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Le Pen gives himself the coup de grace
I’m glad I wrote off Jean-Marie Le Pen a year ago, so that it wouldn’t have taken something this bad to make me write him off. According to a report in the Telegraph (which happily for us English-speaking readers seems to be following the French election closely), Le Pen, echoing his comment several years ago that what the Nazis did to European Jewry was a mere “detail” of World War II, now says that the 9/11 attack was a mere “incident”: “The September 11 event, or one could say incident, prompted a certain number of people to distance themselves [from Islamic extremism] to avoid falling under the barrage of accusations that was then unleashed.” The implication is that the “accusations” were unfair, and forced many of the Muslims to distance themselves from extremism, which also wasn’t fair, since, after all, why should people feel compelled to dissociate themselves from a mere incident? Another problem is his underlying premise that many Muslims distanced themselves from extremism. The truth was just the opposite. This is the man who was, or who was believed to be, France’s leading opponent of Islamization. Now his relativism and anti-Anglo-Saxonism (and, yes, his pro-Nazism) drive him to take the side of Muslims.
Speaking of which, Le Pen draws a moral equivalence between the 9/11 “incident” and the RAF bombing of German cities, since both were “terrorist acts as they expressly targeted civilians to force military leaders to capitulate.” I could explain everything that’s wrong with this statement, but I’m not going to bother. Who is this man? What does he stand for? And does it matter any more? Email entry |