Dominique de Villepin, former Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs during the second term of Jacques Chirac, defended himself from any anti-Semitism and compromise, of which he is regularly accused each time he speaks on the situation in the Middle -East, since the Hamas massacres on October 7 and the Israeli response to Gaza.
“Look for a word, look for a word that is reprehensible on my part,” he asked this Monday, October 7 in the morning on France Info. “My words are disturbing. It is fundamentally disturbing,” said the man who was the head of French diplomacy between 2002 and 2004. “If my words are essentialized, if my person is essentialized, even on a physical level, I cannot do that. admit it,” he protests again.
ALSO READ When a press agency close to Hamas favors Dominique de VillepinDominique de Villepin mainly focuses his criticism on the media. “I say it solemnly: you, the journalists, have a major responsibility in not allowing false things to be accredited on the sets,” he denounced. “We do not allow slander and lies to be peddled without saying anything, without checking the facts. »
A dispute with BFMTV
The former Prime Minister notably returned to a distortion of some of his comments in the past. “BFMTV, for example, at one time, a few months ago, spoke of “Jewish financial domination”: I never used this term,” exclaimed the former member of the government. On November 26, 2023, the continuous news channel attributed these statements to Dominique de Villepin, wrongly interpreting statements made a few days earlier on the set of the show Daily.
ALSO READ The indiscreets – Villepin, Dati, Courson… on the left, we love themOn November 28, BFMTV finally apologized for “inaccurate and unfortunate wording used regarding comments by Dominique de Villepin”. In April 2024, the Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (Arcom) put the channel on notice, ordering it to “respect the requirement of honesty and rigor of information”, noting a “factually inaccurate presentation of remarks actually made by the former Prime Minister.
This Monday, Dominique de Villepin also castigated “Bernard-Henri Lévy and other intellectuals”, who “speak of denunciation by [lui] of the “financial domination of international Zionism””. “I never used this term,” he insisted, “any more than “genocidal war””. “All the terms that I use today are those that I used the day after October 7, and I have never changed,” assures the politician. “We clearly see today that the attacks are based on lies,” he continued. The day before, BHL had considered on LCI that the former Prime Minister and Jean-Luc Mélenchon had in common “a hatred of Israel” and “Jews”.
Faced with these attacks, Dominique de Villepin therefore refers “all those who are supposed to be philosophers, intellectuals, to responsibility towards the international community which is theirs”.
