Declan Hayes
As the French, along with their old British sparring partners, dust themselves down from these latest elections, they should give consideration to what flag they wish to serve and who best to give their loyalty to.
Britain, as the Jerusalem Post helpfully explains, will have a pro-Zionist government for the foreseeable future and France will be in electoral chaos at least until its 2027 Presidential election.
Sir Keir Starmer's thumping majority is due to the momentum Britain's powerful Zionist lobby, working primarily through Tony Blair's tried and trusted power brokers, put into Starmer's sails. Though their most obvious contribution was, as the Jewish Chronicle helpfully explains, banishing Jeremy Corbyn, and all other Labourites with a granule of common decency, to the political wilderness, New Labour's victory was, on the surface at least and, despite the Jewish Chronice's scare warnings about the dangers of "sanitised Islamism", more thorough than that.
As things currently stand, unless one is a morally bankrupt supporter of Israel, of Zelensky's rump Reich and of NATO's perpetual war mongering, one has no place in Labour, or in government or in policy making. That is an obvious win for Rupert Murdoch, for the Jewish Chronicle and for their wide circles of friends in high places that the Labour Friends of Israel and similar fifth columnist pressure groups coordinate.
Although Corbyn and a few like minded souls did manage to retain their seats, and although a handful of Muslims, standing on pro Palestinian platforms, won, they are of no consequence as the Labour Friends of Israel ensure they have no means of gaining greater traction. Though they will get their couple of minutes a month to ask soft ball Parliamentary questions, that will be the limit of their reach; Britain's powerful pro-Israeli lobby will see to that.
And so will Nigel Farage's Reform lot, who owe their existence to the threat such paper tigers present. The media friendly and media savvy Farage, with his prop of a half a pint of British beer in hand, will rail, in his ever so polite way, against the threat to British values (whatever they are) those who oppose genocide in Gaza present, and Murdoch's pro Israeli media will do the rest.
As for all of those marching for Palestine, they are like an anarchistic army of headless ants, not like a colony of ants, all working towards a common goal. The British intelligence services, with their plants in the Trotskyist and allied groups, will see they never share a common, viable goal, and that they remain just a bunch of well-meaning losers, forever marching around in circles and forever being denounced and dismissed as anti-Semitic bigots for their efforts.
It is to combat such alleged anti Semitism that Blair's pro Israelis rule the Labour Party and undermine whatever remains of British sovereignty. Forget the genocides in Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq that these same Labourites are directly implicated in. They will, their cover story goes, protect everyone in Blighty from another Holocaust.
Although Hitler never made it to Pommy Land, it is worth commenting on his armies' body bag count in France, which also recently had a farcical election. According to the French Defence Historical Service, 85,310 French military personnel were killed; 12,000 were reported missing, 120,000 were wounded and an incredible 1,540,000 were taken prisoner, with some 940,000 being held in Germany until 1945. They are huge numbers and a testimony to the unfathomable suffering France experienced during those years.
Although the Nazis murdered around 73,500 French Jews, more than 75% of the approximately 330,000 Jews in metropolitan France in 1939 survived the War; this is not only one of the highest survival rates in Europe, but should be juxtaposed with the much larger total of 567,000 military and civilian deaths France suffered during the War.
Not only that, but we should also remember that large swathes of the French population collaborated with the Germans, with the Vichy regime, of all groups, executing over 2,000 of their fellow French citizens for collaborating with Hitler. Pál Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa, the father of French President Sarkozy, was an active collaborator, as was President Francois Mitterand, neither of whom suffered the indignities French teenagers did for kissing a dashing Wehrmacht conscript soldier from the banks of the river Rhine.
The relevance of this is to say that when the French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, whose Jewish father survived Auschwitz, described the Rassemblement National, which was then led by Marine Le Pen's father, as the ideological "heir of Pétain," she was, as even Macron admitted, largely talking through her derrière, as the skeletons uncovered during and since the trial of Marshal Pétain clearly showed. Not only did the French invent the misleading concepts of left and right during their bourgeois 1789 Revolution but their leaders have been muddying the lines between them and scrambling the brains of French citizens ever since. As regards French collaboration and French complicity with the fate of the Jews and other minority groups, because there is far too much blame there to go around, the French wisely kept quiet about it for decades after 1945.
If France is ever to make headway, she must ditch those obsolete political clothes pegs and find herself even the most primitive of moral compasses. Such a compass is not to be found in the hands of Macron, of Borne or of their Trotskyist fellow partners in crime, who have no concept of the meaning of work, of toil or of wealth accumulation. Although the weaknesses of Le Pen's hand are obvious, so also are those of the rag tag of opportunists and self-servers who oppose her.
France is in the same sort of political chaos she was in before Germany's 1940 invasion and cheap hucksters like Borne and opportunists like Macron will not save her, no matter how many knock off 1930s' style popular fronts they concoct to save what remains of their own political skins.
Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) is a popular front in its own right, as it has largely supplanted the French Communist Party amongst the French working class and allied rural groups. As things currently stand, the RN has a solid and united bloc of 143 MPs, whereas the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) and Macron's Ensemble, though they respectively have 182 and 168 seats, cannot agree on anything, except that RN must be deprived of power. This is the chaos of 1940 all over again, the difference being that the Wehrmacht has been replaced by the no less loathsome von der Leyden and that Estonian Kallas cuckoo.
On top of all that, France not only stands divided but paralysed and, as with the United States and Britain, France's pro-Israeli lobby is happy with the result. Although the CRIF, France's main Zionist lobbying group, tends to be more discreet than their more obviously obnoxious American or British equivalents, they are just as effective. Although CRIF and Consistoire, which provides religious services and employs the country's chief rabbi, have consistently plumped for Macron, they are just as able to hedge their bets, as are their confreres in the Anglophonic world.
Although Jewish far-right politician Éric Zemmour, who commands the support of both the CRIF and Consistoire, is no less loathsome than the worst of Le Pen's knuckle draggers, most French Jews consider his policies to be kosher. If Zemmour serves any purpose, it is to show that France's thuggish Israeli lobby are as nakedly hypocritical as are their British and American partners in crime.
But it is not just Zemmour. The Times of Israel here reports on France's Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, like a somewhat dim-witted schoolboy, sheepishly telling CRIF's command staff that the "anti-Semitic Mélenchon and their other new-found left-wing buddies are "encouraging the stark rise in antisemitism" and taking "us back to the dark times when we saw that such actions can lead to a great disaster."
But it was not anti-Semitism that led to all the collateral damage of France's 1940 fall, but France's lack of national unity and national purpose, traits which remain as absent on this 2024 Bastille Day, as they were 84 years earlier, when the swastika and not their own tricolour flew from Paris' steeples on 14th July.
As the French, along with their old British sparring partners, dust themselves down from these latest elections, they should give consideration to what flag they wish to serve and who best to give their loyalty to. Although those flags should be those of their national countries, and their leaders should be those, who can best promote and defend their interests, the results in both elections have shown that the interests of Biden, von der Leyen, Netanyahu and Zelensky have emerged triumphant and, ipso facto, that the British and French have both lost. And so it will remain until those foreign forces like Labour Friends of Israel, CRIF and all those who fund them, have their wings well and firmly clipped. Unless and until that day arrives, the political landscape of both Paris and London will be every bit as grimy as the swamp POTUS Trump falsely promised to drain by the banks of the Potomac prior to the Yankees' long-forgotten 2020 election.