Introducing Far-Left French Politician and Antisemite David Guiraud

David Guiraud is a far-left member of the French Parliament. He is also a dyed-in-the-wool antisemite and, consequently, an enemy of the Jewish state that he accuses of committing the same atrocities that Hamas committed on October 7. That’s right – Israel, that is now fighting to destroy Hamas, the terror group whose operatives on October 7 invaded peaceful kibbutzim and proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1200 Israelis, and kidnap 240 more, is in Guiraud’s view the true terrorist. Now a French Jewish organization has decided to make a legal complaint about Guiraud’s social media posts to the French government. More on Guiraud, and the complaint lodged against him, can be found here: “Far Left French MP Hit With Complaint Over Tweet Suggesting Global Jewish Conspiracy,” by Ben Cohen, Algemeiner, January 3, 2024:

A far left member of the French parliament was on Wednesday the subject of a legal complaint submitted by a Jewish organization concerning a posting on social media that invoked a popular Japanese manga meme appropriated by antisemites.

David Guiraud — a parliamentarian from the far left La France Insoumise (“France Rising”) Party — posted a video on X/Twitter from the Japanese manga cartoon “One Piece” in which a character known as Doflamingo complains of being silenced in denouncing the crimes of the “Heavenly Dragons,” an ultra wealthy and secretive global elite that serves as a “world government.” The theme has been eagerly picked up by antisemitic agitators who regard it as a symbol of the world Jewish conspiracy imagined in antisemitic screeds such as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fabrication of the Russian secret police first published in the early 20th century.

Some observers have argued that “One Piece” has deliberately promoted a toxic anti-Jewish stereotype through the “Heavenly Dragons,” pointing out that conspiratorial notions about Jewish power are visible in Japanese culture and politics, despite the absence of a sizable Jewish community in that country. “There is an ambiguity that is inherent in ‘One Piece’,” Rudy Reichstadt of the watchdog group Conspiracy Watch told the news outlet Le Point. “We can make the assumption that the author of this manga drew, with full knowledge of the facts, an anti-Jewish fantasy from which Japanese culture is unfortunately not immune.”

There are only about 300 to 2,000 Jews in Japan, or approximately 0.0016% to 0.0002% of Japan’s total population. So the popularity of antisemitic conspiracy theories in Japan is a phenomenon that cries out for study: how did it begin, and who disseminates such material, and is money from Muslim states being used to support antisemitic publications and conspiracy theorists?

In response, the Jewish Observatory of France (OJF), an organization that combats antisemitism and Holocaust denial, filed a legal complaint against Guiraud that slated his post as an “apology of terrorism and provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence.”

Guiraud later deleted his tweet but offered an explanation that appeared to justify its original posting.

By removing his post, Guiraud silently acknowledged that he did indeed put up at Twitter “an apology of terrorism” (against the wicked Jews who are obviously depicted as the manga’s “Heavenly Dragons”) and in spreading antisemitism in such a manner, offered a “provocation to discrimination, hatred, and violence.” The fact that he took his post down does not efface the evil done by that post when it was still online.

“The Heavenly Dragons are not a religion or a ‘race’ and if you think so, you have misread ‘One Piece,’” he wrote. “They are a military alliance of powerful people who crush others. They are not hated for what they are, but for what they do to others. But I don’t want to attack anyone, so I prefer to delete [my post].”

His deliberate misreading of his own post is meant to protect him from charges of antisemitism. But the “Heavenly Dragons” were not a military alliance, as Guiraud now claims, but — to repeat — “an ultra wealthy and secretive global elite that serves as a ‘world government.’” This imaginary cabal of the very rich (Jews, as everyone would understand them to be) controlling the world hews closely to what appeared in the czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But Guiraud will not own up to what he had originally posted. He lacks the courage of his wretched convictions.

Guiraud’s outbursts were already viewed with concern by French Jews following his speech at a conference in Tunisia in November…

Guiraud charged that Israel had already committed the atrocities which the Hamas terrorists were accused of executing. “Every accusation from Israel is a confession,” he claimed. “The baby [burned] in the oven, that was done by Israel, the mom who was disemboweled, that was done by Israel, during the massacre at Sabra and Shatila.” Two of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Sabra and Shatila, were the location of a gruesome massacre in 1982 that was carried out by Christian Phalange militiamen, but widely blamed on Israeli forces….

Israel does not burn babies in ovens, nor disembowel anyone, as Hamas operatives did so with such satanic enthusiasm on October 7. Guiraud is simply lying — and why not? There are many people around the world ready to believe the worst about the Jewish state — precisely because it is the Jewish state. As for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila that he mentions, Guiraud appears to believe that IDF solders took part in the massacre. It’s nonsense. Not a single Israeli soldier went inside the two refugee camps when the massacre took place. The IDF could not have been expected to know what the Christian Phalange troops would do once inside, while the IDF soldiers remained outside the camps. The IDF certainly had no knowledge of what was going on; had it known, the IDF soldiers would have put a full stop to the attacks by the Phalange troops on Palestinian women and children. The Phalange killers, we learned later, had used knives for most of their killings, because they didn’t want the sound of gunfire to alert the IDF soldiers outside to what they were doing, where they were supposed to be establishing order, but not to engage in mass killings. Guiraud ignores these facts in his insensate hatred of the Jewish state and his desire to blacken the image of the IDF, which in truth, as British Colonel Richard Kemp has said, is “the most moral army in the world,” especially because of its attempts to minimize civilian casualties by warning those civilians – by messaging, telephoning, leafletting, and use of the “knock-on-the-roof” technique, to move away from buildings or areas that are about to be targeted.

Guirard refused to join the nationwide march against antisemitism, in which 200,000 people in Paris alone took part, a march – or marches, rather, throughout France – that including most everyone of note among the country’s political and cultural leaders, despite the horrific rise in anti-Jewish violence. We can only conclude from Guiraud’s refusal to join that stirring march that antisemitism doesn’t bother him. Guiraud is quite content to be on the other side, a spittle-flecked purveyor of the pathology of antisemitism, rather than its enemy. Let the Jewish organization’s complaint against him go forward, and let the French magistrates examine the evidence of his social media posts — both those still online, and those he tried to delete but, unfortunately for him, they had been either been previously captured by screenshots, or were easily retrieved by the Wayback Machine. The investigating magistrates will no doubt conclude that he is an apologist for terror and a promoter of antisemitism. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the far-left party, La France Insoumise, to which Guiraud belongs, will of course not discipline him. Mélenchon shares his anti-Israel animus, though he is not quite as extreme in his antisemitism as Guiraud. There is not the slightest chance that Mélenchon would kick Guiraud out of the party the way that Keir Starmer kicked Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour Party in the UK. But at least Guiraud has been put on notice that his online claims are being closely monitored, that a legal complaint has been against him, and depending on the magistrates, there may be a price to pay — at the very least, public humiliation in a French court, and possibly something more tangible, such as an official reprimand or even a fine, for his blatant antisemitism.