Far-left French Presidential candidate says antisemitic murder of four Jews was “planned in advance” to encourage anti-Muslim sentiment

A far-left French Presidential candidate has said that the murder of four Jews was “planned in advance” in order to encourage anti-Muslim sentiment.  

In 2012, Mohammed Merah, a Jihadist and former combatant in Syria, murdered three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse.

Speaking last Sunday in Toulouse during a radio interview, Jean-Luc Melenchon said: “You’ll see that on the last week of the presidential campaign, we’ll have a serious incident or a murder. In 2012 it was Merah, last week it was Champs-Elysee.”

Mr Melenchon was referring to an incident in April where a policeman was gunned down in Paris. A 37-year-old Muslim man is currently on trial.

“All of this has been planned in advance…we get all kinds of people pulled out of nowhere at a very serious event which, once more, allows to point fingers at Muslims and to invent a civil war. It’s boring,” he said.

Mr Melenchon has announced as a Presidential candidate for 2022, and has run in the past as well.

In late 2019, Mr Melenchon, leader of the Unsubmissive France movement, claimed that one of the reasons that Jeremy Corbyn lost the General Election in Britain was “baseless accusations of antisemitism” and “the various influence networks of the Likud”, Israel’s ruling party.

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