Jacques Chirac deserves credit for being the first French president to puncture the myth of Vichy being an aberration of history, when at the time of the deportation of Jews it enjoyed overwhelming popular support. The same Chirac, however, helped forge France's special relationship with Saddam Hussein at a time that the Iraqi dictator called for Israel's fiery destruction.
What prompted Le Pen to issue the statement was her essentially correct instinct that a successful fight-back against an Islamic takeover of France required France to shed a sense of guilt and shame. As Andrew Michta has recently written in the American Interest the narratives fostered in academia and the media equating the West's colonialist past to original sin have sapped Western self-confidence. This all-pervading sense of guilt (according to Michta) has been appeased by the embrace of multiculturalism, whereby immigrants were no longer expected to embrace the values of the host country and Islamophobia was viewed as a greater problem than the establishment of no-go zones ruled by sharia law. Another tactic in seeking absolution, which Michta does not mention, is to transfer the guilt to others, for example the United States or Israel. [...]
Macron, who will probably get most of the Jewish vote, and was himself targeted with anti-Semitic slurs due to the years he worked in the Rothschild bank, also fell into this pattern. He decried the fact that an increasing number of pupils are studying in religious schools that inculcate hatred for the republic, be they Muslim schools where studies are essentially in Arabic "or elsewhere where they teach the Torah more than the basic skills." As measured by success in matriculation exams, Jewish schools that study Torah surpass the national average by a healthy percentage – but facts cannot get in the way of evenhandedness. The fourth major contender, far leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon, is exempted from this list because he believes that the Muslims are sweetness and light and the Jewish umbrella organization CRIF is "acrimonious".
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