http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=54605&mador=1
Friday, August 27, 1999
Reuters
PARIS - A leading French writer stirred up a storm
of controversy yesterday by saying the late
President Francois Mitterrand had once complained
to him about "the powerful and noxious influence of
the Jewish lobby in France."
Jean d'Ormesson, a member of the prestigious
Academie Francaise, reported in his latest book,
"The Gabriel Report," that Mitterrand had made the
remark in a conversation on May 17, 1995, the last
day of his 14-year presidency.
The writer's move drew criticism from Mitterrand's
illegitimate daughter and denials from Prime
Minister Lionel Jospin and other fellow Socialists,
but also statements supporting d'Ormesson.
In excerpts published in the weekly Le Nouvel
Observateur, d'Ormesson said he had asked
Mitterrand about his longtime friendship with
pro-Nazi wartime police chief Rene Bosquet which
had tarnished the Socialist leader's image late in
his life.
"Francois Mitterrand listened to me without any
apparent irritation and looked at me. 'Here you
see,' he said, 'the powerful and noxious influence
of the Jewish lobby in France," d'Ormesson wrote.
Mitterrand, who died in 1996, also saw his
reputation dented late in his life by revelations
that he had worked for the collaborationist Vichy
regime before joining the wartime resistance.
Under the Vichy regime, 75,000 Jews were sent from
France to Nazi death camps. France's current Jewish
community, numbering about 750,000, is the largest
in western Europe.
Mitterrand's illegitimate daughter Mazarine Pingeot
denounced d'Ormesson for slandering a dead man and
defended her father as a crusader against
anti-Semitism. "I'm ashamed to have to ask the
question, but did he ever, even once, betray his
commitments to the Jewish community or any other
community under threat?" she wrote in the daily Le
Monde.
Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, a fellow Socialist
who sometimes differed with Mitterrand, said he had
several long discussions with the president about
the French Jewish community and the situation of
Jews around the world.
"In his thoughts and in his emotions, anti-Semitism
was foreign to Francois Mitterrand," Jospin said in
a statement. A Mitterrand ally, former Culture
Minister Jack Lang, suggested to Le Monde that
d'Ormesson might not have remembered that final
meeting accurately.
But a friend of Mitterrand and d'Ormesson,
journalist Jean Daniel, confirmed the president had
sometimes complained about a "Zionist lobby" but
added that did not make him an anti-Semite.
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