Jewish French “Holocaust survivor” and former minister Simone Veil has disowned a call by fellow Jew presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy to create a ministry for immigration and national identity in that country.
“I didn’t like the ambiguity of the formula at all. I would have preferred to speak of a ministry for immigration and integration,” the 79-year-old, who rallied Sarkozy’s campaign last week, said in an interview in the Marianne weekly. The interior minister has faced a barrage of protest over the comments, criticised as a ploy to appeal to the electorate of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Sarkozy’s ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) made much of the announcement last week that Veil, a highly-respected former centrist minister and European parliament president, had chosen to back Sarkozy. Immigration has become a sensitive issue in the campaign for the election following non-White rioting in 2005 in predominantly invader suburbs across the country that highlighted France’s strained integration policies.
On Sunday, the 52-year-old Sarkozy reached out to France’s youth with an appeal for brotherhood among races and religions, but refused to back off his proposal for a ministry of immigration and national identity.
On Sunday, Sarkozy, the son of a Jewish Hungarian immigrants, evoked Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in appealing for French “fraternity. I dream that you live in a France where no one is judged by the color of his skin, his religion or the address of his neighborhood, but on the nature of his character,” Sarkozy said, adding that he dreams that “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim children can sit together at the table of French fraternity.”
* Simone Veil often offers herself as a living witness to, and as living proof of, the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz. If she is living proof of anything, it is that the Germans did not exterminate the Jews at Auschwitz. Veil, her mother and one of her sisters were always together: at Drancy (a French transit camp), at Auschwitz, at Bobrek (a sub-camp of Auschwitz), and at Bergen-Belsen. In the last camp they contracted typhus, usually considered a deadly disease at that time. Veil’s mother died there. Like her two daughters, she too had survived Auschwitz. Another daughter survived Ravensbruck.
Source
Loading ...
