France’s centre-left Socialist party are seeking to expel a member of its national executive who tweeted an antisemitic photomontage of the country’s president Emmanuel Macron, controlled by three well-known Jews.
Gérard Filoche, a leading trade unionist and political activist on the left of the party, is already facing civil action brought by the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism. Filoche has since deleted the tweet.
Filoche tweeted the picture showing Macron with a red and black Nazi-style armband, with a dollar sign substituting the usual swastika. Macron is shown dominating the globe and surrounded by Israeli and American flags and controlled by businessman, Patrick Drahi, the banker, Jacob Rothschild and the author and former senior advisor to François Mitterand, Jacques Attali. All three are Jews. The picture is captioned : “En Marche (marching (forward), also the name of Macron’s party) towards world chaos.”
The Socialist party issued the following statement: “The Socialist party condemns in the strongest terms this abhorrent, inexcusable and unacceptable tweet. It strikes at socialist values as much as it does against the daily engagement and action on the ground of our activists against racism and antisemitism. In this regard, it constitutes a reason for expulsion.”
“We will take a speedy decision,” party coordinator Rachid Temal said.
The CRIF, the umbrella organisation of French Jews and the country’s EJC affiliate, also announced on Twitter that it would bring forth civil action. “While denying he is the author, he has become the instigator and the diffuser,” the CRIF said, adding that he should be prosecuted for justifying antisemitic hatred.
Filoche said he had merely retweeted the offending screed.
“What more do they want ?,” he said. “I am of the left and against the right and the far right. If they say I’m an antisemite, they should prove it, if I’m a racist, they should prove it.”
Temal said that showed “all the codes that we unfortunately saw in the 1930s. It’s an openly antisemitic tweet and on that basis it demands a procedure for expulsion, in the name of the Socialist party and its values.”
