While the signature of the agreement between Washington and Teheran draws ever closer, Thierry Meyssan retraces and analyses the policies of François Hollande in the Near East which uphold his support for the Gulf monarchies and Israeli apartheid. Indisputably, the author demonstrates the fact that this policy, which is contrary to the values of the Republic and the interests of the Nation, exclusively serves the personal ambitions of a few individuals and the social group they represent.

The 6th July 2012, the war criminal Abou Saleh (Brigade Farouk) was the special guest of President François Hollande. He had directed the Islamic Emirate of Baba Amr and ordered more than 150 people to have their throats cut in public.

Elected in May 2012 as President of the French Republic, François Hollande has imposed on his country an entirely new foreign policy orientation. The fact that he presented himself as a left-wing politician has hidden from the eyes of his fellow citizens that this high-ranking civil servant has turned his back on the interests of the Nation, its history and its culture, and placed the state in the service of a tiny group of “upper-class” neo-conservatives.

The change of spring 2012

-        Although during his electoral campaign he seemed open to all forms of analysis, surrounding himself with several competing study groups, he was obliged to lower his mask as soon as he assumed power on the 15th of May. He therefore placed his mandate under the auspices of Jules Ferry. With subtlety, he claimed to honour the founder of obligatory secular schooling, but not the socialist theoretician of colonisation. However, Ferry’s secularism was not aimed at guaranteeing freedom of thought, but at taking children out of the hands of the Catholic church and training them, under the authority of the “hussards noirs”, to become cannon fodder for his colonial expeditions.

-        On the 6th July, he gathered in Paris a coalition of states who were self-proclaimed “Friends of Syria”, in order to sabotage the Geneva Agreements and restart the war against Syria. Symbolically, he saluted the “democrats” (sic) of the Syrian National Council, a puppet organisation put together by Qatar with the support of the secret society of the Muslim Brotherhood.

-        He strutted around beside the war criminal Abou Saleh, who had directed the Islamic Emirate of Baba Amr and ordered more than 150 of his compatriots to be beheaded. He then gave a speech which had been written by his mentors in English, then translated into French.

-        Immediately afterwards, on the 22nd July, he solemnly declared that France was accountable for the crimes committed by the illegitimate government of Philippe Petain against its Jewish citizens. By doing so, primary civil servant Hollande placed the state above the Republic.

I wrote at the time that François Hollande, by assuming the succession of Philippe Petain, had offered France to the powers in place and resumed its colonial policy [1]. Considering that my political exile had caused me to lose my sense of balance, many people decided to ignore what they considered to be an outrage.

I was therefore relieved to read the latest book by Emmanuel Todd, Qui est Charlie?, in which he analyses how and why the present Socialist Party electorate has become the inheritor of the “Maréchalistes” [2]. I have always had great admiration for this intellectual, who has managed to demonstrate the unconscious impact of family systems on history. When I was a student of political science, I eagerly read his thesis explaining that the division of the world during the Cold War corresponded in reality to the familial structures of the people. With maps as references, he observed that today, the mainly de-Christianised Socialist Party electorate has lost its bearings and has turned in upon itself. He had already analysed the rallying of the ruling class around the cult of the Euro, in other words, the law of the most powerful actors in the European theatre. He concludes that the Socialist Party has sold the country to foreign instances with the approbation of an electorate of the wealthy.

François Hollande’s team

The change in foreign policy decided by the President of the Republic is based on a simple analysis – the United States, having less need for Gulf oil, have announced their intention to pivot their military machine towards the Far East. By supporting Washington on the international stage, like Tony Blair, François Hollande has the possibility of taking the place that they are vacating in the Gulf and profiting from easy money.

It’s perfectly logical that Qatar – meaning Exxon-Mobil, the Rockefeller company – financed a large part of François Hollande’s electoral campaign [3]. Since this gift, which was illegal by French law, had been negotiated by Laurent Fabius, Mr. Hollande, once he was elected, nominated him as Minister for Foreign Affairs, despite their long-standing rivalry.

François Hollande’s courting of his generous sponsors in the Gulf was accompanied by powerful support for the state of Israël. We remember that President Charles De Gaulle had broken off relations with this colonial state in 1967, claiming that France, who had allied with them in order to maintain control over the Suez Canal and fight against the independence of Algeria, could no longer do so once France had renounced its Empire. President Hollande chose, on the contrary, to declare in Hebrew once he arrived at Tel-Aviv airport in November 2013 – “Tamid echa-er raver chel Israël, I am your friend and I will always be your friend” [4].

To activate this change of orientation, the President formed a team around two extreme right-wing personalities – his private military commander, General Benoît Puga, and his diplomatic advisor, Jacques Audibert.

General Benoît Puga is an ex-soldier of the “colonial” (Marine Infantry). A Lefebvrist Christian, he makes no secret of his admiration for the ex-archbishop of Dakar and his hatred of the French Revolution. Between two masses at Saint Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, he directed Special Operations and Military Intelligence. He was nominated to the Elysée by President Nicolas Sarkozy, and – an unprecedented fact for this function - was incorporated into the Presidential cabinet by his successor.

Jacques Audibert is often qualified by his ex-collaborators as an “American with a French passport” since his devotion to United States imperialism and Israeli colonialism is far greater than his respect for the French Republic. He played a central part in the blockade during the years of the 5+1 negotiations with Iran. He had hoped to be nominated as France’s permanent representative to the UNO, but finally joined President Hollande at the Elysée.

When he was Director of Political Affairs at the Quai d’Orsay, Jacques Audibert systematically eliminated the Arabist diplomats, beginning with the most competent. The most prestigious among them were exiled to Latin America. This was certainly a way of eliminating all support for the Palestinians in order to satisfy the Israeli colonists, but also, and especially, to put an end to centuries of “France’s Arab policy” in such a way as to relinquish traditional allies and move closer to the Gulf millionaires, despite their dictatorships and religious fanatism.

This evolution, however surprising it may be, corresponds to what François Hollande had announced several years before. When he was received on the 30th November 2005 by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), he declared, according to the official minutes of the meeting – “There is a very old tendency, which we call France’s Arab policy, and it is inadmissable that an administration should maintain an ideology. There is a problem with recruitment at the Quai d’Orsay and the ENA, and this recruitment should be reorganized” [5].

What Hollande really thinks

François Hollande has expressed his true opinions by evoking the Résistance. He defined this concept during the burial at the Pantheon of four major figures of the French Résistance, on the 27th May 2014, when he excluded the Communists from his speech. The French Résistance has inspired states and militia which, today, refuse the occupation of their lands and submission to an apartheid régime. In homage to their French predecessors, they defined their alliance as the “Axis of Resistance”.

But François Hollande has denied Palestinians their right to resist and, directly in line with the armistice of 1940, has required them to “negotiate” (sic). He made the European Union qualify Hezbollah as a “terrorist” organisation, just as Philippe Petain had Charles De Gaulle condemned to death for “terrorism” [6]. He waged war on the Syrian people and imposed an economic siege on the Iranian people.

After Israeli President Shimon Peres via video-conference, François Hollande was the second non-Muslim head of state to be invited to a session of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

François Hollande and the Gulf dictators

For the last three years, France has benefitted from the US support of Hillary Clinton and General David Petraeus, Exxon-Mobil and its private state Qatar, and finally the Saud family and their private state to which it has given the name “Saudi Arabia”.

Thus France has been able to launch a second war against Syria and Iraq by moving tens of thousands of mercenaries from all over the world, including several thousand French soldiers. France therefore bears major responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of dead which have plunged the Levant into mourning. Of course, all this was done under cover of humanitarian aid to the martyred populations.

Officially, this policy has not yet born fruit. Syria is still at war, and it is impossible to exploit its gas reserves, even though the “Friends of Syria” (sic) have already shared this between themselves in June 2012 [7].

However, 

 France has received a 3 billion-dollar order from Saudi Arabia for arms for the Lebanese Army. This is a way of thanking the Lebanese for not making public the confession of Majed el-Majed, the agent of liaison between Saudi Arabia and al-Qaïda, and thanking the French for continuing the war against Syria [8].

 France sold 24 Rafales to Qatar for 6,3 billion Euros.  But these mega-contracts will not benefit France 

 The Israelis have posed a veto on the sale to Lebanon of weapons capable of resisting them. France was therefore only authorised to supply 700 million dollars worth of uniforms, service vehicles and handguns. The remaining 2,3 billion will cover out-dated weapons made in East Germany. 

 Qatar has certainly bought Rafales, but demanded in exchange that the government force Air France to abandon certain of its flights, those which are the most profitable for Qatar Airways.

In any case, even if these were honest contracts, they would never have replaced those that have been lost by the relentless pressure brought by Jacques Audibert against all the French companies who work with Iran, like Peugeot or Total, or the determination of General Benoît Puga to implement the destruction of all the French factories in Syria.

On the 30th June, despite the opposition of Benjamin Netanyahu and François Hollande, and their multiple attempts at sabotage, John Kerry and Mohammad Javad Zarif should be signing, on the one hand, a multi-party agreement concerning nuclear power, and, on the other hand, a bilateral agreement for a regional ceasefire.

The Washington-Teheran agreement

Despite the efforts of Hollande’s team in general, and Jacques Audibert in particular, the agreement negotiated between the United States and Iran should be signed on the 30th June 2015. It is worth reading my previous articles about the consequences of this text [9]. It already seems that the two major losers will be the Palestinian people and France. The former because no one will be left to defend their inalienable right to return, and the latter because it will have associated its name with three years of injustice and massacres in the region.

This week, the 2nd June, the US Assistant Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, came to Paris to co-preside a meeting of the 22 member states of the International anti-Daesh Coalition. Contrary to what has been said in the French press, it is not a question of organising a military riposte to the fall of Ramadi and Palmyra - the Pentagon has no need to reunite its allies to know what it has to do. No, the subject of the meeting was to feed his hat to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Laurent Fabius, and force him to accept the Iran-US agreement. Which he was obliged to do.

The signing of the agreement was threatened by the fall of Palmyra, which cut the “Silk Road”, in other words the communications route between Iran on one side, and Syria and Hezbollah on the other [10]. In the event that Palmyra should remain in the hands of the jihadists (in other words the mercenaries who are fighting against the “Axis of Resistance” [11]), Teheran would be unable to transport its gas and export it to Europe, and would therefore have no interest in signing an agreement with Washington.

The Assistant Secretary of State thus informed the meeting that he had authorised the “Axis of Resistance” to bring fresh troops into Syria in order to defeat Daesh. By that he meant 10,000 Revolutionary Guards, who would reinforce the Syrian Arab Army before the 30th June. So far, the Syrians have been defending themselves alone, with help only from the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Turkish PKK, but without Russian or Iranian troops or Iraqi militia.

Antony Blinken also informed the meeting that he had concluded a new agreement with Russia which authorises a peace conference concerning Syria under the auspices of the United Nations in Kazakhstan. He demanded that Laurent Fabius sign a final declaration accepting the principle of a Syrian government designated by “mutual consent” between the coalition currently in power (Baas and PSNS) and the different oppositions, whether they are in Paris or Damascus.

After having his nose wiped for him, Mr. Fabius swallowed his slogan “Bachar must go”, admitted that President el-Assad could finish the mandate for which his people had massively elected him, and pitifully bleated a new slogan “Mister Bachar (sic) will not be the future of Syria”.

In three weeks, the emperor will be seen to be naked. By signing together, Washington and Teheran will reduce to nothing the plans of François Hollande, the neoconservative Jacques Audibert and the neo-fascist Benoît Puga.

Notes

[1] “France According to François Hollande”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Michele Stoddard , Voltaire Network, 4 August 2012.

[2] The majority of the French people who supported the armistice of Philippe Petain were not fascists, but « Maréchalistes ». Traumatised by the butchery of 14-18, they hid behind the authority of the champion of Verdun to justify their refusal to fight the Nazi invader.

[3] « François Hollande négocie avec l’émir de Qatar », Réseau Voltaire, 31 janvier 2012.

[4] « Déclaration de François Hollande à son arrivée à l’aéroport de Tel-Aviv », par François Hollande, Réseau Voltaire, 17 novembre 2013.

[5] “France: the Socialist Party promises it will eliminate pro-Arab diplomats”, by Ossama Lotfy, Voltaire Network, 17 January 2006.

[6] “The EU assimilates the Lebanese Resistance with terrorism”, Translation Alizée Ville, Voltaire Network, 2 August 2013.

[7] “The “Friends of Syria” divvy up Syrian economy before conquest”, byGerman Foreign Policy, Voltaire Network, 30 June 2012.

[8] « Le silence et la trahison qui valaient 3 milliards de dollars », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 15 janvier 2014.

[9] See in particular: “What will become of the Near East after the agreement between Washington and Teheran ? ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 23 May 2015.

[10] “The fall of Palmyra upsets geopolitical balance in the Levant”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2015.

[11] “Jihadists in the service of imperialism”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 1 June 2015.

Courtesy Thierry Meyssan; Translation Pete Kimberley

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