France: Former PM Valls accused of proximity with Israeli far right

Via The Irish Times:

Mélenchon [a former Socialist minister and now leader of the far-left France Unbowed, France Insoumise] clashed with the former prime minister Manuel Valls, after the weekly Canard enchaîné reported that Mélenchon called Valls a Nazi. “I did not say and I do not think that Valls is a Nazi,” Mélenchon tweeted. “He’s a political loser.”

Mélenchon accused Valls of supporting the Israeli extreme right, while Valls accused Mélenchon of using “Islamo-leftist rhetoric” and complacency towards anti-Semitism. 

Valls, now deputy for the Essonne department south of Paris, chairs a commission on independence for the overseas territory of New Caledonia. Mélenchon withdrew from the commission, citing Valls’s “proximity to the ethnic theses of the Israeli extreme right”. He referred to a photograph of Valls with Ayelet Shaked, the Israeli minister of justice and a member of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party. 

Valls called Mélenchon’s statement “ignoble and outrageous”. Mélenchon replied that “Valls’s gang are completely integrated in the fachosphère and its propaganda.” Valls thanked politicians who supported him under the hashtag  #I’mFromValls’sGang#. 

The name-calling culminated with Vall’s interview on Europe 1 radio station. “When I go to Israel, I meet everyone,” he said, referring to the photograph with Shaked. “But when they publish this photo and say I’m the friend of the Israeli extreme right, they want to send one message: that Manuel Valls is the friend of the Jews. They’re forgetting the new anti-Semitism. That’s where there is complacency... or they realise it, which is even more serious.”

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