The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Le Pen aide fired over Holocaust denial comments
Party chief says gas ‘impossible’ to use in exterminations.
PARIS — The man Marine Le Pen chose to lead her farright party while she ran for the presidency has been forced to step down because he praised a Holocaust denier and expressed doubt that the Nazis used poison gas to murder Jews.
In a 2000 interview, her ally, Jean-Francois Jalkh, said Zyklon B, the gas used to kill millions of Jews during the Holocaust, would have been “impossible” to use in “mass exterminations.”
Le Pen called the outrage directed at Jalkh, her choice for interim leader of the National Front, a “defamation” on Friday morning.
She is one of two candidates to advance to the second round of the presidential race, and announced Monday that she would temporarily step down as party leader to focus on defeating the independent centrist Emmanuel Macron, considered to be the favorite in the election on May 7.
At a rally Thursday night, she sought to focus the campaign, sharply criticizing Macron, a former investment banker and economy minister, whom she has condemned as a “globalist” and “immigrationist,” but she did not address the Jalkh controversy until Friday morning.
Since she became the National Front leader in 2011, she has been trying to “un-demonize” the party, and the legacy of anti-Semitic and racist comments made by its founder, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Expelled from the party in 2015, he once called the Nazi gas chambers a “detail” of history.
Le Pen herself prompted an outcry earlier in the presidential campaign when she said that France had not been responsible for the roundup of Parisian Jews during World War II in an event known as the Vel’ d’Hiv.
But her efforts to buff her party’s image were complicated this week by a furor over comments that Jalkh made in 2000. During an interview, a doctoral student, Magali Boumaza, had asked him about the gas chambers. Jalkh replied that he was not a “negationist” but that he had read the works of a “trustworthy revisionist”: Robert Faurisson, a former professor of history at the University of Lyon who has been convicted of inciting hatred and racial discrimination and who has often been cited by the more extreme far-right elements.
Jalkh, who once took part in a ceremony commemorating the death of Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy government that collaborated with Nazi Germany, said in the interview that he had been “surprised” by the “rigor “and “conscientiousness” of Faurisson’s research.
Revelations that Jalkh, who is also a member of the European Parliament and a vice president of the National Front, had praised a Holocaust denier quickly prompted the party to react, fearful that his comments might cast a shadow on Le Pen’s campaign.
Jalkh agreed to resign as party chairman to help calm the controversy, Louis Aliot, a vice president of the party, said Friday morning on the French channel BFMTV, announcing that Steeve Briois, the mayor of Hénin-Beaumont, a National Front stronghold in northern France, would replace Jalkh.
Jalkh, who also faced accusations of campaign finance violations related to Le Pen’s failed 2012 presidential bid, has denied giving the interview, according to Le Monde.
But Boumaza, now a researcher in Istanbul, told BuzzFeed that she had recorded the comments, which were made during a three-hour interview at National Front headquarters, and that she still had the tapes. The interview had been published in an academic journal, Le Temps des Savoirs ...(Continued on next page) (The Time of Knowledge). Aliot said on BFMTV that Jalkh wanted to “defend himself; he’s going to press charges because he believes that his honor is being sullied, and I can tell you that he firmly and formally contests what he’s being reproached with.”
Le Pen’s temporary departure from the helm of the party was part of an effort to extend her reach to the disillusioned supporters of the firebrand leftist JeanLuc Mélenchon, who failed to reach the runoff stage of the election. Many of his supporters share Le Pen’s distaste for elites and globalization, if not for the rest of her positions, like immigration.
Few of Mélenchon’s voters are expected to switch to Le Pen. But high abstention in their ranks could favor her.
Mélenchon said in a YouTube video posted Friday that he would not vote for Le Pen, but refused to say whether he would vote for Macron or cast a blank ballot.