French Antisemitism Watch
The news director of French state-run radio network Radio France Internationale resigned today, after his shocking antisemitic outbursts raised an outcry: French news chief resigns over anti-Semitic remarks.
Alain Menargues, speaking last week on Radio Courtoisie, an extreme right-wing Catholic radio station, said, “I was very shocked by the wall. Read Leviticus in the Torah. What is it about? Separation between pure and impure. To pray, a Jew must be pure and whatever comes in the way of this purity must be separated. Where was the first ghetto? It was in Venice. And who built it? It was the Jews themselves in order to be separated from the rest. After that, Europe put them in ghettos,” he said.
Menargues, who has written several books on the Middle East, has been doing interviews to publicize his latest book, Le Mur de Sharon (Sharon’s Wall).
Following the broadcast, the journalists’ union of RFI, the French equivalent of the BBC world service, issued a statement reading: “We protest with indignation and we reject Alain Menargues’s remarks on Jews and the State of Israel. It is now up to the president of RFI, Antoine Schwarz, to draw conclusions and take the appropriate measures.”
RFI’s spokesman announced on Monday that Menargues had submitted his resignation as news director.
The resignation followed another controversial statement by Menargues on September 30. Speaking on LCI, a French cable television network, Menargues said, “You say Israel is a democratic state? Let me also say Israel is a racist state”.