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Macron hosts Netanyahu, condemns anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism

July 17, 2017 by  
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Two days after treating President Trump to a Bastille Day parade, Emmanuel Macron welcomed yet another world leader to Paris for a symbolic summit.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose hard-line politics have earned him few friends across the French ideological spectrum, arrived here for talks on Sunday, the French president condemned anti-Zionism as the new form of anti-Semitism.

The backdrop for their meeting was the 75th anniversary of an infamous Paris Holocaust roundup, and Macron used the occasion to reiterate his declaration that the French state bore the responsibility for the arrest and deportation of about 13,000 Jews in 1942.

“We will never surrender to the messages of hate,” Macron said, standing on the site where French police, on the night of July 16, 1942, detained thousands of French and foreign-born Jews before facilitating their transports to Nazi concentration camps across Eastern Europe. “We will not surrender to anti-Zionism, because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism.”

Following a string of devastating terrorist attacks in recent years, thousands of French Jews left France for Israel, encouraged in 2015 by Netanyahu himself. But as Macron vowed Sunday to fight anti-Semitism in all its forms, the Israeli leader changed his tone and spoke of solidarity with France.

“Your struggle is our struggle,” Netanyahu said, referring to Friday’s attack in Jerusalem, when Arab Israeli gunmen shot and killed two Israeli police officers. “The zealots of militant Islam, who seek to destroy you, seek to destroy us as well.”

The wartime roundup — known in France as the Vel d’Hiv massacre, for the now-demolished indoor stadium where Jews were temporarily held — featured prominently in France’s recent presidential election, in which historical revisionism and denial were constant themes.

In one of the campaign’s most controversial moments, Marine Le Pen, Macron’s far-right opponent and the daughter of the convicted Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, insisted that the French state had not been responsible. Along the same lines, a French journalistreported that Le Pen’s principal deputy denied the use of the poison gas Zyklon B in the Nazi gas chambers.

In repudiating these assertions, Macron joined ranks with several of his recent predecessors.

After decades of government silence, Jacques Chirac, in 1995, became the first sitting French president to acknowledge the country’s complicity and collaboration in the Holocaust, during which 76,000 Jews were deported from France altogether.

In his own remarks at the site of the Vel d’Hiv, Chirac, in 1995, put it this way: “France, on that day, committed the irreparable. Breaking its word, it handed those who were under its protection over to their executioners.”

Macron echoed those remarks Sunday. “I say it again here,” he said. “It was indeed France that organized the roundup, the deportation, and thus, for almost all, death.”

Macron’s remarks come after a years-long wave of anti-Semitism — and a subsequent surge in the number of French Jews who have moved to Israel.

In 2012, a terrorist attacked a Jewish day school in Toulouse, killing four — including three children. In 2014, the Franco-Cameroonian comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’balalikened Jews to “slave drivers” and promoted a version of the Nazi salute. In January 2015, an attack on a kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris left four Jewish customers dead.

Sunday was Netanyahu’s first visit to France since his appearance in January 2015 at Paris’s Grand Synagogue, immediately following the attack on the supermarket, when he delivered a controversial speech urging Jews to consider leaving France.

About 8,000 French Jews left for Israel in 2015, out of an estimated Jewish population of about 600,000. The number has since fallen. In 2016, 5,000 Jews left France, according to statistics released by the Jewish Agency of Israel to Agence France-Presse, and analysts expect a similar number in 2017. In general, critics also caution that the figures do not necessarily represent an “exodus,” as each individual case cannot easily be attributed to anti-Semitism. Some French Jews have also since returned to France.

In any case, the perception of France as an inhospitable place for Jews has persisted, and it was this that Macron appeared to address in his remarks. Netanyahu pointedly did not repeat his previous remark encouraging immigration.

Some French Jewish leaders vehemently opposed the presence of the Israeli leader at an event they said should otherwise have remained apolitical. In the words of Elie Barnavi, France’s former ambassador to Israel, the Vel d’Hiv massacre had “nothing to do with Israel.” But others welcomed Macron’s remarks about the realities of contemporary anti-Semitism.

“He understands what it is today, not just what it was in the past,” Yonatan Arfi, the vice president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Organizations (CRIF), France’s largest Jewish advocacy organization, said in an interview.

“It’s at once from the extreme right, but also present on the extreme left and among radical Islamists,” he said. “Anti-Zionism has definitely become part of anti-Semitism today, and it’s a real satisfaction to find someone before us who speaks the same language.”

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Iran sentences Princeton graduate student to 10 years for espionage, report says

July 17, 2017 by  
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A Chinese American student Iran has accused of espionage was sentenced by an Iranian court to 10 years in prison, the judiciary’s official news agency reported Sunday, a move likely to raise tensions with the Trump administration ahead of a deadline to waive some Iran sanctions.

The Mizan news agency named the American as 37-year-old Xiyue Wang, a graduate student and researcher at Princeton University. The report said he was born in Beijing and is a dual Chinese American citizen, but that information could not be confirmed.

Earlier in the day, judicial spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejehi announced that a U.S. citizen had been sentenced for “infiltration” but did not release further details.

“It was verified and determined that he was gathering (information) and was involved in infiltration,” Ejehi said at a news conference in Tehran, the Associated Press reported.

Mizan, which is affiliated with Iran’s hard-line judiciary, later reported that Wang had been sentenced as part of an “infiltration project” that included the gathering of “confidential articles” to send back to the State Department and other Western academic institutions.

Wang is a fourth-year graduate student working on a doctorate in history, Daniel Day, Princeton’s vice president of communications, said Sunday.

“He was arrested in Iran last summer, while there doing scholarly research on the administrative and cultural history of the late Qajar dynasty in connection with his Ph.D. dissertation,” Day said in a statement. “Since his arrest, the university has worked with Mr. Wang’s family, the U.S. government, private counsel and others to facilitate his release.

“We were very distressed by the charges brought against him in connection with his scholarly activities, and by his subsequent conviction and sentence. His family and the university are distressed at his continued imprisonment and are hopeful that he will be released after his case is heard by the appellate authorities in Tehran.”

The report from Mizan, which included a photo from the Princeton University website, also published a quote from Wang in which he had praised the British Institute of Persian Studies for facilitating access to Iran’s National Archives and other libraries. The quote was used as evidence of his spying activities, the report said, adding: “Wang admits his mission in Iran.”

“I have been having trouble accessing Tehran’s archives and libraries,” Wang said in the 2015-2016 annual report of the British Institute of Persian Studies, a nonprofit organization based in London.

“Mrs Reyhanpour offered to help,” he said of one of the institute’s employees. “And within a few days, she put me in contact with senior scholars at the National Archive … Without Mrs. Reyhanpour’s help it would be hard to imagine how long it would have taken for me to become acquainted with academic institutions in Iran.”

Wang’s reported conviction comes at a particularly tense time for U.S.-Iranian relations, which have rapidly deteriorated since President Trump took office.

Under the previous administration, the United States and other world powers negotiated a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. It was hailed as a victory for diplomacy and an end to Iran’s global isolation.

But since then, the Trump administration has stepped up its anti-Iran rhetoric and placed U.S. participation in the nuclear deal under review. Monday is the deadline for the White House to decide whether to issue a waiver on nuclear-related sanctions against Iran, a provision that is required periodically under the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal. The administration is expected to approve the waiver, despite an internal debate on how to respond to Iran’s human rights abuses and support for militant groups like Hezbollah.

“The Iranian regime continues to detain U.S. citizens and other foreigners on fabricated national-security related changes,” a State Department official said in an emailed statement Sunday. Iran is believed to hold a number of foreign nationals, mostly dual citizens of the United States and European countries, but many of their identities have been kept secret.

“We call for the immediate release of all U.S. citizens unjustly detained in Iran so they can return to their families,” the State Department official said.

It was unclear how long Wang may have been in Iranian custody, but Mizan reported authorities arrested him in August 2016 as he was leaving the country. Facebook and LinkedIn pages with Wang’s name, photo, and similar work and study history indicate he studied at Harvard University from 2006 to 2008, and later worked as a Pashto language interpreter for the International Committee for the Red Cross in Afghanistan.

According to Day, Wang specialized in Eurasian history in the 19th and 20th centuries. The website of Wang’s apparent advisor, Stephen Kotkin, lists Wang’s thesis topic as “Islamic Inner Asia.”

“We cannot comment more at the present time, except to say that the University continues to do everything it can to be supportive of Mr. Wang and his family,” Day said.

Also Sunday, the brother of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was detained for unspecified financial crimes, the judicial spokesman said. Hossein Fereidoun is a close adviser of the president and was involved in the negotiations that led to the nuclear deal with world powers. Hard-line conservatives in Iran had long accused him of corruption.

Morello reported from Washington.

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