.

Myanmar: towards energetic sanctions against the generals?

Francis Christophe, Asialyst, 3/5/2021

Translated by Fausto Giudice

The West knows this. The Achilles heel of the coup generals in Burma is energy. They are under the financial influence of a complex arrangement for the exploitation of a huge gas field. The whole thing was designed and implemented by Total in partnership with Chevron. France and the United States therefore have a decisive weapon in their hands. While Paris still does not seem to want to use this lever, a bipartisan group in the Senate in Washington has asked Joe Biden to impose sanctions where it hurts the Burmese junta.

Burmese General Min Aung Hlaing, head of the junta that overthrew the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi in a coup on January 1, 2021. (Source: Le Devoir)

All parties involved in the Burmese maelstrom discovered on April 28 that a decisive step had been taken in the thirty-year saga of sanctions against the successive juntas in power in Burma. A Reuters dispatch, picked up by some of the international media, announced the suspension of a veritable sword of Damocles over the heads of the February 1 coup generals. The report exposes some of the peculiarities that occurred in the U.S. Senate last week, surprising senior analysts consulted by Asialyst.

Since Donald Trump took office in January 2017 until April 28, 2021, no bipartisan group had been able to emerge in the Senate, so deep is the ideological gap separating Republicans and Democrats. However, such a group has just been formed for the declared purpose of calling at the highest level of the Biden administration for sanctions explicitly targeting the MOGE (Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise), the main currency pump of the successive juntas that have been bleeding Burma for 30 years. [Read letter from the Senators to Blinken and Yellen]

Compensation paid to slave owners by France in the 19th century made public

A team of researchers from the CNRS has published the list of beneficiaries of the compensation decided by the Second Republic following the abolition of slavery in 1848.

By Coumba Kane and Julien Bouissou, Le Monde, 8/5/2021

Translated by Fausto Giudice

 

At the ACTe Memorial, or Caribbean Centre of Expression and Memory of the Slave Trade and Slavery, in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in 2015. NICOLAS DERNE / AFP

One hundred and fifty-three years after the definitive abolition of slavery in France on 27 April 1848, a team of researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) put online on Friday 7 May, as part of the "Repairs" project, a database detailing the compensation paid by the French State to slave owners . This information provides a better understanding of the slave society of the time and allows us to trace the origin of investments that gave rise to entrepreneurial dynasties or companies that still exist today.

Contrary to popular belief, the 10,000 slave owners who received compensation of 126 million gold francs (1.3% of national income, the equivalent of 27 billion euros today) from 1849 onwards were not all white settlers. The abolition law of 27 April 1848 is the source of a semantic confusion," explains Myriam Cottias, a researcher at the CNRS who heads the "Repairs" research project. It states that the "colonists", i.e. whites, must be compensated, whereas it is the slave owners, some of whom are coloured, who receive the compensation."