Figarovox/Chronicle – The eagerness of LFI and its allies to point out the “Islamophobia” supposedly, which is the source of the murder of Aboubakar Cissé is matched only by the voluntary blindness of this movement on anti-Semitism which continues to prosper on the left, estimates our columnist.
Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Each week, he deciphers the news for Figarovox. He recently published Journal of a prisoner (Fayard, 2025). He is also president of Borders without borders.
The French left, this old bastion of displayed humanism, has definitively lost in an obscure forest, guided by the flickering torch of rebellious France (LFI). By dint of wanting to dance with its end, it sinks into a moral forfeiture which no longer deceives many people. Between outrageous instrumentalization, trial of intention and guilty complacency, the table is as heartbreaking as it is ironon. Take the pulse of this left -handed drift.
Let’s start with the tragic episode of the murder of Aboubakar Cissé, stabbed in a mosque in the Grand-Combe on April 25, 2025. A horrible drama, indisputably. But hardly the blood of the unfortunate had dried that LFI, with his legendary flair for recovery, helped by his servile media, hastened to hoist the case in symbol of an alleged wave of galloping Islamophobia. Manuel Bompard, Fabien Roussel and others shouted in scandal, denouncing a “two weights, two measures” in the state response, pointing to Bruno Retailleau, minister of the Interior, accused of dragging his feet. Issue ? The facts tell another story.
Everything indicates that the author, a young Frenchman of Bosnian origin in his twenties, was an unbalanced, more fascinated by the idea of killing a man motivated by the hatred of the Muslim.
Alès prosecutor, Abdelkrim Grini, said himself that if this last track was envisaged, the individual seemed above all animated by the “fascination of death” and an ambition morbid to land as a serial killer. In other words, Aboubakar was not targeted for his faith, but because he was there, vulnerable, in a place that the killer chose to fulfill his gesture. As for the idea of a particularly martyred Muslim community, it does not hold: statistics show that violent racist acts target much more often other groups, especially Jews, with an increase in anti-Semitic acts of 284 % in France between 2020 and 2023, against a lower increase in anti-Muslim acts. If there are indeed two weights and two measures, it is in this gaping gap. But for LFI, regardless of the truth: a drama is a boon, and the truth, an incongruity.
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Let’s go to Bruno Retailleau, transformed into a scarecrow by a left in search of bastard. He is accused of waiting two days before going to Alès, near the crime location. Two days really? In a world where ministers juggle cascade crises-attacks, assaults, drug trafficking-, is this period insulting? The minister went there on Sunday, April 27, met the local authorities and expressed his « compassion » for the victim, qualifying the murder of« ignoble ». He even announced a strengthening of security around Muslim places of worship. Too late, too warm, proclaims the left. LFI yells to state Islamophobia, forgetting that Retailleau, as Minister of worship, must sail between all religious sensitivities without favoring any.
And what about the outcry around his remark on the migratory status of Aboubakar? By mentioning that the victim was “In an irregular situation”Retailleau did not try to stigmatize it, but to explain the difficulty of locating his family, dispersed between several African countries. An indisputable factual clarification, transformed into an indictment by rebellious people who smell the scandal like truffle dogs. To accuse Retailleau of contempt is like reproaching a doctor for specifying the medical file of a patient. But for LFI, everything is a pretext to cry racism, especially when reality does not follow.
If LFI leads the charge, it leads in its wake historical figures of the left, such as Ségolène Royal, whose inept declarations add a layer of miracle to this drift. During the demonstration against Islamophobia in Paris, the socialist deputy Jérôme Guedj was heckled, hué, with obvious anti -Semitic hints – an incident that Bruno Retailleau pointed out as a symptomatic of LFI drifts. What does Ségolène Royal do? Rather than unambiguously condemn these insults, she minimizes them (“Kids”), binding them to ” anger “ Around the situation in Gaza without regard to the giant pogrom which caused it. An obscene pirouette that exudes complacency towards insidious anti -Semitism that plays LFI’s speeches, barely masked behind pathological anti -Zionism. In 2025, while anti -Semitic acts exploded in France – 1,570 incidents identified in 2024 according to the CRIF – this relativization is more than a clumsy: it is the symptom of a left which, by submission to its left wing, lost its ability to fly high.
-By instrumentalizing the tragedy of Aboubakar, by rising witchcraft trials against a minister who acted within the limits of his role, and by closing his eyes on anti -Semitic abuses in their ranks, LFI and its allies fracture society
Gilles-William Goldnadel
Ségolène Royal, formerly carrying a moderate socialism, definitively succumbed to the temptation to follow the bad melenchonist wind, where the Palestinian cause serves as a transparent screen for permanent slippages. When LFI brandishes photos of Palestinian children in the Assembly to denounce a “genocide” in Gaza, causing sanctions for violation of the regulations, it does not only defend a cause: it polarizes, closes, and opens the door to infamous amalgams. Royal, by mimicry, prefers to loss rather than decide, illustrating this left which, out of fear panic of losing voices, is lost in toxic postures.
Supreme irony: by accusing Retailleau of “dividing France”, LFI and its allies do exactly what they blame their opponents. By instrumentalizing the tragedy of Aboubakar, by rising witchcraft trials against a minister who acted within the limits of his role, and by closing their eyes on anti -Semitic abuses in their ranks, they fracture society. The French left, formerly carrying universalism, finds itself to sing the methods it denounced in its adversaries: populism, excess, and a barely disguised communitarianism.
This drift is not only a cyclical adventure: it is part of a long history, where left anti -Semitism oscillates between contemporary regression and historical constancy. Two recent, brilliant and incisive works, throw raw light on this phenomenon. first of all, The anti -Semitic left by Clément Weill-Raynal (Éditions L’Artilleur, 2025), a book that I particularly appreciated for his clarity and his rigor. Weill-Raynal, a recognized journalist, revisits the historical figures of the French left, from Charles Fourier to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to demonstrate how anti-Semitism, often draped in a criticism of capitalism or imperialism, has gangrenous.
In particular, he remembered my own legal fights against this long untouchable far left. Weill-raynal dissects how LFI, by cultivating a hate speech on Israel, stirs up inter-community rehash, transforming the Palestinian cause into a fuel for mortal anti-Semitic prejudices. Her work is an implacable indictment, but also a call – that I know vain – on the left so that she is recovering.
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In a complementary vein, Michel Onfray, in The other collaboration: the French origins of Islamo-leftism (Editions Plon, 2025), explores the intellectual roots of this drift. Onfray, with his style of iconoclastic demolier, traces a genealogy that goes from Father Grégoire to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, via Sartre and Foucault. He argues that left anti -Semitism, far from being an aberration, is part of a tradition where utopism and complacency towards certain forms of visceral violence – like that of Hamas – mix with radical anti -Zionism. Onfray accuses LFI of embodying an Islamo-leftism which, on the pretext of defending the oppressed, makes the “Jew” a symbolic enemy, heir to an old anticapitalist and anticlerical rhetoric.
These two works converge on one point: LFI does not invent anything, it recycles. In 1845, Alphonse coughing, utopian socialist, wrote in Jews, kings of the time what “Jew, usurier, trafficker are synonymous”laying down the basics of economic anti -Semitism which reappears today in modernized forms. LFI perpetuates this logic, while adapting it to an electorate as afray describes as a “Coagulation of an Arab-Muslim electorate” and a youth “Endoctrine” by cultural leftism. This regression, paradoxical for a left -wing left, is only the visible face of consistency: the inability to confront its own demons.
So what’s left of this left? A shell which, under the influence of its rebellious end, swaps reason for emotion, nuance for overbidding, and democracy for a moralizing posture. Under this posture, the imposture.
