France: Socialist primary winner had backing of prominent anti-Semites

The issue of the importance of the Muslim opposed to the much less important Jewish vote is not new in France - it was advocated 15 years ago by Pascal Boniface.  Pascal Bruckner wrote: 

"When the political scientist Pascal Boniface, in a note to the leaders of the Socialist Party in April 2001, advised them, as a matter of simple electoral calculation, to abandon the Jewish vote (500,000 in France) for the Muslim vote (five million), he very honestly spilled the beans." 

Via JTA:

A left-wing politician in France who was endorsed by the founders of the country’s Anti-Zionist Party handily defeated Prime Minister Manuel Valls in the Socialist presidential primaries.

Benoit Hamon, who supports dramatically expanding welfare payments and has called for his party to support Palestinian causes to increase its appeal to Muslim voters, beat his hard-line challenger Sunday with 58 percent of the vote in the second and final round of the balloting.

Last week, the comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala and the far-right author Alain Soral — who along with founding the  Anti-Zionist Party both have multiple convictions for Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred against Jews – endorsed Hamon publicly. Hamon disavowed Soral and Dieudonne.

Soral wrote on his website that voting for Hamon was necessary to “knock Valls out of the race” because he is “a candidate who swore allegiance to the CRIF and to Israel be it through policy, media exposure, judicial means or by deploying the police.” CRIF is the umbrella group of French Jewish communities.

Soral and Dieudonne cited Valls’ commitment to defending Jews against anti-Semitic violence. Valls is married to Anne Gravoin, a Jewish musician. In 2011 he said his marriage connected him “in an eternal way” to Israel and the Jewish people. He is also the only French prime minister who has said publicly that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. (...)

Hamon in a televised interview last month called the establishment of a Palestinian state the “best way of ensuring Israel is not attacked by its neighbors.” But in a 2014 interview, he said that supporting the establishment of such a state was the Socialist Party’s “best way to recuperate our electorate in the suburbs and the neighborhoods” – code for Muslim voters — “who did not support the pro-Israeli position taken by President François Hollande.”

Hamon had criticized Valls, too, for “giving in to Israel.”

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