French Far-Right Candidate Courts 9/11 Controversy
The Front National’s candidate’s anti-semitic “trutherism” comes to the surface.
France’s National Front (FN) claims it has changed its game plan to gain wider legitimacy among ordinary voters, but one of its new faces is courting the kind of controversy that has long made most of the electorate recoil from the far-right party.
Aymeric Chauprade, a former professor at France’s most prestigious military academy, will be the top FN candidate representing Paris in European Parliament elections in May.
The French press has pounced on Chauprade since the party’s announcement was made, but not to inquire about his views on monetary policy or allowing Turkey into the EU. Journalists mostly want to know about an essay he first published in 2009, in which he cast doubt on the official version of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In “Chronicle of the Clash of Civilizations”, he develops several alternative theories about the tragic event attributed to al Qaeda, including one that 9/11 was part of a devious American-Israeli conspiracy.
Chauprade has offered several interpretations about the origin of the World Trade Center attacks without picking one in particular, but has also expressed disbelief about the causes given by US authorities for the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, which fell hours after the Twin Towers.
“The shockwave could not have triggered its collapse… Only a controlled demolition with explosives can explain such a quick and perfect collapse,” he wrote. The essay cost him his teaching job shortly after it was released.
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