"In recent years - before the intifada - there were three or four incidents of anti-Semitism a year, and that's out of 18 million crimes and violations of the law"
About this Quote
Le Pen is doing something more surgical than denial: he is laundering indifference through arithmetic. By hauling out a tiny numerator ("three or four incidents") and drowning it in a massive denominator ("18 million crimes"), he turns anti-Semitism into statistical noise. The move isn’t just to minimize; it’s to reposition what counts as a problem in the first place. If the suffering can be made to look rare, the moral obligation to respond can be framed as hysteria, special pleading, or political theater.
The temporal bracket - "before the intifada" - is the real tell. It quietly imports a causal story: that Jewish vulnerability is either exaggerated until geopolitical events make it "understandable", or that anti-Semitism is a reactive byproduct of Middle East conflict rather than an indigenous prejudice with its own roots. Either way, the phrase nudges blame outward and invites the listener to treat hatred as situational, even rational, instead of principled bigotry.
Context matters because Le Pen’s career sits inside a French far-right tradition that alternates between coded respectability and provocation. Here, the provocation is masked as public-safety bookkeeping. He speaks in the language of law-and-order ("crimes and violations") to imply neutrality, while choosing a metric that flattens targeted hostility into just another entry on a crime ledger. It’s a rhetorical trick with political intent: delegitimize anti-racist attention, inoculate his camp against accusations, and re-center the national conversation on "real" crime - the kind his movement is eager to racialize.
The temporal bracket - "before the intifada" - is the real tell. It quietly imports a causal story: that Jewish vulnerability is either exaggerated until geopolitical events make it "understandable", or that anti-Semitism is a reactive byproduct of Middle East conflict rather than an indigenous prejudice with its own roots. Either way, the phrase nudges blame outward and invites the listener to treat hatred as situational, even rational, instead of principled bigotry.
Context matters because Le Pen’s career sits inside a French far-right tradition that alternates between coded respectability and provocation. Here, the provocation is masked as public-safety bookkeeping. He speaks in the language of law-and-order ("crimes and violations") to imply neutrality, while choosing a metric that flattens targeted hostility into just another entry on a crime ledger. It’s a rhetorical trick with political intent: delegitimize anti-racist attention, inoculate his camp against accusations, and re-center the national conversation on "real" crime - the kind his movement is eager to racialize.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|
More Quotes by Jean-Marie
Add to List
