The absurdities of Vincent Peillon, PS primary candidate

What an infinite disappointment it has been to read in the press over the past few days certain remarks that one would never have suspected could be uttered by a candidate in the French Socialist Party (PS) primary election, who is reputed to be an intellectual. Vincent Peillon, who stood out from his rival friends thanks to his training as a philosopher and his reputation as a passionate republican, seems to have fallen really low.

His first mistake was on the set of France 2 last Tuesday. The candidate in the left-wing primary declared: «Some people want to use secularism, it's already been done in the past, against certain categories of the population. That was forty years ago (sic) the Jews who were given a yellow star are now a number of our Muslim compatriots.»

Jews and Muslims are on the same boat

This is a triple misunderstanding. Firstly, forty years ago, Jews did not wear a yellow star. Vincent Peillon undoubtedly meant the forties, but isn't that a totally scandalous approximation for a person claiming to be President of the Republic? Secondly, what the agrégé de philosophie is trying to convey with this sentence, namely a parallelism between anti-Semitism and fear of a certain Islam, or even of Islam altogether, is bafflingly absurd: detestation of a people and detestation of a religion or ideology have nothing to do with each other. Finally, secularism has never been a justification for the anti-Semitic horror of the twentieth century.^th century.

But above all, this sentence implies that community victims in France are no longer Jewish, but Muslim. This analysis, shared by Edwy Plenel, is astonishing, if not dishonest. Anti-Semitism still exists in France, it's even gaining strength again, and it's overwhelmingly from Islamic circles. It is in Arab-Muslim neighborhoods that a manifest hatred of the Jewish people is developing, at this very moment and increasingly so.

This reality, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be picked up by the airwaves of what has come to be known as Islamo-leftism. Against all odds, Vincent Peillon, republican though he may be, is becoming an undisputed representative of this current, often based on base electoral motives. Of course, we must recognize and fight the rejection of Muslims, but at the same time we must recognize and fight the rejection of Jews - which is more frequent, if we want to compare communities as Peillon does by comparing Muslims to Jews...

How to define the right

The company's second hard-to-digest sentence concerns its vision of the Right. Here's how he defined it on TMC on Wednesday: «The right is people who consider that there are differences between us which mean that, for example, if we don't have the same sexual orientation, I have the right to marry, he doesn't have the right to marry; he's black, he doesn't have the right to vote. That's been our history for two centuries.»

No need for lengthy comments here. This statement speaks for itself. And it testifies to the current state of affairs on the Left, which, well aware that it will never be able to accept and make amends for its betrayal of the popular electorate, is trying to attract it by all means, as demagogic as they are counter-productive. It's a pity, because candidate Peillon could have raised the level of French political debate. Fortunately, he has made up for it recently, notably during his appearance on «On n'est pas couché».

Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com

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