To my Francophone friends in France, America, and Africa

President Macron’s recent statement is nothing short of astonishing. 

He reproaches a segment of the Jewish community for having "forgotten its universalism." If memory serves, this is classic antisemitic rhetoric: accusing Jews of betraying their own values. One might add that the president appears to have very little understanding of what those values truly are.

According to him, the “good Jew” is one who publicly declares hatred for the Netanyahu government and pledges unwavering allegiance to the “two-state solution,” as if this were the sacred condition for admission into the "Club of the Righteous." As Woody Allen — and Groucho Marx before him — once quipped: “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”

Surrounded by naïve advisors, still under the lingering spell of Yasser Arafat, and propped up by a media that is staunchly pro-Palestinian — a press known today not only for its bias but for its capacity to lie outrageously without ever apologizing when caught red-handed — Macron now presumes to lecture the 400,000 Jews of France. I fear he has lost them entirely.

This government, and those loyal to it, have become experts at one thing: moralizing. 

They pretend to act, hide behind lofty, outdated principles, and use them as cover for their disdain of Israel and, incidentally, their deeply rooted contempt for the United States.