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French Far-Left Leader, Long Accused of Antisemitism, Backs Hezbollah ‘Resistance’ Over Israel’s ‘Invading Army’
Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of La France Insoumise party, speaks after the results of the second round of the 2024 French legislative elections, at the headquarters of La France Insoumise, July 7, 2024. Photo: Victoria Valdivia / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
The leader of France’s largest leftist coalition in government appeared to have declared open support for Hezbollah as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.
“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Jean-Luc Melenchon posted on X/Twitter on Monday, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”
Then on Tuesday, Melenchon continued to attack Israel on social media, tweeting, “After the terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Netanyahu inflicts bombings on this country up to 130 kilometers deep! The so-called international community lets it happen. The Lebanese are despised and abandoned. Shame on Europe that looks the other way.”
Hezbollah has been pummeling northern Israeli communities almost daily with barrages of drones, rockets, and missiles from its stronghold of Lebanon, which borders the Jewish state, since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas invaded southern Israel from neighboring Gaza on Oct. 7.
More than 60,000 Israelis have been forced to evacuate their homes in northern Israel and flee to other parts of the country amid the unrelenting attacks from Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon.
The conflict has escalated over the past week, with both sides increasing the scale and intensity of their strikes.
However, Melenchon seemed to single out Israel for criticism, keeping in line with his vocal hostility toward the Jewish state and controversial comments about France’s Jewish community.
France has experienced a record surge of antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Antisemitic outrages rose by over 1,000 percent in the final three months of 2023 compared with the previous year, with over 1,200 incidents reported — greater than the total number of incidents in France for the previous three years combined.
This year, anti-Jewish hate crimes in France have continued to skyrocket.
Amid the wave of attacks, France held snap parliamentary elections in July which brought an anti-Israel leftist coalition to power, leading French Jews to express deep apprehension about their future status in the country.
“It seems France has no future for Jews,” Rabbi Moshe Sebbag of Paris’s Grand Synagogue told the Times of Israel following the ascension of the New Popular Front, a coalition of far-left parties. “We fear for the future of our children.”
The largest member of the NFP, which gained the most seats of any political bloc but not enough for a majority, is the far-left La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) party, whose leader, Melenchon, has been lambasted by French Jews as a threat to their community as well as those who support Israel. Melenchon has a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.
Shortly after the NFP’s victory, Melenchon — who in a 2017 speech referred to the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest” — called for France to recognize a Palestinian state. Supporters of the hard-left coalition, which includes socialist and communist parties, poured into the streets of Paris waving Palestinian flags. French flags were largely absent from the celebrations.
In the wake of the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, Melenchon and his party issued a statement declaring the attacks “an armed offensive of Palestinian forces” as a result of continued Israeli “occupation.” Melenchon also failed to condemn a deputy who called Hamas a “resistance movement.”
Melenchon’s rhetoric and policy proposals have seemingly been unaffected by the rise in French antisemitism, which in many cases has been fueled by anti-Israel animus.
Earlier this month, for example, a kosher restaurant in Villeurbanne, near Lyon in eastern France, was defaced with red paint and tagged with the message “Free Gaza.”
The incident came days after French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.
Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), lambasted Melenchon at the time for denouncing an “intolerable crime” without mentioning antisemitism while condemning the attack on the synagogue.
“I do not believe in the sincerity of Jean-Luc Melenchon when he condemns this antisemitic act,” Arfi told the French broadcaster RMC, referring to the far-left leader as a “firefighter-arsonist” who incites hatred against Jews.
Arfi referred to the synagogue attack as a “symbol of the antisemitism which has struck French society” since October.
“It must be seen as such, as a tragic illustration of the new face that antisemitism has taken on in recent months,” he added. “It misappropriates the Palestinian cause to designate Jews as legitimate targets. French Jews are today attacked in the name of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the name of Gaza, by guilty shortcuts but also by a certain number of actors who fan this fire, in particular the political leaders of La France Insoumise who have contributed to the fact that today, these issues are inflammable. This unfortunately results in the fact that Jews are attacked.”
The restaurant vandalism also came two months after an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”
In another egregious attack that has garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.
Around the same time in June, an Israeli family visiting Paris was denied service at a hotel after an attendant noticed their Israeli passports.
In May, French police shot dead a knife-wielding Algerian man who set fire to a synagogue and threatened law enforcement in the city of Rouen.
One month earlier, a Jewish woman was beaten and raped in a suburb of Paris as “vengeance for Palestine.”
Such incidents are part of an explosion of antisemitic outrages across France that has continued since Oct. 7. Last month, then-French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin warned that incidents targeting the country’s Jewish community spiked by about 200 percent since Jan. 1.
“Two-thirds of anti-religious acts … are against Jews,” the interior minister added, according to French broadcaster BFM TV.
Darmanin appeared to call out the hard left for fostering a hostile environment for Jews during his remarks.
“There is hateful political speech against the Jews of France and it must be denounced,” he said, according to France Info. “We can clearly see that part of the left, unfortunately, is making this speech of encouragement of hatred toward our Jewish compatriots.”
Darmanin’s comments followed him stating earlier last month that antisemitic acts in France have tripled over the last year. In the first half of 2024, 887 such incidents were recorded, almost triple the 304 recorded in the same period last year, he said.
The now-former interior minister also called out Melenchon during his remarks, asking, “How can politicians think antisemitism is residual?”
Darmanin was referring to a blog post published in June in which Melenchon wrote that antisemitism in France was “residual” and “absent” from anti-Israel rallies. Critics argued that Melenchon was downplaying the significance of antisemitism in France.
Darmanin’s successor, newly minted French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, said on Monday that Jewish citizens in the country must be protected.
He made the comment during a speech about “restoring order to France’s streets,” referencing heightened crime in the country.
Criticizing what he described as the “laxity” of the Macron administration regarding public security, Retailleau said he was “speaking, and thinking especially, of our Jewish fellow citizens. We must let nothing pass.” He added that crime must not be tolerated against anyone including “women, children, and fellow citizens who, because of their origin, skin color, or faith, are threatened.”
However, the threat of antisemitism may continue to spike as Israel continues launching defensive military operations along its borders.
In recent months, as Israel has imposed devastating losses on Hamas in Gaza to the south, it has increasingly turned more of its attention northward to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The Israeli military said it struck over 1,600 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley over the past 24 hours as part of Operation Northern Arrows.” Overnight attacks followed Monday’s massive Israeli aerial offensive to prevent the Iran-backed terrorist army from firing rockets across the border.
According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, 558 people were killed and 1,835 were wounded in the Israeli strikes. The ministry’s figures did not distinguish between combatants and noncombatants.
The strikes came after Hezbollah, which openly seeks Israel’s destruction, launched more than 100 rockets and drones at northern Israel in waves of attacks overnight on Saturday and Sunday morning.
The Hezbollah barrage was in response to the thousands of pagers and walke-talkies used by Hezbollah terrorists that exploded in Lebanon last week. While Israel neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the sophisticated operation, Iran and Hezbollah blamed the Jewish state and vowed revenge. Several experts and media reports said Israeli intelligence was behind the blasts.
Israeli leaders have said they seek a diplomatic resolution to the conflict with Hezbollah along the border with Lebanon but are prepared to use large-scale military force if needed to ensure all citizens can safely return to their homes.
The post French Far-Left Leader, Long Accused of Antisemitism, Backs Hezbollah ‘Resistance’ Over Israel’s ‘Invading Army’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’

Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living on April 24, 2025. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Oswiecim, Poland — Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz, the infamous former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, for the first time on Thursday, joining Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the annual March of the Living.
The march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II — took place on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and included 80 Holocaust survivors, many of whom were also death march survivors, to mark 80 years since the liberation of the camps.
March of the Living president Phyllis Greenberg Heideman addressed the survivors, who were seated next to the gate bearing the notorious inscription, “Work sets you free.”
“It’s a strange thing to say, but we welcome you to Auschwitz,” she said. “You are the true heroes. We will treasure your legacy forever.”

Almog Meir Jan and his mother Orit. Almog was rescued by the IDF on June 5 during the Arnon Mission. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Standing outside the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz I, recently released hostage Eli Sharabi said, “The Holocaust was unlike anything else — we will never forget and never forgive.”
“But our presence here is the triumph of the Jewish spirit. The Jewish people sanctify life, not death. I endured horrors in enemy captivity, but I chose life. That gives me hope to get up each morning and begin rebuilding,” he added.
Sharabi, whose wife and daughters were murdered during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, was released in February after nearly 500 days in captivity. His emaciated appearance as he was paraded through Gaza on his release led to comparisons with concentration camp survivors.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran broke down after seeing Sharabi. The two embraced for several minutes. “Seeing him in real life, in this place, just made it all suddenly seem very close. This is no longer something that happened 80 years ago; it’s continuing until this day,” Shukran told The Algemeiner.

Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran embracing former hostage Eli Sharabi. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In remarks to reporters prior to the march, Herzog called the return of the hostages a “universal human imperative.”
“With a broken heart, I remind us all that although after the Holocaust we vowed, ‘Never again,’ today, even as we stand here, the souls of dozens of Jews again ‘yearn within a cage,’ ‘thirsting for water and for freedom,’ as 59 of our brothers and sisters are held by terrorist murderers in Gaza, in a horrific crime against humanity,” Herzog said, referring to the hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion who remain in captivity.
His Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, said the march was “a dramatic call of ‘never again.’ No more hatred, no more discrimination, no more antisemitism.”
He called for “all wars in the Middle East to end,” and for a two-state solution, which he said was the “most rational solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] that gives hope for achieving stable and lasting peace.”
The two leaders signed the visitors’ book and laid a wreath at Auschwitz’s Black Wall, where the Nazis executed prisoners.
At the march’s opening ceremony, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, lit one of six candles — representing the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis — and addressed rising antisemitism in the world.
“Jews all over the world fear walking streets with a kippah and it’s unacceptable. College students are being attacked verbally and physically,” he told The Algemeiner.
He praised US President Donald Trump for “combating this scourge.”
“There’s a new sheriff in town. It’s my hope the rest of the world can look to him to see how to support and defend the Jewish community against these vile attacks,” he said.

Matt Brooks, chief executive officer of the Republican Jewish Coalition, with Malcolm Hoenlein, vice chairman emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In Block 5, where thousands of victims’ eyeglasses are displayed behind glass, Laly Dery told a delegation of Israeli teenagers from the national civil service about her son, Sgt. First Class (res.) Saadia, who fell in battle in Gaza in June.
“Just like my son, who served the country with every fiber of his being, you have earned the enormous privilege of serving the state of Israel,” Dery said.
Derai’s words resonated with Sara Bisan, the only member of the national service delegation not wearing an Israeli flag. Instead, Bisan wore the distinctive multi-colored flag of the Druze community to which she belongs.
“I feel her pain, and it hurts,” Bisan said, reflecting on the death of her own friend from the northern Druze village of Kfar Yarka, who was also killed in Gaza.
“But our people, the Druze and the Jews, share a lot, including a love of Israel. I also feel that serving the state of Israel is a privilege,” she added.

Sara Bisan. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
Twelve thousand participants marched the 1.7 miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau for the main ceremony, which was cut short this year due to heavy rain.
As thunder echoed overhead, released hostage Agam Berger played the theme from “Schindler’s List” on a 150-year-old violin rescued during the Holocaust. Daniel Weiss, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri whose father was murdered on Oct. 7 and whose mother was abducted and later killed in Gaza, performed a musical rendition of the psalm Shir Lamaalot alongside her.
“The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul,” Weiss sang, his voice quavering.
The post ‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert

Eyal Golan. Photo: Screenshot
France’s leading far-left party has called for the cancellation of Israeli pop star Eyal Golan’s upcoming concert in Paris, describing him as “a true mouthpiece for supporters of genocide” in Gaza.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the La France Insoumise party (LFI — “France Unbowed”), led by leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, urged the National Assembly — the lower house of the French Parliament — to ban Golan’s upcoming concert, claiming that he “should not come to sing the praises of genocide in Paris.”
“We call for a broad mobilization to prevent this event from taking place,” LFI lawmakers wrote in the statement, referring to Golan’s concert scheduled for May 20. “We ask the prefect to ban it immediately.”
“No one should come to Paris to sing hymns to the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the statement continued.
According to the party, the 54-year-old singer called for “the extermination of the Palestinian people” in a social media post the day after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which he wrote, “Leave no soul alive.”
LFI also said that Golan “repeated the statement a week later, before receiving support from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” who serves as Israel’s national security minister.
In their statement, LFI lawmakers claimed that Golan’s concert, expected to gather more than 4,500 people, “constitutes a real voice for genocide supporters.”
“France cannot tolerate such an unnecessary insult to the thousands of Gaza victims and their loved ones,” the statement read.
In response to these accusations, Liam Productions, the event organizer, denounced the push to cancel Golan’s concert as antisemitic and expressed their eagerness to meet the Jewish community in France, promising a “unifying and special evening.”
“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember the consequences of staying silent in the face of hate, far-left parties in France seek to boycott an Israeli artist simply because he is Israeli,” the statement read.
“This is not freedom of expression — it is antisemitism disguised as morality. The people of Israel will not be silent, will not apologize, and will not stop singing.”
Mélenchon and his party have a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.
The French diplomat has been criticized by French Jews as a threat to their community, as well as to those who support Israel.
Mélenchon has previously described the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest.” He has also urged the French government to recognize a “Palestinian state.”
In the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel, Mélenchon and his party issued a statement calling the attacks “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” in response to the ongoing Israeli “occupation.”
Last year, Mélenchon openly expressed support for Hezbollah on social media, as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.
“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Melenchon wrote in a post on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”
France has experienced a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 atrocities, with 1,570 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded last year.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews.
“LFI has given antisemitism a political endorsement,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the French publication Le Point last year. “We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent in France, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
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Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education

US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon shakes hands with Annette Albright next to US President Donald Trump during an event to sign executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect.
US President Donald Trump has signed a seismic executive order to strengthen federal law which colleges and universities have long circumvented to avoid reporting donations they receive from illiberal foreign governments and individuals.
“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” Trump said in the order, which was signed in the Oval Office in the presence of the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Wednesday. “It is the policy of my administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.”
The executive order noted that during Trump’s first term in office, the Education Department launched investigations of 19 higher education institutions suspected of concealing foreign donations and any undue influence the immense sums may have gained the country from which they originated — inquiries that led to the disclosure of $6.5 billion worth of unreported gifts. The Biden administration, he said, “undid” that work, “hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”
The remainder of the order enumerates enforcement duties delegated to McMahon, which include reversing Biden-era policies which countenanced lax observance of the law — Section 117 of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 — updating the public on the department’s findings, and impounding federal funds appropriated to institutions that continue to shroud their foreign donations behind a veil of secrecy and corporate spin.
“Unfortunately, in the last four years, the Biden administration undermined the structures the president built to do this critical work, allowing nations like China and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to US universities with little to no oversight,” McMahon said in a statement. “This financial infiltration enabled foreign governments to steal taxpayer-funded intellectual property and reshape how our elite campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East.”
Foreign money in higher education is an issue to which scholars and nonprofit groups have called attention for years, arguing that it is an instrument of hostile powers that aim to distort US foreign policy by exposing students to propaganda or other ideas which undermine faith in liberal values such as free markets, limited government, and freedom of the press. Some of it is used to rehabilitate the reputations of authoritarian governments, a tactic which, experts argue, effectively converts the openness of American society into a force of its own self-subversion.
For example, according to the 2017 National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for years planted “Confucius Institutes” at universities across the US, teaching students that Taiwan is Chinese territory while censoring darker moments in the regime’s history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre that killed thousands of Chinese citizens. The institutes, the report added, came with substantial financial benefits, such as extra funds for the University at Buffalo’s Asian studies department and “opera costumes and materials in the lobby of Binghamton University.”
At other times, the Confucius Institutes were allegedly used as bases from which to conduct espionage and theft of American research and intellectual property.
NAS president Peter Wood told The Algemeiner on Thursday that Trump’s executive order is the right move, but that higher education will “resist” complying with it.
“What is at stake here is not just compliance with a good accounting principle. What is really at stake is the contempt with which many college and university presidents regard America’s national interest,” Wood said. “Allowing our universities to become beholden to the Chinese Community Party endangers Americans. The National Association of Scholars has helped to track the theft of intellectual property, the duplicity of American researchers, and the diversion research programs all under the influence of Chinese funding. China is far from the only source of such subversive funding, but it is by far the largest source.”
He added, “President Trump’s forceful executive order will go a long way towards curing this problem. We can be under no illusion, however, that America’s colleges and universities will cheerfully comply. They have a long record of ignoring lawful requirements for such disclosure and they are now more eager than ever to demonstrate their defiance of America’s laws. In light of other executive orders against [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and other forms of academic malfeasance, dozens of prominent research universities are openly declaring that they intend to resist.”
NAS has recorded copious data on foreign funding of higher education, notably in the Foreign Donor Database it created in 2024 that led to the uncovering of vast sums the Qatari government had pumped into American universities — Cornell University received over $322 million, for example, from the Qatar National Research Fund between 2015 and 2018 — to promote pro-Hamas propaganda.
Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner that Qatar has “given billions to universities, including to share their Middle East studies program which then in turn develop and disseminate K-12 curriculums which are dramatically anti-Israel, antisemitic, and pro-Islamist.”
The donation of billions of unreported dollars to US institutions of higher education is strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a 2023 report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind.”
From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations. The largest donor it named is Qatar, which former US President Joe Biden described in 2022 as a “major non-NATO ally.” From 2014-2019, Qatar gave American universities a striking $2.7 billion in undocumented funds.
Additionally, students attending universities that received foreign funding witnessed antisemitism “significantly more often” than those attending schools that did not.
“A lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education,” the report said. “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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