France’s National Front gaining among Jews with tough stance on Arab anti-Semitism

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  • France’s National Front gaining among Jews with tough stance on Arab anti-Semitism | Jewish Telegraphic Agency
    By Cnaan LiphshizSeptember 23, 2014
    http://www.jta.org/2014/09/23/news-opinion/world/frances-national-front-gaining-among-jews-with-tough-stance-on-arab-anti-semiti

    (JTA) — From the window of his Paris home, Michel Ciardi can see into the waiting room of a government welfare agency where a predominantly Arab and African crowd awaits government checks.
    A former communist, Ciardi once believed the scene at the agency was a necessary element of French efforts to help integrate new immigrants. But that changed in 2000 after the second Palestinian intifada triggered a massive increase in anti-Semitic violence, much of it committed by Arab and African immigrants.
    The violence was enough to shift his political allegiance to the National Front, a far-right party long demonized by French Jews as anti-Semitic and a threat to republican values.
    “I never considered voting National Front,” Ciardi told JTA. “But I realized you need to defend yourself, your community, society and country against those seeking to subdue us.”
    French Jewry has long viewed the National Front as an enemy, an abominable vestige of the pro-Nazi Vichy state. But under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, the photogenic daughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, a political provocateur convicted multiple times for hate speech and Holocaust denial, the party has tried to shed its image as decidedly outside the mainstream.