What to make of Éric Zemmour?

Despite my many criticisms, large and small, of Zemmour, I would vote for him were I a French citizen.

What to make of Éric Zemmour, the just-declared candidate for president in France in 2022?

His last name in Arabic means, perhaps suitably for an intellectual, honking, as what ducks and car horns do. His parents fled Algeria and he openly identifies as a Jew but presents himself as the representative of traditional Catholic Deep France and the scourge of immigrants and Islam.

He adopts positions on Jewish issues so extreme that France’s Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia called him an antisemite. He’s been twice found guilty of hate speech and wears these condemnations proudly. His anti-feminist positions are antediluvian. He’s pro-Russian and anti-American.

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Far-right pundit Eric Zemmour launches 2022 bid for French presidency

French far-right pundit Eric Zemmour announced on Tuesday that he will run for president in next year’s election, staking his claim in a video peppered with anti-immigrant rhetoric and warnings France must be saved from decline.

Zemmour, 63, is the most stridently anti-Islam and anti-migrant of the challengers seeking to unseat President Emmanuel Macron in the April 2022 vote.

His formal entry into the race — anticipated for weeks — adds another element on the far-right to the campaign, alongside its traditional leader Marine Le Pen. But it remains to be seen if he will maintain the momentum of recent weeks.

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‘Immigration is war’: an interview with Éric Zemmour

He speaks in newspaper columns: press his opinion button and he’s off. His eloquence is almost hypnotic

Éric Zemmour looks down at a copy of The Spectator and cocks his eyebrows at the unflattering cartoon of him on the cover. He decides he doesn’t care. “It takes a lot to offend me, you know,” he says. He then leafs through the magazine making polite and appreciative noises. “Ah, Doooglas Murray!” he exclaims. “I like Doooglas Murray very much. We’ve exchanged ideas.”

Zemmour is in London as part of his still undeclared campaign to be the next president of France — to curry favor with and raise money from the many French voters who live in the capital. But the British Establishment has given him a cold reception. Mayor Sadiq Khan said he wasn’t welcome. The Royal Institution canceled his event. The UK government ordered Conservatives to call off meetings with him. That could be because Boris Johnson hopes to repair badly damaged relations with Emmanuel Macron, the man Zemmour wants to eject from the Élysée Palace. Or it could just be that Mr Z is considered so right wing as to be toxic.

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Salah Abdeslam and the Banality of Terror

The only surviving attacker from the terror commando that descended on Paris on the night of Nov. 13, 2015, is currently on trial. The young man used to like going out, drinking alcohol and smoking joints. What happened?

The witness, François Hollande, walks quickly through the courtroom, past the light-colored, wooden benches where the co-plaintiffs and journalists are sitting. Past the huge glass box from which 11 of the 20 defendants are following the proceedings. The former French president doesn’t even look at them before stopping at a lectern at the front of the courtroom.

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France: Is Éric Zemmour an Anti-Semite?

The rumor that a Jew making racist and anti-Semitic remarks could be a candidate in France’s presidential election of spring 2022 has crossed the country’s borders. Worse, the rumor is that this supposedly racist, anti-Semitic Jew, Éric Zemmour, is buoyed by polls that forecast him as a very possible second-round candidate against France’s current President Emmanuel Macron.

Sacrebleu! How could such a thing have happened? Is Zemmour really a racist? Is he carried by a wave of the extreme right, as many on the left suggest? Is France on the verge of tipping over into fascism?

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Will Éric Zemmour’s Bataclan stunt backfire?

Will Éric Zemmour’s Bataclan stunt backfire?

The French far-Right pundit and likely presidential candidate, Éric Zemmour, offended against good taste and the unwritten rules of political life last week by using the anniversary and site of the Bataclan terrorist attacks in Paris to advance his election campaign.

On Saturday — the sixth anniversary of the Bataclan and other Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris which killed 130 people — Zemmour invited TV cameras to film him outside the concert hall in the French capital where 90 concert-goers were murdered on 13 November 2015.

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The future of France? Civil war and then Islamist dictatorship, says famed Algerian writer

“Strike hard and fast, that’s what the living and the dead are calling for,” said famous Algerian writer Boualem Sansal in an interview with Le Figaro, calling on France to take decisive, hard, and politically incorrect action.

According to him, only a “big reversal” gives a chance to save France from “Lebanonization” or “Algerization.” Sansal, who won the Arab Literature Prize, shared his opinion on the anniversary of the terrorist massacre at the Bataclan Club in Paris.

On Nov. 13, 2015, individuals sworn to the Islamic State terrorist group burst into the Bataclan club in Paris, where a concert was taking place, and shot 80 people with automatic weapons. These terrorist attacks, committed six years ago, were, according to Sansal, “an act of unimaginable violence, to which the French President (Francois Hollande) responded with tears and lamentations.”

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France: Nationalism Makes a Comeback

Although the next French presidential election is months away, the way the media in Paris along with French chattering classes are behaving, one might think that we are on the eve of polling day.

Turn on any TV channel and open any newspaper and you are likely to run into oodles of speculation about the journey to the Élysée Palace.

One reason may be even the main one, for this premature interest is a 63-year old journalist who has cast himself as a modern version of the Prophet Jeremiah to depict gloom and forecasting doom for French democracy.

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̷F̷r̷e̷n̷c̷h̷ ̷m̷a̷n̷ Muslim gets life sentence for slaying 85-year-old Holocaust survivor in antisemitic attack

A French man has been sentenced to life in prison for stabbing an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor to death in an antisemitic attack, a case that triggered widespread outrage and called attention to resurgent anti-Jewish sentiment in France.

After horror and grief, Mireille Knoll’s family feels justice after Wednesday’s verdict.

…. Yacine Mihoub, a neighbour who grew up in the Paris public housing project where Knoll had lived most of her life, was convicted of killing a vulnerable person based on religious motives, according to Knoll’s family.

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Policeman survives suspected terror attack in French city of Cannes

Police in the French city of Cannes have shot a man who attacked a group of police officers with a knife.

Security sources have told French media the attack looks to have been motivated by Islamist terrorism.

A police source said the attacker claimed to have been acting “in the name of the Prophet.”

He reportedly opened the door of a police car stationed in front of the central police station in Cannes, before stabbing the officer in the driver’s seat.

Regarding the assailant:

➡️ Algerian nationality

➡️ 37 years old

➡️ Unknown to police

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How the French establishment betrayed Samuel Paty

The brutal Islamist beheading of a school teacher, one year on.

In a quiet suburb of Paris, in broad daylight, 47-year-old teacher Samuel Paty was decapitated. His murderer, Abdullah Anzarov, posted a picture of the severed head on social media, with a message from ‘Abdullah, the servant of Allah’ addressed to ‘Macron, leader of the infidels’. ‘I executed one of your hellhounds who dared to belittle Muhammad’, Anzarov boasted.

Paty had shown his pupils some cartoons of Muhammad in a class discussion on freedom of expression. Hearing of the story, a girl at the school claimed she was in the room, and that Paty had asked the Muslim pupils to leave. This particular detail was a lie. But it was this version of events that attracted the attention of Islamists and which then led Paty’s life to be brutally, violently extinguished.

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Paris attacks trial: Humdrum lives that turned to mass murder

They had happy childhoods in Brussels, Malmo or Tunis, with plenty of brothers and sisters and parents who worked hard to give them life’s comforts.

The long-running Paris attacks trial heard this week how the once ordinary lives of 14 men in the dock became a mix of petty jobs and petty crime. Some went to join the war in Syria, and then became caught up in an Islamic State vengeance plot to wreak terrorist havoc in Western Europe.

It culminated in the murder of 130 people on the night of 13 November 2015.

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France: Can this Journalist Become President and Save France?

September 16. Éric Zemmour’s new bookFrance Has Not Yet Said Her Last Word, immediately book becomes a bestseller. Two of his previous books, The French Suicide and A Five-Year Term for Nothing: Chronicles of the War of Civilizations, sold more than 500,000 copies, a high number for non-fiction in France. He is an exception. All authors who write of immigration and Islam without political correctness have been ostracized by the media for years. Not Zemmour. Each time he was fired by radio and television stations, another one hired him. As the last politically incorrect talk show host, his audience consists of people weary of political correctness. He has been dragged into court countless times and ordered to pay high fines, presumably to force him to be quiet. He has paid the fines but would not be quiet.

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Two thirds of French people believe white Christians are ‘threatened with extinction’ by Muslim migration, new poll shows

Two thirds of French people think white, European, Christian populations are being ‘threatened with extinction’ by immigration from Muslim and African countries.

Sixty per cent of French people said such a scenario will ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ play out in the country when asked by pollsters, who published the results last week.

The question was posed ahead of next year’s election, where Emmanuel Macron is almost certain to face off against one of two right-wing candidates: Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour.

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