In response to one of Captain Dreyfus’s great-granddaughters who asked him why he would not take the lead in the demonstration against anti-Semitism, the President of the Republic displayed a serious air while saying distressing banalities. In summary, I am the president of the union of all French people, if I had to demonstrate it would be every week. However, it is not every week that the Republic, through the voice of the presidents of the Senate and the National Assembly, summons the citizens. It’s not every day that French Jews are afraid and feel terribly isolated. It is not every week that we march in silence and dignity against anti-Semitism, the mold of all racism, and this, after the pogrom committed by Hamas on October 7, the first since the Shoah. Forgive the expression, but the carelessness of the President of the Republic is ruining things.
We had already guessed it… But as History makes great men, we hoped that Emmanuel Macron would suddenly strengthen himself politically and abandon the poison of “at the same time” which is only “words, words”. Louis Barthou, journalist and politician from the 1930s, had seen yesterday what is the problem of Macronie today: “In France, the word is too often taken, both by those who speak and by those who listen, for the sake of higher form of action.” It was already distressing with Russia: Emmanuel Macron wanted to keep the channel open with Putin, fantasizing about being a peacemaker before his time, allowing himself to be filmed, wearing a turtleneck and artificial relaxation, in a secret-defense conversation with the master of the Kremlin – sequence which drew the wrath of the diplomatic corps -, taking an indecent amount of time to go to Kiev, alienating both the Russians and the Ukrainians, before finally siding with Ukraine in desire for democracy. “At the same time” inconsistent.
Last fall, after the death of Mahsa Amini, murdered by the moral police for a poorly worn veil, while the Iranian street courageously shouted its hatred of the mullahs and demanded moral, material, political and diplomatic support to overthrow a toxic and dangerous regime for the world, the President of the French Republic found nothing better to do than shake hands with the butcher of Tehran, Ebrahim Raïssi, in front of the cameras, and at the UN please (this increasingly useless body whose leader, Antonio Guterres, is confused every day a little more with an ex-Miss World who is only just ready to inaugurate the sausage stands in supermarkets). Before receiving, a few days later, at the Elysée, women from the Iranian opposition. “At the same time” shameful.
The President of the Republic is an invertebrate who talks too much
After the pogrom of October 7, Emmanuel Macron lagged behind Western leaders in going to Israel, where he nevertheless managed, after meeting Benjamin Netanyahu and assuring him of France’s support, to meet Mahmoud Abbas liar, who after promising him everything he wanted in private, took up the Islamist narrative in public, humiliating the French president who could no longer hold his seat. And then, it was too much: the BBC. Implying in a foreign media outlet that Israel is deliberately bombing babies, women and old people, then backpedaling by calling on Israeli President Isaac Herzog for help as if he had realized the enormity of his words after They came out of his mouth, this is the pitiful sequence in which the head of state indulged. “At the same time” murky.
“At the same time” which expresses the fear of a president of French society, which he refuses to understand. A president who imagines that ostensibly combating anti-Semitism would hurt French Muslims, who thus lumps together Islamists and Muslims and validates the Islamist discourse, which is winning over many Muslims. “At the same time” separatist, who glorifies what he believes he is fighting.
Perhaps the problem with Emmanuel Macron is that he gets drunk with his words, that he wallows in his logorrhea, that he wallows in the vanity of the actor he never became. Perhaps he confuses the world stage with a spectacle in which he is the hero, and therefore fails to appreciate the gravity that is required in the face of geopolitical complexity. It is not too complex, it is not complex enough. The President of the Republic is an invertebrate who talks too much: “For many men, speech precedes thought. They only know what they think after hearing what they say”, observed Gustave Lebon. “At the same time” theater.
Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity
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