French far-right TV pundit Eric Zemmour, who
declared Tuesday he was running for president next year, has forged his
reputation on controversial stances over issues including immigration, Islam, and
France's identity.
اضافة اعلان
AFP looks at some of his views, which have
led to numerous police investigations for hate speech and several
convictions:
Immigration
One of the central ideas of Zemmour's
rhetoric is that France is heading for civil war due to racial and religious
tensions caused by mass immigration.
This was the theme of his best-selling book
in 2014, "Le Suicide Francais" (French Suicide), which sold more than
half a million copies.
He is an advocate of the "great
replacement theory" favored by white supremacists which posits that Europe
is being deliberately populated by foreigners — "colonizers" in his
terms — which are pushing out natives.
"The great replacement is neither a
myth, nor a conspiracy, but a relentless process," he wrote in his latest
book published this year.
He is being prosecuted for calling child
asylum seekers "thieves, killers and rapists" and was convicted for
saying that the reason non-white people were stopped more by the police was
because "most drug dealers are black and Arab."
Islam
Although of Algerian Jewish descent himself,
Zemmour sees himself as an ultra-nationalist defender of France's Christian
heritage — against the imposition of what he sees as Islamic values and
culture.
He regularly says that "Islam is
incompatible with the French republic", and he makes no distinction
between practicing French Muslims and Islamists, who seek to impose their
religion on the rest of society.
In January last year, he talked in favor of
"re-migration" and the idea of "sending back immigrants who do
not assimilate", although he has ruled out expelling naturalized French
people of foreign background.
He caused an outcry by expressing
"respect" for the jihadists who attacked the Bataclan concert hall in
Paris in 2015.
"I respect people who are prepared to
die for what they believe in, something which we are no longer capable of
doing," he said in an interview with Causeur magazine in October
2016.
Women
Zemmour's 2006 book called "The First
Sex" helped make his name in France when he was a journalist at Le Figaro
newspaper.
The openly sexist text argued that much of
France's social ills and decline could be attributed to the "feminization"
of society and the loss of male "virility".
As well as arguing in favor of prostitution
and blaming women for too much shopping, he criticized feminists for their
campaign to rid society of sexual violence.
He returned to the subject in "French
Suicide", saying he regretted that "before feminism," a bus
driver could "slide a concupiscent hand over a desirable female
bottom" without risking prosecution for sexual harassment.
As for women as leaders, they "don't
express power, they don't embody it. Power evaporates when they arrive,"
he told the BFM channel in 2013.
World War II
Zemmour has been accused by historians and
Holocaust survivors of trying to rehabilitate France's disgraced Vichy regime
during World War II, which collaborated with the Nazis following the occupation
of France in 1940.
In "French Suicide", he argued
that the head of the collaborationist French regime, Philippe Petain, tried to
save French Jews by deporting foreign Jews instead.
"I say that Vichy protected French Jews
and handed over foreign Jews," he said on CNews in September this year,
whereas archive documents have shown Petain himself demanded changes to toughen
up an anti-Semitic law.
Zemmour says one of his battles is against
"repentance" and of "telling French people they are guilty all
of the time".
Zemmour has described himself as an
"adversary" of what he calls the "gay lobby" and a defender
of the "heterosexual norm".
He fiercely opposed gay marriage when it was
legalized by the former socialist government in 2013.
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