How responsible is one for the sins of ones father?
Marine Le Pen, a front runner in Frances presidential election, brings popular support and political ambition to the race. She also brings the baggage of her fathers undisguised anti-Semitism. Jean-Marie Le Pen ran for president in 2002 but was defeated in one round of voting by the ultimately victorious Jacques Chirac. The elder Le Pen was called an unreconstructed anti-Semite and a Holocaust negationist or minimizer.
The gas chambers, he said, were a detail in WW II. This raises damning by faint praise to an art form.
Much of the French Jewish community is having a hard time separating Marine Le Pen from her father and from the anti-Semitic reputation of the Le Pens party, the National Front. This, is in spite of daughter Marine Le Pens efforts to distance herself from her fathers controversial pronouncements, saying several times that she does not share his view of history or of minorities.
Marine Le Pen recently denied many requests for an exclusive interview, but sat for an interview with JTA, the news agency of the Jewish people, in which she proclaimed her opposition to anti-Semitism and said it had no place in the National Front.
She did, however, blame the Jewish establishment for insulating the Jewish community from the real issues that face the French people and for preventing her from reaching them with her message. Her reference to the establishment was apparently a reference to the pressure applied by the leading body of French Jews on Radio J not to interview her.
The pressure was so great that Radio J cancelled the interview.
Marine Le Pen might become the next president of France, home to 483,500 Jews, most whom are not warming up to her. They evidently cannot get past the heinous assertions her father spewed through the years.
This raises the question asked at the beginning: How responsible is Marine Le Pen for the anti-Semitism of her father and members of her party?
To take it one step further: If Marine Le Pen is sincere in her renunciation of the anti-Semitic skeletons in her family closet, shouldnt the Jewish community as Jews are instructed to do when asked for forgiveness prior to Yom Kippur take Le Pen at her word and accept her rejection of anti-Semitism, at least until such time as she proves the doubters right?
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
