Ben Shapiro Shapiro is a second-year political
science student. E-mail him at frumfiddle@aol.com.
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France is supposed to be the world capital of sophistication.
Their public sneers at brutish American policy. They hesitate to
support any war on Iraq. They refuse to turn over suspected
terrorists to American courts for fear of the cruel American death
penalty. They scoff at Israel’s right to self-defense, which
is so un-chic.
All of this explains why the most recent political developments
in France have been so satisfyingly surprising. In the latest
French presidential election, Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the
far-right French National Front party, won 17.06 percent of the
presidential vote, finishing second to moderate-conservative
Jacques Chirac, who is the current French president. Chirac won 19
percent of the vote. Socialist Prime Minister Lional Jospin
finished third with 16 percent of the vote. Chirac and Le Pen will
both take part in the presidential runoff.
The irony of the situation is beautiful. The French public has
put the French version of Pat Buchanan in a runoff. Le Pen is by
most accounts an anti-Semite, calling the Nazi gas chambers a
“detail of history.” He supports stopping immigration
and deporting all illegal aliens from France. He states that France
must stop being an American pawn in the Middle East. He wants to
promote isolationist trade policies by erecting trade barriers.
Le Pen’s showing has led to despair across France.
“Non!” and “The Earthquake” ran across the
front pages the day after the election. Protests against Le Pen are
being held every day. Jospin, the Socialist, has thrown his support
to Chirac.
But no matter what the French media says, votes talk. This
situation has revealed much of the French public for what it is:
xenophobic, anti-Semitic and isolationist.
For decades, the French have made it their priority to claim
moral high ground. They foist blame for the Holocaust onto the
German occupation of France, completely ignoring that French troops
voluntarily rounded up Jews for the gas chambers. They gloss over
the fact that the Vichy government virtually welcomed the Germans
with open arms. They exaggerate the extent of the French resistance
movement against the fascists. Their moral ambiguity has
masqueraded as sophistication for years. Now, it has become clear
that the French public would voluntarily ask for a fascist
dictator, which is what Le Pen surely desires.
To be sure, not all of Le Pen’s platform is completely
unjustified. He seeks to cut the inheritance tax and income taxes.
He wants to pull France out of the EU, and reinstate the franc
alongside the euro. In response to mass immigration of North
Africans, he seeks to bar immigrants from that area. In recognizing
the latent threat of militant Islam, which has already been
manifested in hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks by Arabs in France,
he seeks to bar the building of any more mosques in France — some
mosques are used as recruiting places for potential terrorists.
These points are well-taken, but the bottom line remains that Le
Pen is a very scary politician — a politician with significant
support from that “sophisticated” French public.
This “shocking revelation” that the French public
supports hatred and fascism has two very practical ramifications:
First, America should stop seeking support from such an
ideologically schizophrenic nation in the war on terrorism, and
second, France should lose its international status as some sort of
social beacon.
Before this election, the French could cite “higher
thought” as reason for refusing use of French air-space for
American and UK strikes against Iraq. They could thumb their noses
at the American war on terrorism, and support terrorists rather
than unambiguously siding with democracy and freedom.
Before this election, French ambassadors were welcomed as
moderates in the Middle East conflict despite comments by a French
ambassador that Israel was a “shitty little
country.”
Now things have changed. Leaders all over the world are
mobilizing against the French threat. Israel’s religious
parties are calling for mass immigration by Jews from Europe. Says
Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Pique, “I am extremely worried
by certain stances which might involve a racist or xenophobic
element, but I am also worried to a large extent by certain stances
which run completely counter to the construction of
Europe.”
Holding out hope, British Prime Minister Tony Blair says:
“we trust the French people to reject extremism of any
kind.” It is now exceedingly clear that any trust in France
is completely misplaced.