Accused of fueling anti-Semitism, notably through his statements since October 7, Jean-Luc Mélenchon defends himself “of having failed in his duty” towards the Jewish community which on the contrary “abandoned” him and persists in his line, believing that the Israeli government is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
“We have never failed in our duty”
“I feel abandoned by those I have defended all my life. We have never failed in our duty. Nor in the principles that underpin it,” declares the leader of LFI in a long interview with the magazine East XXI.
“The Jewish community that I knew, with whom I campaigned when I was elected from Massy, lived in debate and accepted its differences. There were the ‘cultual’ and the ‘cultural’. The left, “was the ‘cultural’ ones,” he adds.
Absent from the November 12 march against anti-Semitism, Jean-Luc Mélenchon assures that the Jewish community “is wrong” to feel abandoned by the left because “we will always be the first to fight without weakness against the spread of racism” .
“No one has filed a complaint against me”
“Historically, the Jewish community had made the fair and judicious choice of the left,” he insists. He believes “that we are inventing a controversy” about the choice of words he uses in his statements which created the scandal, such as that on the president of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, whom he had accused of “camping” in Israel.
“This is part of an ideological war whose aim is to silence the opponents,” he judges. “No one has filed a complaint against me for anti-Semitism, even though it is an offense in France. It is therefore because our accusers do not believe it themselves,” he says.
In the interview, Jean-Luc Mélenchon defends his political position since the Hamas attack. “I called for a ceasefire on October 7,” he said, while this call, on the same day of the Hamas attack, was part of the reproaches addressed to him by the rest of the political class.
“In this case, (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu’s action against the Gazans is not legitimate. It is not self-defense, but genocide,” he maintains. “There are mass protests in many countries, including the United States of America, with large segments of local Jewish communities participating,” he notes. “In no country in the world, except perhaps in a large part of the French media class, is there an anti-Arab, anti-Muslim divide,” he notes.