IS SARKOZY THE REAL DEAL? Is he really an ally of the US. For that matter, is he really a friend of Israel? Nidra Poller thinks he is. She writes about French President Nicolas Sarkozy's opening address to the French diplomatic corps. For one thing, Sarkozy said that bombing Iran might be the only alternative to a nuclear Iran. For another:

Repeatedly referring to the imminent danger of a clash between Islam and the West, President Sarkozy confirms his “…reputation as a friend of Israel; and it is true. I will never compromise Israel’s security.” But, he continues, Mahmud Abbas and many other Arab leaders who have visited Paris since his election trust in his respect and friendship for their populations. One might expect him to go on from there with the usual demand for Israeli concessions to soothe Palestinian humiliation, suffering, and frustration, and remove the thorn from the side of the Middle East… He doesn’t. Though reaffirming his belief in the two-state solution via the Road Map, he shifts the focus from vague peace wishes to a dire warning: If the international community accepts the fait accompli of a Hamastan in Gaza, it will be the first step in an Islamist takeover of the Palestinian territories. Sarkozy, like other Western leaders, calls for the reconstruction of the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of Abbas.

As usual, we are going to have to wait and see if Sarkozy is consistent and whether his actions confirm or belie his words.

We are used to 'wait and see'--maybe this time there is something worthwhile waiting for.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Sarkozy and Nidra Poller.

MAYBE NOT SO COZY WITH SARKOZY. In the middle of Iran, 2; Israel 0, Caroline Glick notes:

Israel hoped that with Nicholas Sarkozy's victory in the presidential race, France would take a more pro-Israel stance. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred. Sarkozy has warmed French ties with the Iranian-Syrian-Hizbullah axis. Sarkozy legitimized all three when he invited Hizbullah representatives to participate in talks he held with Lebanese factions outside of Paris this month.

Additionally, early this month France led 10 EU member states in meddling in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The foreign ministers of these largely Mediterranean EU member states sent a letter to Quartet envoy Tony Blair, demanding, among other things, that Israel agree to the deployment of international forces in Judea and Samaria, and that Hamas be invited to participate in an international conference on the issue.

Let's face it: no country sees Israel as a friend or ally--merely as an interest.
And interests wane...and change.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Sarkozy.

SARKOZY REVOLUTION IN FRANCE HITS A ROAD BUMP--France: Terrorist Hizbullah Welcome to Summit

Technorati Tag: France and Sarkozy and Hezbollah.

FRANCE GETTING COZY WITH SARKOZY: The Astute Bloggers finds that France approves of the steps Sarkozy is taking.

I wish such leadership were contagious.

Technorati Tag: Sarkozy and France.

NEW FRENCH PRESIDENT CHANNELS KAHANE: French President Sarkozy will pay immigrants to leave the country:

France to Pay Immigrants to Return Home

New French President Nicolas Sarkozy made immigration a central issue of his campaign. Now, his new minister for immigration and national identity says its time to start paying immigrants to leave the country.

France's new Immigration, Integration and National Identity Minister, Brice Hortefeux toured Charles de Gaulle airport on his first day on the job. He has said he intends to pay more immigrants to return home.
Zoom
AFP

France's new Immigration, Integration and National Identity Minister, Brice Hortefeux toured Charles de Gaulle airport on his first day on the job. He has said he intends to pay more immigrants to return home.
France is home to over 5 million immigrants -- and the new conservative-led government doesn't plan on making things any more comfortable for them. While the new regime in Paris is determined to curb illegal immigration, it is also looking to encourage legal migrants to reconsider their decision to stay in France -- by paying them to go back home.

This will be interesting to watch.
[Hat tip: LGF]

Technorati Tag: Sarkozy and France and Meir Kahane and Immigrants.

SARKOZY'S FIRST TEST: The Volokh Conspiracy has President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy's first speech, comparing his prepared text with what he actually said. According to the text, he was to end his speech with this:

I want to launch a call to all those in the world who believe in the values of tolerance, of liberty, of democacy and of humanism, to all those who are persecuted by the tyrannies and by the dictators, to all the children and to all the martyrized women in the world to say to them that the pride, the duty of France will at their sides, that they can count on her.

But in his actual speech he added an extra paragraph not in his prepared text:

France will be at the sides of the Libyan nurses locked up for eight years; France will not abandon Ingrid Betancourt; France will not abandon the women who are condemned to the burqa; France will not abandon the women who do not have liberty. France will be by the side of the oppressed of the world. This is the message of France; this is the identity of France; this is the history of France.

This after days of car burnings.
If only Sarkozy can follow through and not back down.

Technorati Tag: France and Nicholas Sarkozy.

PRESIDENT SARKOZY OF FRANCE HAS JEWISH ROOTS: JR of The Astute Bloggers points out Sarkozy''s Jewish background, linking to an article from last year in the European Jewish Press:

In an interview Nicolas Sarkozy gave in 2004, he expressed an extraordinary understanding of the plight of the Jewish people for a home: “Should I remind you the visceral attachment of every Jew to Israel, as a second mother homeland? There is nothing outrageous about it. Every Jew carries within him a fear passed down through generations, and he knows that if one day he will not feel safe in his country, there will always be a place that would welcome him. And this is Israel.”

But wait! There's more:

Additionally, many may be surprised to learn that his yet-to-be-revealed family history involves a true and fascinating story of leadership, heroism and survival. It remains to be seen whether his personal history will affect his foreign policy and France’s role in the Middle East conflict.

In the 15th century, the Mallah family (in Hebrew: messenger or angel) escaped the Spanish Inquisition to Provence, France and moved about one hundred years later to Salonika. In Greece, several family members became prominent Zionist leaders, active in the local and national political, economic, social and cultural life. To this day many Mallahs are still active Zionists around the world.

Sarkozy’s grandfather, Aron Mallah, nicknamed Benkio, was born in 1890. Beniko’s uncle Moshe was a well-known Rabbi and a devoted Zionist who, in 1898 published and edited “El Avenir”, the leading paper of the Zionist national movement in Greece at the time. His cousin, Asher, was a Senator in the Greek Senate and in 1912 he helped guarantee the establishment of the Technion – the elite technological university in Haifa, Israel. In 1919 he was elected as the first President of the Zionist Federation of Greece and he headed the Zionist Council for several years. In the 1930’s he helped Jews flee to Israel, to which he himself immigrated in 1934. Another of Beniko’s cousins, Peppo Mallah, was a philanthropist for Jewish causes who served in the Greek Parliament, and in 1920 he was offered, but declined, the position of Greece’s Minister of Finance. After the establishment of the State of Israel he became the country’s first diplomatic envoy to Greece.

In 1917 a great fire destroyed parts of Salonika and damaged the family estate. Many Jewish-owned properties, including the Mallah’s, were expropriated by the Greek government. Jewish population emigrated from Greece and much of the Mallah family left Salonika to France, America and Israel.

Sarkozy's grandfather immigrated to France, where he converted.

Knowing he was still considered Jewish by blood, during World War II he and his family hid in Marcillac la Croisille in the Corrèze region, western France.

During the Holocaust, many of the Mallahs who stayed in Salonika or moved to France were deported to concentration and extermination camps. In total, fifty-seven family members were murdered by the Nazis. Testimonies reveal that several revolted against the Nazis and one, Buena Mallah, was the subject of Nazis medical experiments in the Birkenau concentration camp.

In any case, while France may have better relations with Israel, and Sarkozy might take anti-Semitism in France more seriously, some things will not change:

It is a fair to predict that France will stay consistent with its support in establishing a viable Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, existing side by side with a peaceful Israel. How to get there, if at all, will not be set by Sarkozy’s flagship but rather he will follow the leadership of the US and the EU.

What remains now is to see how Sarkozy will add to his distinguished family history.

Technorati Tag: Israel and France and Nicolas Sarkozy.

CAN ISRAEL GET COZY WITH SARKOZY? A reader writes to The Corner:

As an American living in Paris and married to a Frenchman, let me point out a few things: 85.5 % voter turnout is not only amazing, it is also without precedent. Even in France, 75% voter turnout only last happened 40 years ago. This was a HUGE election. Every last granny in the nursing home went to the polls. 53-47 under those circumstances is one helluva mandate and Sarkozy knows it.

OK, so what will Sarkozy do with his 'mandate'? According to the reader, in his acceptance speech, Sarkozy said:

"...and let me say to our American friends, they can count on our friendship."

What about Israel?

According to The Jerusalem Post:

Last March, he asserted that French decision-makers should be able "to say a certain number of truths to our Arab friends, for example, the right for Israel to exist and to live safely is not negotiable, and that terrorism is their true enemy." He also declared himself ready to defend "the integrity of Lebanon," including the disarmament of Hizbullah.

The Heritage Foundation goes even further:

Sarkozy’s stance on the Israeli-Lebanon war represented another break with French foreign policy. Sarkozy was not afraid to condemn Hezbollah as the aggressor and spoke up for Israel’s right “to defend herself.” While urging that Israel should “maintain level headedness and restraint,” he refused to join the European Union (EU) chorus calling for a total ceasefire. In fact, his policy was remarkably similar to that of the United States and marked Sarkozy as a sensible voice on the Middle East in Europe.

A 'sensible voice on the Middle East in Europe'--What does that sound like again?

Technorati Tag: Nicolas Sarkozy and France and Israel.

ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACKS IN FRANCE: Nidra Poller writes for Pajamas Media about the anti-Semitic tone of Royal's ads against Sarkozy in the run-off for president of France between Ségolène Royal (Socialist) or Nicolas Sarkozy (conservative). In that context, she mentions recent attacks:

Several particularly serious anti-Semitic incidents have been reported in the past few weeks. A 22 year old student whose mother is Jewish and father is Antillais was accosted by two Beurs [French of Arab-Muslim origin] on a metro parking lot in Marseille. Thinking she was Muslim, because of her ethnic appearance, they asked her why she was wearing that diabolical sign around her neck. It was the Hebrew word “hai” meaning life. When she explained that she is Jewish, they manhandled her, threatened her with a knife, cut open her t-shirt, marked a swastiska between her breasts, cut off her hair and, for good measure, stole her cell phone. Elsewhere, a driver deliberately tried to run over a Jewish teenager. In Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, a Jewish man wearing a kippa was stabbed in the back.

Fofana, leader of the Gang of Barbarians that held a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi, hostage for three weeks and tortured him to death, sent anti-Semitic letters to the Halimi family’s lawyer, Maître Szpiner, and his associate. (Maître Szpiner, Jacques Chirac’s personal lawyer, represented the rector of the Paris mosque in the lawsuit against Charlie Hebdo). Kemi Saba, leader of the Ka Tribe that marched into the rue des Rosiers in the old Jewish quarter of Paris last year, was tried this week in Chartres for anti-Semitic insults and death threats against policemen who tried to prevent him from holding an unauthorized rally. Forty of his goons were in court, boisterous and defiant. He mumbled threats and insults against the lawyer of one of the plaintiffs.

As Ségolène Royal is wont to say, “tout se tient,” it all holds together. Attacks against Jews, policemen, public buildings, private property, election posters, and the soon-to-be president. It all holds together: demonization of a political leader who promises to protect the population from predators, demonization of an American president who goes to war against global jihad, and glorification of thugs, terrorists, shahids, and tyrants.

Technorati Tag: France and Nidra Poller and Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Torture and Murder of French Jew by Muslim Gang--Not Anti-Semitic

The Observer, sister paper to the Guardian, reports the following story:

Torturers' Iraq link

Criminals who tortured and killed a young hostage, keeping him naked and hooded and burning him repeatedly before throwing him from a train, were inspired by images from Iraq, according to a French prosecutor.

If you read the entire article, some facts are missing--

o The victim's name (Ilan Halimi)
o The fact that the victim was Jewish
o The fact that the missing gangleader is Moslem
o The possibility that when a Moslem kills a Jew there may be anti-Semitism

Though the report does give the name of the ringleader, Youssef Fofana, that may be because of how stupid it would appear to report that the police are looking for the ringleader and then not report on who the police are looking for.

Or maybe not.

The Times--another British newspaper--gives some of the information hidden by the Observer, yet still manages to skirt around the issue:

Photofit leads to capture of Paris 'honeytrap' gang

Paris police have arrested a dozen people suspected of kidnapping and torturing a young man to death after a blonde woman used to bait their honeytrap gave herself up.

They reveal the name of the victim and even go so far as to admit that the Jewish community is concerned by the fact that 4 other Jews were targeted in botched kidnapping attempts. But according to The Times the key to the gang is not that the victim was horribly tortured, but that it is a "honeytrap" gang that uses women to lure the victim--and the model was not Iraq, but a 1995 movie called L'Appât (The Bait).

At least Haaretz puts the pieces together. It reports that there is disagreement between the family and the authorities on whether there was anti-Semitism:

"We think there is anti-Semitism in this affair," Rafi Halimi, Ilan's uncle, told the press.

"First, because the killers tried to kidnap at least two other Jews, and second, because of what they said on the phone," Rafi Halimi added. "When we said we didn't have 500,000 euros to give them they told us to go to the synagogue and get it," Rafi said. "They also recited verses from the Koran."

But the Paris public prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, told Parisian Jewish radio on Thursday that "no element of the current investigation could link this murder to an anti-Semitic declaration or action." The umbrella group of French Jewish secular organizations, CRIF, issued a statement Friday calling on the Jewish community "to keep calm, cautious and wait for developments in the investigation."

Apparently the fact that 4 other Jews were targeted is not enough of a hint.

Why is it that Europe can have laws that outlaw denial of the Holocaust, but when Moslems beat up, torture, and kill Jews, anti-Semitism is the evil that dare not speak its name?

For more on the media in Great Britain, see Great Britain Keeps a Stiff Bloody Lip

Update: Adloyada notes that:

It's interesting to compare the Observer's report to the European Jewish Press report, which links Halimi's treatment more explicitly to the Abu Ghraib tortures

According to the prosecutor, however, Halimi was tortured in scenes
reminiscent of the abuse of prisoners at Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib jail.

Held prisoner in a Bagneux apartment, "naked, with his face covered," he was abused in "a repetition of scenes seen elsewhere", the prosecutor said.

Update: There is more in another Haaretz article here.

Update: At The Corner, Cliff May quotes from an article by Nidra Pollers online at the Wall Street Journal (registration required):

“The highest echelons of the French government are now preoccupied with the murder of Ilan Halimi. … Once again, as in the suburban riots of 2005, the country is forced to come face to face with the criminalized, alienated and racist Muslim youth and their adult enablers in its midst. …

“The murder of Ilan Halimi invites comparison with the November 2003 killing of a Jewish disc jockey, Sébastien Selam. His Muslim neighbor, Adel, slit his throat, nearly decapitating him, and gouged out his eyes with a carving fork in his building's underground parking garage. Adel came upstairs with bloodied hands and told his mother, "I killed my Jew, I will go to paradise." …

BIG UPDATE (3/3/06):
(This was going to be a separate post, but there are other blogs already covering this)

Last week France finally was openly and freely admitting that the brutal torture of Ilan Halimi which led to his death was motivated by anti-Semitism. The French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said the members of the gang "were convinced that 'Jews have money'... That's called anti-Semitism by conflation." Furthermore:

Sarkozy revealed that some suspects possessed extreme Islamic and pro-Palestinian literature and documents. What they confessed to the police further confirmed the apprehension that Halimi was subjected to barbaric abuse because he was a Jew.

Caroline Glick is more specific on the nature of the documents that were found:

It appears that Ilan Halimi's murderers had some connection to Hamas. Tuesday, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that police found propaganda published by the Palestinian Charity Committee or the CBSP at the home of one of the suspects. The European Jewish Press reported this week that Israel has alleged that the organization is a front group for Palestinian terrorists and that in August 2003 the US government froze the organization's US bank accounts, accusing it of links with Hamas.

Glick is relentless in her critcism of how the Israeli government responded to the murder and to the Jewish community in France:

o No Israeli official condemned his murder.

o No Israeli official demanded French authorities investigate why the police were so slow to take anti-Semitism into account while Halimi was held captive

o No Israeli official flew to Paris to participate in Ilan's funeral

o The Foreign Ministry's Web site has no mention of Halimi's murder.

o The Israeli Embassy in Paris did not publicly express its condolences to the Halimi family until February 23--10 days after Ilan was found.

o The French press has noted that the Israeli media has not given the story prominent coverage.

o Halimi's murder has not appeared on the front pages of the papers or at the top of the television or radio broadcasts.

While Glick gives the French government credit for pursuing the murderers once they finally admitted the gang's anti-Jewish motivation, she not only faults the Israeli government but singles out Kadima:

Israel's societal meekness accords well with Kadima's ideology. Its creed was best expressed by Foreign Minister, Justice Minister and Immigration Minister Tzipi Livni last month at the Herzliya Conference and is best characterized as "conditional Zionism." In her speech, Livni explained that Israel's international legitimacy is conditional. Unless a Palestinian state is established in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, she warned, Israel will lose its legitimacy as a Jewish state.

So for Livni, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and the rest of the Kadima gang, unlike every other people in the world, the Jewish people does not have an inherent, natural right to exist as a free, sovereign and independent people in its homeland. For Kadima, the Jewish people's right to self-determination in our land years is conditional on our enemies' acceptance of our right to be here.

I thought that part of the Zionist ideal is that besides being a homeland and destination for Jews, Israel is here to help defend and look out for Jews around world.

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tag: Anti-Semitism and France and Jews.

Paris Intifada Repercussions?

Even as the riots in Paris continue with no real end in sight, the media is not clear on who it is that is rioting. According to John Lichfield of The Independent:

Is this France’s intifada? Do the riots have wider significance for the West?

Talk of an intifada is absurdly misleading. Firstly, the rioters are far from being all Muslim (although more than half are from Islamic backgrounds). Second, they have no sense of political or religious identity and no political demands. Their allegiance is to their quartier and their gang. Their main demand, so far as can be established, is to be left alone by police and the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sark-ozy, to continue with their life of low-level violence and drugs trading. The wider significance is therefore not politico-religious but a warning of what happens if problems of deprivation and violence are allowed to fester.

On the other hand, Captain’s Quarters writes about indications that the riots in Paris are very much an intifada:

The riots in France have little connection to the Islamist terrorist offensive against the West, if the American media coverage gives any indication. However, alert CQ reader Mr. Michael points out that both American and French media sources warned of coordinated Islamist action against France in the weeks before the riot. Agence France Presse even had a quote from the maligned Nicolas Sarkozy noting the imminent nature of the threat in its 9/27 dispatch:

An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as “enemy number one”, intelligence officials said Tuesday.

“The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr,” the group’s leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.

“France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community,” he was quoted as saying. … Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is “at a very high level… There are cells operating on our territory.”

Either way, no matter who is behind the riots, where does this leave the Jewish community in Paris? The riots started in Clichy-sous-Bois, and as Gateway Pundit reminds us:

One of the last times Cliche was in the news, in October 2001, molotov cocktails were thrown at the Jewish Synagogue, a non-descript building during Kol Nidre services. In August 2002, the synagogue was attacked again.

And given this background and the kind of anti-semitism that Jews have been suffering in France, how does the Jewish community in France feel about the ongoing riots?

After a half-decade surge in anti-Semitic attacks and a long history of troubled treatment of Jews, [Paule H.] Levy (of France's Radio Communite Juive) added that the recent violence is "the first time in French history that it's not a Jewish problem." She continued, "In the mind of the French people, it's not a Jewish problem. The Jewish community is not in this story, and that's a very good thing."

"Thank God it is a phenomenon that has roots in the lack of integration of the the population," said European Jewish Congress secretary-general Serge Cwajgenbaum, himself French. "It's societal, it's economical, it's educational. It has nothing to do with any other subject or matter. It's a social phenomenon and the government must take the necessary measures to bring peace back and take the necessary steps to integrate the population. I really hope this will not affect any particular group of citizens in France, and hopefully not the Jews."

Though last Friday a projectile was flung at a synagogue outside Paris, causing some minor damage but no injuries, Jewish officials stressed that the Jewish community has not been targeted and is only nominally more concerned than others.

Security at Jewish institutions, for instance, has not been beefed up more than at non-Jewish places, according to David Roche, general manager of the Jewish Agency in France and Europe. But he said he was surprised that Jews aren't expressing more concern about the implications of the lawlessness that has prevailed in France for almost two weeks.

Apparently the opinion of Jews who are in the middle of the violence, and have experienced that violence first hand, really do see this as an issue of unassimilated--and angry--immigrants. Let's just hope that the Jewish community there is not being overly optimistic and a bit naïve.

Meanwhile, what does all this mean for Israel? According to Caroline Glick:

One could ask why Israel should care what happens in France. Given France's traditional and rather obscene hostility towards Israel, a certain level of good old-fashioned schadenfreude would seem justified. But the fact of the matter is that Israel has two reasons to care about the future of France. First, five years into this global jihad we see that while Muslim terrorists or militants in Ramallah, Paris, Jakarta, New York, New Dehli, Tikrit, Amsterdam, London, Teheran, Umm el-Fahm and Beslan may not speak to each other directly, they are certainly aware of one another's actions and successes. And were France to fall, all of us would feel the aftershocks.

Secondly, if France begins to assert its authority and responsibility for unassimilated Arabs and Muslims in France, perhaps Israel will be inspired to do the same for our Arab minority in Israel and Judea and Samaria, and thus move our country from a position of policy paralysis and defeatism to one of movement and strength.

So if the violence is just the anger of immigrants, the Jews of France will be relatively safe and it is mostly a French issue.

However, if this really is the makings of a French Intifada, then the stakes are high, both for French Jews and Israel.

Back to John Lichfield:

When and how will the riots end?

In tears or in rain. It is a miracle no one has died since the first two boys. A tragedy might bring the kids to their senses. Or it might not. Police, meanwhile, have been praying for a downpour, which has usually ended outbreaks in the past. The forecast for this week is fine and dry all over France.

Well, as long as it's the time of year to pray for rain anyway...

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tag: Israel.