Days before elections, Éric Zemmour made a Jewish man’s death a national issue. Jewish voters are still split.

PARIS (JTA) — It’s been six months since Éric Zemmour give up his job as a journalist to run as a far-right candidate in France’s presidential elections. However this week Zemmour, who’s Jewish, landed probably the largest scoop of his profession.

On Tuesday, simply days earlier than Sunday’s first spherical within the presidential race, the right-wing Zemmour broke on social and mainstream media the story of Jérémie Cohen, a 31-year-old disabled Jewish man whose dying in February police now suspect might have the oblique results of violence, which some consider was antisemitic.

Zemmour, a 63-year-old former tv pundit whose possibilities of turning into president are slim, has helped focus nationwide consideration on the incident within the midst of a marketing campaign by which antisemitic violence, the rule of legislation and politicized Islam are central themes.

Requested on TF1, France’s hottest home tv community, what his first act as president could be, Zemmour replied on Wednesday: “To go to the household of a younger man whose title was Jérémie Cohen. The French public doesn’t learn about him but, that’s regular. I’ll inform the story.”

Zemmour, who’s trailing three to 4 different candidates in latest polls, recounted how Cohen’s dying was handled as a car accident for almost two months, till the person’s father, Gerald, shared with Zemmour the outcomes of the household’s non-public investigation — together with a video by which Cohen is seen operating away from males who assaulted him and getting fatally hit by a tram.

The video attracted the eye of incumbent President Emmanuel Macron and different candidates vying for the presidency. The publicity prompted Paris prosecutors this week to announce for the primary time that they’re opening a prison investigation into the affair.

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For the firebrand Zemmour and his supporters — together with many Jews — the incident captures the center of what’s improper in French society, together with the proliferation of antisemitic violence and the media’s therapy of it.

For Zemmour’s many critics, together with leaders of French Jewry, the incident underlines what they regard as his and the broader far-right’s unscrupulous use of France’s social and political points to foment concern and win votes.

“I condemn this use of the struggling of this household, the usage of this younger man as a martyr,” the chief rabbi of France, Haim Korsia, mentioned on Tuesday in an interview with the RCJ Jewish radio station.

Korsia has known as Zemmour, whose spouse and lover are Jewish and who generally goes to synagogue, an “antisemite.”

If Zemmour is utilizing Cohen’s dying to spice up his marketing campaign, it isn’t going as deliberate. Occupying the fourth or fifth slot in line with the polls, he’s projected to drop out of the race after Sunday’s first spherical. A second spherical will function Sunday’s high two vote-getters; projections level to Presidential Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, and Marine Le Pen, the daughter of a Holocaust denier who has sought to reform the picture of her far-right Nationwide Rally get together.

In Neuilly-sur-Seine, an prosperous suburb of Paris with many Jewish residents, a number of congregants instructed the Jewish Telegraphic Company that they don’t view the Cohen case via the prism of the native elections.

“I heard about it on social media. It makes me scared,” mentioned Pierre Allouche, a 60-year-old father of two teenage ladies, one in all whom needs to depart for Israel on a Jewish volunteer program. “But it surely’s not going to have an effect on my vote as a result of it’s simply the newest of many incidents of this type, which have already formed the way in which I and lots of different French Jews vote.”

Marine Le Pen arrives to ship her speech throughout her Nationwide Rally Social gathering’s first public assembly following the summer time break, on Sept. 6, 2020, in Frejus, southeastern France. (Valery Hache/AFP through Getty Pictures)

Like many if not most French Jews — together with Zemmour’s mother and father — Allouche was born in Algeria, he instructed JTA on a wet afternoon in Neuilly’s synagogue, a hanging Bauhaus-style constructing encircled with fences for safety causes.

Zemmour, who has been convicted of hate speech for saying that almost all drug sellers in France are Arabs or Africans, struck a chord with Allouche via passionate speeches about lawlessness and the perceived development of political Islam on the expense of the rule of legislation. However that hasn’t earned Allouche’s vote — in truth, Zemmour “scares me,” he mentioned.

“I agree with Zemmour on many factors, however I wouldn’t vote for him. Out of the query,” he mentioned. “Have a look at his protection of Vichy, his weird remarks on Dreyfus.”

Allouche named two of the problems which have acquired little consideration nationally however have pushed many Jewish voters away from supporting Zemmour: His controversial declare that the Nazi-collaborating Vichy authorities sacrificed international Jews to save lots of French ones from the Holocaust, and that Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish military captain who was convicted for treason in a trial critics mentioned was antisemitic, was focused not as a result of he was of Jewish descent, however attributable to his German roots.

“I’m a patriot. I agree together with his name for patriotism, nevertheless it’s as if Zemmour reaches the purpose the place I may agree with him, after which goes far too far. It’s like he’s overcompensating for being a Jew, and decides to be extra French than the French,” Allouche added.

Allouche was going to vote for Valerie Pecresse, one other hard-right candidate polling round Zemmour’s tier, however has been let down by her “weak efficiency” in debates and speeches. “I’d simply vote for Macron, who’s truly fairly robust on radical Islam,” Allouche mentioned.

Jean-Marc Moskowicz, 63, a retired lawyer and head of the right-wing Europe-Israel advocacy group, is one in all Zemmour’s Jewish voters. He’s conscious of the criticism however says it’s the results of “media manipulation. The media caricature what Éric says however when you learn the supply, it’s not excessive.”

However he agrees the Cohen case will in all probability not dramatically change the voting patterns of French Jews — a minority of about 450,000 individuals, or 0.7% of the final inhabitants.

“I feel French Jews will vote massively for Zemmour, however not due to the Jérémie Cohen case. Tragically, it’s extra of the identical,” mentioned Moskowicz.

Cohen’s father, Gerald, has mentioned that he contacted Zemmour to get extra publicity for the video he had uncovered.

“He bought proper on it,” Gerald Cohen mentioned of Zemmour. “It helped wake individuals up. He helped us enormously, serving to us with the investigation and ultimately make arrests and punish the responsible. He’s man who advocates for causes like this one, not just for me, and Éric Zemmour did this bravely.”

For a lot of observers, the Cohen recollects the traumatic 2017 killing of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old doctor whose Muslim neighbor killed her whereas shouting about Allah.

The case, which additionally shortly preceded the final spherical of presidential elections, was first reported on as a neighborly dispute in nationwide media. It infuriated hundreds of French Jews, particularly after the perpetrator prevented standing trial final yr with a short lived madness plea based mostly on his consumption of marijuana earlier than the incident.

“It positively brings again dangerous recollections from the Halimi case,” Allouche mentioned.

No matter his causes, Zemmour, who not too long ago based a celebration known as “Reconquest” — a attainable allusion to the incremental recapture of Spain within the fifteenth century AD from Muslim rule — has been boosting the Cohen case far past any of his rival candidates.

In a speech he gave Thursday to hundreds of listeners, the group began shouting “Jérémie” and “justice” as quickly as Zemmour started describing the incident.

“I feel you recognize I need to speak to you about Jérémie Cohen,” he mentioned, triggering extra shouts and applause. Zemmour, calling Cohen a “sufferer of barbarians,” requested the group to face up and observe a second of silence in Cohen’s reminiscence.

“All the things was accomplished so this story stays hidden, a political machination,” he mentioned. “Why the info about an incident that occurred on Feb. 16 surfaced solely on April 4? Why did the household must launch their very own investigation? Why did the media collude to cover these info?”

President Emmanuel Macron instructed reporters on Tuesday that he expresses “solidarity with the household” and desires to see “readability,” which he mentioned authorities at the moment are trying to offer to the most effective of their talents.

Marine Le Pen additionally addressed the incident, talking of it in an interview Wednesday with Europe 1 for example of a rise in “savagery in our society and the exacerbation of antisemitic incidents in our nation.”

The circumstances round Cohen’s dying aren’t but clear. Cohen often wore his kippah, although it isn’t clear whether or not he had it on the evening he died. His father instructed i24 Information that police gave him his son’s kippah together with the son’s different possessions. The truth that it occurred in Bobigny, an impoverished and closely Muslim suburb of Paris, has fueled hypothesis in a rustic that has seen a number of terrorist assaults carried out by Muslims prior to now decade.

Again in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Madeline Zerbib, a 77-year-old Jewish widow who was born in Tunisia and raised three kids in France, says she is “watching the elections via her fingers,” with horror.

“I didn’t see the Jérémie Cohen video, I used to be too afraid to observe,” she mentioned. “I additionally don’t watch the elections protection as a result of it’s too horrible, a fascist towards a Napoleon towards a kiss-ass and I’m too afraid to go go to my niece as a result of she lives exterior this Jewish ghetto,” Zerbib mentioned, shaking her head and proper hand.

“That is what’s left of this nice nation,” she added.