France responsible for sending Jews to concentration camps, says court

Jews arriving at Pithiviers, one of the French
camps from which they were deported, in 1941.

First legal admission of country's collaboration in Nazi atrocities

France's highest court put an end to decades of legal timidity and moral taboo yesterday when it issued a ruling recognising the state's responsibility in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during the second world war.

Citing "mistakes" made by the collaborationist Vichy regime, the council of state said the government's share of blame was clear in acts which had not been forced on it by the occupiers and which "allowed or facilitated the deportation from France of victims of antisemitism".

The ruling, which will be recorded in the official state legislative journal, marks the first time any French judicial body has acknowledged in such stark terms the government's role in Nazi-era atrocities.

Calling for a "formal admission of the state's responsibility and of the prejudice collectively suffered", the court said it had concluded that acts such as the arrest, internment and dispatching of Jews to transit camps were clear indicators of the government's guilt. "As they led to the deportation of people considered Jewish by the Vichy regime, the acts and activities of the state ... became its responsibility," it added.

The move was welcomed by historians and Jewish groups, many of whom have expressed disbelief at France's unwillingness to face up to its actions. From 1942 to 1944 a stream of Jews were rounded up by Vichy authorities, and by the end of the war some 76,000 had been deported to Nazi concentration camps. Although under the overall control of the SS, the main transit camp of Drancy, from which 63,000 people were sent to their deaths, was run by Paris's police force.

"It is a decision with which I am content," Serge Klarsfeld, the leading French historian of the Holocaust, told Le Figaro. "France is showing now that she is at the forefront of countries which are confronting their past, which was not the case even in the 1990s."

For decades after the war, the suffering of French Jews at the hands of their countrymen was buried, along with the shame of collaboration, at the back of national consciousness. François Mitterand, president from 1981 until 1995, insisted France "was never involved" in ill-treatment of its Jewish population, and it was not until Jacques Chirac in 1995 that a head of state admitted France's "inescapable guilt".

Yesterday's ruling, issued in connection with the individual case of a deportee's daughter requesting damages, did however find that the current French state had largely made up for the sins of its past. Apparently ruling out any reparations for victims or their families, the court said the acts had been "compensated for" through various means since 1945.

Klarsfeld, whose postwar research was the first to reveal the extent of France's complicity in the deportations, agreed that enough had been done in recent years. "The people asking now for other forms of compensation have often already got something with the measures in place," he said.

Guardian

French to block porn, terror, hate web sites

The French state and Internet service providers have struck a deal to block sites carrying child pornography or content linked to terrorism or racial hatred, Interior Minister Michel Alliot-Marie announced Tuesday.

The plan, part of a larger effort to fight cybercriminality, is to go into effect in September when a "black list" will be built up based on input from Internet users who signal sites dealing with the offensive material, the minister said.

The announcement comes on the heels of a similar deal in the United States, also announced Tuesday. There, three service providers — Verizon, Sprint and TimeWarner Cable_ have agreed with New York state officials to block child pornography sites nationwide.

Alliot-Marie said all service providers in France have agreed to block offending sites but did not name them.

"We can no longer tolerate the sexual exploitation of children in the form of cyber-pedopornography," Alliot-Marie said. "We have come to an agreement: the access to child pornography sites will be blocked in France. Other democracies have done it. France could wait no longer."

Among other countries that have already implemented similar measures include Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Canada and New Zealand.

Under the French plan, Internet users, via a platform, will be able to signal inappropriate sites and the state, receiving the complaints in real time, will then decide whether the sites are to go on a so-called black list to be passed on to Internet service providers to enforce site blocks.

Sites containing what appear to be blatant crimes will be referred to judicial authorities, the minister said.

As for offending sites hosted in other countries, France will pass on the information via Interpol or Europol, the two police agencies, or seize judicial authorities there, Alliot-Marie said. She insisted that the plan would not "create a Big Brother of the Internet" and pledged her support for the "fundamental liberty that is Internet access."

France's upcoming presidency of the European Union will be a chance to coordinate efforts between countries, she said, adding that efforts are often needlessly duplicated and sites shut down in one country often pop up in another.

Associated Press

Battle against anti-Semitism enters new phase with increased legal action and harsher penalties

French Jews were relieved to learn of the arrest and conviction of Nizar Ouedrani, a man who assaulted a young Jew wearing a kippah in Paris last July, as the victim was walking toward a synagogue.

The incident is one among dozens, but for the first time, Jewish leaders noted, the court opted for a severe sentence.

On Saturday, July 21, two men and a boy were going to their synagogue on Petit Street when a man driving a truck honked at them and started shouting anti-Semitic slurs. When 24-year-old Yossef Zekri tried to calm the driver down, the latter jumped out of the car and started hitting him while shouting, "Dirty Jew, I'll finish you." Ouedrani hit Zekri on the head with a vacuum cleaner and ran away. He was caught the next day after police traced his license plate number.

In court, Ouedrani testified he didn't realize his victim was a Jew, but failed to convince the judge, who sentenced him to nine months in prison (of which six months are suspended).

"We believe that this ruling, the first to be as severe as we expected, is exemplary and will dissuade thugs from attacking our community," Sammy Ghozlan, the head of the Vigilance Bureau Against Anti-Semitism, said.

With the Ouedrani case, the battle against "new" anti-Semitism has entered a new phase.

Until 2002, the left-wing government led by Lionel Jospin refused to even recognize the spectacular increase of anti-Jewish attacks triggered by the second intifada.

Local Jewish organizations, strengthened by American Jewry, demanded President Jacques Chirac present a firm battle against anti-Semitic attacks.

The French president and his new center-right Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy -- now France's president -- launched a plan to fight anti-Semitism, including reinforced surveillance of synagogues and unprecedented efforts on behalf of police to hunt down the attackers. The next phase was to get offenders to court. The French Assembly approved the Lellouche legislation, doubling the sentences for anti-Semitic and racist assaults.

Jewish community leaders fought forcefully for serious sentences following dozens of symbolic rulings that failed to dissuade new aggressors.

The Ouedrani ruling, the first severe court decision after an anti-Semitic attack, opens the door to a new phase of the battle against anti-Semitism. Authorities appear to have taken every possible measure and precaution, yet anti-Jewish attacks continue as if nothing had been done.

"There are no new ideas on how to fight anti-Semitism, no new plan in the horizon," said policeman Michel Thooris, who follows anti-Semitism issues. "French Jews voted massively for Sarkozy hoping that he would put an end to hatred, but he has no new answers. It sometimes seems as though hearing about anti-Semitism is starting to annoy our leaders..." and the French in general, Thooris said.

Simone Veil -- former minister, European Parliament speaker and current president of the Shoah Remembrance Foundation -- told me, as we were visiting the Shoah memorial with President Sarkozy, that certain forms of anti-Semitism denounced by schoolteachers could easily be countered.

Since the beginning of the second intifada, French professors in troubled schools have complained that their Muslim pupils have been refusing to learn about the Shoah, claiming it was Zionist propaganda. The pupils have prevented professors from teaching the Shoah and the trend has extended to other lessons that involve Jews. Anti-Semitic assaults against Jewish pupils and teachers have also increased.

"I actually noticed that Arab pupils failed to appear in class for courses on the Shoah long before the second intifada, but at the time I didn't understand what motivated them," said Irene Saya, the head of the teachers association PEREC (For a Republican and Civil School).

In 2002, a dozen professors gathered their testimonies in a book called, "The Lost Territories of the Republic." Irene Saya said that nothing has changed in five years.

"Jewish professors and pupils are subject to anti-Semitic remarks and it feels like there isn't much to do. Anti-Semitism isn't just going to disappear," Saya said. "The ministry created a special department for these issues but there are no official figures and no real measures to battle anti-Semitism in school."

"The way I see it, the pupils who refuse to study are not at fault," Veil said. "The teachers are the ones who should find solutions to this problem and find ways to teach what happened in WWII. But I think some of these professors don't really want to make that effort."

Every year, the Shoah Memorial sends up to 10,000 adolescents from throughout France to Auschwitz. Troublemakers aren't invited. It also launched several projects commemorating the genocides perpetrated in Rwanda and against the Armenians.

"Today, we have to talk about Rwanda if we want schools to keep on teaching about the Shoah," sarcastically observed the leader of one European Jewish organization.

Obviously, most of those who combat genocide and fight racism do so genuinely, and their efforts often lead to positive results.

"We have to be irreproachable at a time when revisionists are still trying to distort history," Veil said.

Anti-Zionism and the boycott of Israeli products and skills are viewed by French Jews as another form of anti-Semitism. But, unlike other countries, France has successfully countered the phenomenon, launching the France-Israel Foundation in July 2005 to reinforce ties with the Israeli government and encourage collaboration in various fields, from literary exhibits to stem cell research.

The foundation has prevented boycotts that would have isolated Israel in the intellectual and commercial fields. It instigated French investments in the Israeli film industry, for example, leading to the success of the Israeli Film Festival of Paris and to numerous productions and prizes, the latest ones being the awards granted at the Cannes film festival to two Israeli films, "Jellyfish" and "The Band's Visit." Israeli movies, once rare in French theaters, have become common and, at times, even popular.

Those who supported the boycott against Israel, mainly within the pro-Palestinian association CAPJPO (Coordination of the Calls for a Fair Peace in the Middle East), are about to observe a new high in French-Israeli relations since the annual book fair -- the major cultural event of the year -- selected Israel to star the 2008 exhibit.

Sarkozy is apparently looking for global answers, fighting boycotts with reinforced collaboration and battling racist extremists by offering new alternatives. In theory, every issue can fall into place.

Since recent anti-Semitic attacks are perpetrated mainly by young Muslims, Sarkozy's plan to annihilate anti-Semitism consists of putting all his energy into solving the conflicts in the Middle East in order to avoid new tensions between communities.

When inviting Hezbollah representatives to Paris in July, only a few months after he compared them to Nazis, Sarkozy hoped to get things moving, but assured the public he would not invite Hamas.

Sarkozy, a great admirer of George Bush, has multiple initiatives in the Middle East.

The man, who a few months ago was criticized for his Jewish descent by extremist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, has already managed to reduce the National Front Party to nothing, attracting most of its voters and leaving it penniless after two major electoral defeats.

Maybe the French president's plan to annihilate anti-Semitism isn't all that impossible. The Jewish community voted massively for that plan. Now, it is holding its breath.

Jewish Journal

Property investment for fascists - the Croatia story continues

An article in a national newspaper last Sunday (22 July), and reproduced all over the internet, claimed to reveal how BNP leaders were setting up a self-sufficient rural bolthole in Croatia in preparation for when the oil runs out.

In fact the story, which was full of errors, was the result of an attempt by the BNP to build a smokescreen around some plain old-fashioned property speculation.

Last October Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, was a guest speaker at a well attended meeting of the party's Leeds branch. He normally turns up in a suit, but on this occasion he made his excuses for wearing jeans, saying that he had just returned from a visit to Croatia. He then regaled his audience about the ethnic problems following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

What Griffin did not mention was that much of the "ethnic cleansing" in Croatia at the start of the 1990s, consisting of torture, rape, murder and mutilation of bodies, was carried out by the reborn Ustasha movement. Some 50 years earlier the Ustashi had carried out their first attempt at genocide, in conjunction with the Nazis, against Serbs, Jews and Roma. More than a million Serbs of all ages were butchered in their homes, in forests and in concentration camps. Another 250,000 were forcibly converted to Catholicism, and around a further 300,000 were driven out of Croatia into the remote mountain areas of Serbia.

Hero worship of the wartime butchers of the Ustashi remains widespread in Croatia and it is one of the areas of eastern Europe in which Roberto Fiore, the Italian third-positionist fascist and long-term friend of Griffin, has taken an interest in recent years.

Griffin's visit to Croatia inevitably gave rise to speculation in the BNP, especially when news started to leak out about at least one other senior BNP officer visiting the country, about a property purchase there and even offshore bank accounts to shift BNP funds into the new project.

Older BNP members recalled with dismay two earlier overseas property ventures involving Fiore. The first was a ruined hamlet in northern France in the days when Griffin led the National Front Political Soldiers. A member of Fiore's family had their name on the title deeds and volunteers were shipped out to try to turn it into a political commune. The project was eventually abandoned, money raised from British supporters poured down the drain.

A decade later Fiore bought an abandoned village in Spain. Again work on making it habitable was carried out by volunteers, now from the successor group to the Political Soldiers, the International Third Position.

Yet again it flopped and Fiore had to rush in a lawyer to bail out a leading member of the ITP who had been thrown into jail for attacking the local mayor's property. Back in England the man was given a job in Fiore's extensive UK property empire. The project vanished.

And one must not forget how Griffin got Young NF members to work free of charge to convert a barn at his parents' property in Suffolk in the mid 1980s and later got the BNP to pay for renovation of a barn on his farm in Wales.

BNP members are not keen to see the party's hard-earned funds squandered on yet another potentially disastrous property venture. The BNP is not a party where people can freely ask awkward questions of their leader and get honest answers, so instead disgruntled members started leaking bits of interesting information about the Croatian plans to the anti-fascist Lancaster UAF blogsite.

This could not have come at a worse time for Griffin, who is currently facing a leadership election in the BNP. A huge amount of dirty linen has been paraded before the public in the past six weeks, including talk about property in Croatia.

Knowing that the story was likely to break beyond the anti-fascist movement, Griffin engaged in a classic manoeuvre to control the situation by orchestrating the delivery of a "scoop" to a national newspaper. Anti-fascist blogs and others immediately reproduced it, though Kirklees Unity soon removed it after realising that the story was riddled with errors and half truths and was just an attempt to divert attention from Griffin's property venture.

The story claimed that Andrew McKillop, an expert on "peak oil" – the theory that the world's oil reserves are about to run out – briefed the BNP leadership last September at a secret weekend meeting at a hotel in Hampshire. Those present were so concerned about this that they decided to buy 1,100 hectares of land in Croatia as a bolthole for when civilisation breaks down, the story continued.

But there were many errors.

The story quotes McKillop saying that he had only been contacted via the internet to give the presentation in the New Forest, giving the impression he has had little to do with the BNP. In fact Griffin has reproduced and promoted McKillop's articles on the BNP website and they have been published in the BNP's monthly magazine, Identity.

McKillop was also invited to join the BNP's shadowy think tank, which Searchlight exposed in March. The story says McKillop lives in the USA. When we spoke to him earlier this year he was living in Paris.

Another man named in the story is the BNP's economics expert Alan Goodacre. The writer seemed to think he uses the name Ian Fletcher when visiting the USA. In fact Ian Fletcher is a well known US rightwinger who lobbies against migrant workers. They are not the same person. For one thing an expert analysis of their articles show that Goodacre writes in British English whereas Fletcher is very definitely a North American.

One of the story's most obvious errors is the description of Lee Barnes as the BNP's second-in-command. Far from it: although Barnes acts as the director of the BNP's legal department, he is not actually a party member. This enables him to front up various money raising schemes for the BNP from which the party prefers to distance itself.

Griffin's deputy is Simon Darby and the party's vice-chair is Scott McLean.

The story claims the land is owned by a BNP sympathiser whose late father "is understood to have made a fortune in the pizza business". No name is given and the story sounds a bit like it is based on the pizza billionaire who funds a community in the USA.

The article ends with an obvious bit of padding, with a rapid trawl through the bombers Tim McVeigh and David Copeland and William Pierce's The Turner Diaries.

It is interesting that the BNP chose to dump this story on a journalist who does not have a track record of writing about the far right but works for a newspaper that is very keen on ecology.

The very worthwhile team at Lancaster UAF are to be congratulated on opening up a can of worms which the BNP leader will have great difficulty closing.

Stop the BNP

France's Front National faces ruin as Sarkozy steals Le Pen's clothes

France's xenophobic, anti-immigrant National Front party is facing financial ruin, with its vote set to crash in parliamentary elections tomorrow.

The far-right party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen looks like being swept aside by "la vague bleue" - the blue wave of support for the conservative UMP party of newly elected president Nicolas Sarkozy.

While the UMP is tipped to win up to 430 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, giving Mr Sarkozy a free reign to implement his "economic revolution", the National Front's performance is expected to be so poor it may lose its vote-dependent state subsidy of £3.1 million. The party now faces the prospect of selling its Paris headquarters.

In last month's presidential elections, Mr Le Pen lost nearly a million votes in comparison with 2002, scoring 10 per cent of the ballot in his worst result since 1974. This downward trend is expected to be confirmed in this month's parliamentary vote and in elections for municipal and regional councils, where the National Front is only expected to win between 3 and 8 per cent of the vote.

Even in its stronghold of Provence in southern France - where the National Front has won between 20 and 25 per cent of the vote and once controlled four city councils - the party is expected to see its vote cut in half.

The meltdown can be explained in a name: Nicolas Sarkozy.

The UMP leader has appropriated Mr Le Pen's rhetoric on immigration and law and order, creating a new ministry of immigration and national identity and stealing 38 per cent of the far-right winger's 2002 voters in last month's presidential polls. Mr Sarkozy enjoys 88 per cent popularity among National Front supporters, polls show.

Despite turning 79 later this month, Mr Le Pen refuses to relinquish his position as party leader.

The bickering Socialists are set to face further humiliation after the defeat of presidential candidate Ségolène Royal with their number of seats possibly falling as low as 115. Centrist Francois Bayrou is forecast to win only a handful of seats for his new Democratic Movement party after most of his MPs defected to Mr Sarkozy. The French Communist Party is also in danger of losing nine of its current 21 deputies after a disastrous result of less than 2 per cent in the presidentials.

The Scotsman

Le Pen's mask slips as he plays the race card against Sarkozy

The candidate who claims to be closest to the people rarely leaves his office, except to go to the radio or TV studio. The candidate who promises never to lie to the electorate refuses to say what he would do if elected.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, 78, is the "invisible man" of the French presidential campaign: invisible but ever-present, like a virus. He began the campaign pretending to be a more mellow, and more tolerant, man. But in his latest broadcast appearance - he seldom appears in public - the veteran far-right leader reverted to his favourite theme: xenophobia.

The front-running, centre-right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, "comes from an immigrant background," Mr Le Pen told a radio interviewer on Sunday. By comparison, he, Mr Le Pen, was a candidate of the terroir: literally, a candidate rooted in the native earth.

"It's obvious, there's a difference," Mr Le Pen said. "There is a choice there which might be considered fundamental by a certain number of French people".

This is Jean-Marie Le Pen at his most poisonous and his most plausible - and also his most effective.

Mr Sarkozy, 52, the man who is favourite to be the next President of France, is indeed half-Hungarian and a quarter-jewish on his maternal, French side. He does not look particularly French; his name does not sound French. Ask almost anyone in France if this will make a difference to their choice in the presidential election on 22 April and 6 May and they will say "no". Mr Le Pen knows, however, that it does make a difference, for a significant minority of French people, especially people on the hard right, tempted to vote for Mr Sarkozy.

Mr Le Pen, and he alone, has been prepared to break the taboo and make a public issue of Mr Sarkozy's Hungarian and Jewish blood. When challenged - as he knew he would be - he immediately pointed out that Mr Sarkozy had himself boasted of his immigrant background during the campaign. If Mr Sarkozy had not mentioned his family, Mr Le Pen said, he would not have mentioned it either.

At 78, fighting his fifth - and presumably last - presidential campaign, Mr Le Pen has lost none of his tactical brilliance or his moral cynicism. He knows, better than anyone, how to touch the buttons of inchoate anger and xenophobia.

Although placed fourth by the polls, Mr Le Pen insists that a "tsunami" of "rejection of the system" will carry him into the crucial top two places in the first round on 22 April. Can he repeat his extraordinary coup of 2002 and reach the second round?

Mr Le Pen has been creeping up in the opinion polls, to around 13 or 14 per cent. Last time he knocked out the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, with just under 17 per cent. There are two candidates ahead of him this year: the unconvincing Socialist, Ségolène Royal, and the likeable but undynamic centrist François Bayrou.

Mr Le Pen predicts that they will cancel one another out, and he will dart between them, with about 20 per cent of the vote, and reach the second round.

There are a number of reasons to believe that Mr Le Pen will fail. First, he has never scored more than 18 per cent in a national election. Second, he is an old man and beginning to look his age. (His decision barely to go on the road is partly strategic but may also be intended to conserve his flagging energy.)

Finally, he has a candidate running against him this time - Mr Sarkozy - who has stolen and moderated many of his favourite issues: immigration, insecurity, excessive taxation and nationalism.

Another shock cannot not be ruled out, however. Mr Le Pen predicts that somewhere around 5 per cent of the 30 per cent of voters now supporting Mr Sarkozy will return to the far right on 22 April. Hence his decision to make Mr Sarkozy's Hungarian - and implicitly his Jewish - blood an election issue.

And there is a further complication. Pollsters in France have never managed accurately to gauge Mr Le Pen's support. Le Pen voters systematically lie. This year his electorate is even harder to plumb than ever.

An unknown but significant minority of far left voters - and even Arab and African - voters say they are tempted to vote Le Pen this time out of bloody-mindedness, frustration or determination to "make the system explode". Last fling or not, Mr Le Pen may have one shot left in his locker.

Independent

Le Pen tells lustful teens the answer is in their hands

He has advocated patriotism and zero immigration, but the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen this week came up with a new way for young people to serve their country: masturbation.

Asked at a debate whether condoms should be distributed in high schools, he resorted to Latin to suggest that restless teenagers might take the problem into their own hands. He advised "those worked up" to resort to "manu militari". "It's a much simpler method," Mr Le Pen pronounced.

Mr Le Pen, whose daughter and campaign manager, Marine, has been softening the party's image and attempting to attract women with more policies on the family, was attending a debate organised by Elle magazine, entitled "What women want".

The 78-year-old former paratrooper and National Front leader faced protests and heckling on his arrival at the event at the elite graduate school, Sciences Po. After telling the audience that women faced a "social handicap", he responded to boos by shouting: "Bunch of imbeciles!"

But his remarks do not appear to have hurt his electoral chances. Yesterday, his approval rating hit its highest level of the campaign so far, with a survey in Le Parisien giving him 16% - only 0.8% less than the shock score that catapulted him into the second round run-off against Jacques Chirac in 2002. The rightwing former interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy was in the lead with 26% followed by the Socialist Ségolène Royal on 23.5% and the centrist François Bayrou on 21%.

Yesterday Mr Le Pen made a surprise visit to a multi-racial housing estate north of Paris telling a crowd: "We want to help you get out of these suburban ghettos where French politicians have parked you."

Mr Le Pen was not the only candidate seeking to explain colourful use of language yesterday. Mr Sarkozy came under attack from a former ally who says he called him "an arsehole" and "an unfaithful bastard" during the riots crisis of 2005. Azouz Begag makes the accusation in a new book.

Guardian

France's Political Mainstream Panders To Far Right Voters

We are 22 days away from the first ballot in the upcoming French presidential election. In the last few days, the whole spectrum of the political parties have played a fear game based on the question of national identity. As we could see throughout the mainstream media, the two leading parties of the right and left wings, the Socialists and the center-right, rallied some traditional far-right ideas and their ideological proposals.

On the one hand, the Socialist Party candidate Segolene Royal wants French families to keep the national flag at home to unwrap their blue-white-and-red colors on July 14, national Bastille Day. She also wants French people to memorize the "Marseillaise," the national anthem. Furthermore, Royal announced that delegates will sing the Marseillaise as a lyrical conclusion to end every Socialist convention. No doubt those proposals are shamelessly courting the jittery far-right voters, who may change their vote at the last moment.

On the other hand, the Union for a Popular Movement and their leader Nicolas Sarkozy has unveiled an odd idea about a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, which is a genuine and extremist far-right proposal. The proposal is so scandalous that the former minister Simone Veil, who recently gave her support to Sarkozy as a representative of the French Jewish community, is now withdrawing that support She publicly criticized this ministry for the reason. She prefers the word "integration" rather than "national identity." Thus some Jews who were supporting Sarkozy because the rightist candidate backed Israeli policy in the Middle East are now rallying to vote for Francois Bayrou's centrist party, the UDF.

As a matter of fact, 22 days before the first ballot, we approach the time when stress turns into a great fear. Truly everybody wonders whether the far-right slice of the electorate could repeat the upset of the first ballot that it achieved in 2002, when the National Front's leader Jean-Marie Le Pen defeated the socialist Lionel Jospin, allowing the racist and xenophobic far-right to reach the second round of the presidential election for the first time.

Royal and Sarkozy are trying hard to reduce this great threat and trauma, but at the same time, they are sharply tempted to court a part of this far-right electorate for their own benefit.

As we can easily see, this is a very dangerous Machiavellian game being played overtly and cynically with sacred democratic values. Moreover, the whole French people are judging this political bargain, so the voters are widely conscious that their major politicians favor ethnic confrontations instead of national unity, as when Sarkozy in winter 2005 called the suburban youngster "scum," helping to fan a three-weeks fire in the suburbs around Paris.

As an obvious maneuver to clear the road for his hard law-and-order policy, he is now responding to the far-right demands. The same cause always produces the same effect. A few days ago, in the upcoming presidential election, this far-right provocation by the two leading candidates electrified the Parisian atmosphere, leading to a riot in the Gare du Nord. Suddenly, hundreds of youngsters rebelled against policemen who were just trying to arrest a man riding the subway without a ticket, which is common. However, the growing mob destroyed everything in the station before the eye of the cameras. Thus, the French people saw on television a remake of the 2005 suburban nightmare, but even worse because it took place in the center of Paris.

Meanwhile, the centrist candidate Francois Bayrou criticized this strategy of the two leading candidates Sego-Sarko (as French People call them) who play and bet unconsciously on inter-ethnic fear just to win the presidential race.

According to the pollsters, Bayrou has lost points in the recent polls. But the pollsters didn't say frankly that they question only non-suburban populations. Despite the polls, Bayrou is as popular in the suburbs as a champion boxer could be. On the contrary, Sarkozy sets the crowd on fire and incites violence immediately when he appears in any suburban town.

OHMY News

Hacker steals data from French presidential candidate

A hacker stole sensitive data from a computer in the offices of French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, police said, fueling his fears that rivals used it to try and keep him out of the presidential race

The security breach at Le Pen's National Front party headquarters comes as the campaign intensified ahead of the April and May election with several candidates facing smear scandals in recent weeks.

Le Pen, who shocked France by finishing second in the 2002 presidential election, is struggling to secure the backing of at least 500 elected officials needed to run this time round. He says he has been the target of a well-prepared offensive to persuade the officials, including mayors, not to sign and asked police to open an investigation after suspecting that a mole might have leaked the names of his potential backers.

After a visit to the headquarters of his National Front party on Friday, the police said the list of officials who had agreed to back Le Pen had been stolen by a hacker. The hacker had gained access using an Internet site specializing in breaking entry codes. A National Front employee who used the computer that was hacked into was detained but later released.

News of the electronic break-in, came just a week after the Socialist party demanded an investigation into what it said was a spate of burglaries targeting its campaign team.

Le Pen has until March 16 to gain the sponsorship of at least 500 of France's 42,000 elected representatives, including parliamentarians and mayors, to become a candidate. He says he is 100 short and has accused a far-right rival of trying to poach his sponsors.

Despite his success in 2002, when he won 16.8 percent of the vote, Le Pen's National Front party does not have any mayors and he has criss-crossed France for months to find backers.

Supporters of mainstream conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy have appeared increasingly uneasy at the prospect of Le Pen being blocked from running. They believe National Front supporters will prove a vital pool of potential voters in an expected second-round run off between Sarkozy and Socialist candidate Segolene Royal, and fear a high abstention rate if Le Pen is shut out of the first round.

Among other candidates who may not make the sponsorship grade are anti-globalization leader Jose Bove who says he has accumulated just 350 signatures. Greens candidate Dominique Voynet says she has 500 pledges, but only 15 returned forms.

The candidates fear some mayors will not come good on their promises and say they need at least 600 pledges to feel safe.

CNet