Guest of the public station on Saturday January 4, the vice-president of the far-right group in the Assembly was questioned about the visits carried out by RN elected officials during the dictator's reign.
The year is new but the elements of language and the lies remain the same. Never, ever has the National Rally supported Bashar Al-Assad, continue to hammer the executives of the far-right party widely questioned on the subject since the fall of the “Butcher of Damascus” last December 8. Guest of France Inter this Saturday, January 4, the vice-president of the RN group in the National Assembly Laurent Jacobelli was no exception, questioned about the trips to Damascus of seven personalities from the party or close to the party in recent years. “What is the message? “Was Syria better before?” asks the journalist. “There were several dozen French parliamentarians and political figures, between 30 and 40 I believe. Among these 30 and 40 there were 7 from the National Rally, replies the elected official from Moselle. […] All the political parties went there because at a time like in many countries, parliamentarians travel as part of missions. It wasn’t supportive at all.”
To defend himself against any companionship between his party and Assad, Jacobelli even tries another surprising argument. The former close friend of Nicolas Dupont-Aignan recalls that Thierry Mariani, who never hid his proximity to Vladimir Putin or the fallen dictator of Syria, was not yet a member of the Lepenist party when he went to Damascus. «[Il] was himself LR when he went there”he breathes on France Inter this Saturday. Visibly omitting that the former Sarkozyst had traveled to the Syrian capital in August 2021 in his capacity as RN MEP. Mariani's numerous trips to Syria were not a problem for the far-right party in 2019 when the former leader of the “Popular right” within the UMP announced its rallying during the European campaign. Rather than displaying embarrassment regarding the past of the former Vaucluse MP, the executives all welcomed with open arms this politician described today by the Syria Facteur collective as a “tour operator” of the country.
Defense of the Syrian regime
Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the elected representatives of the National Rally have had difficulty forgetting its past positions towards the deposed President. Marine Le Pen has long defended the Syrian regime and its Russian ally. In 2017, after her meeting with Putin in Moscow, she praised Russia's intervention in Syria “Who [avait] dealt a serious blow to fundamentalism. In 2015, on LCP, she was reluctant to describe Assad as “barbarous” and cast doubt on the hundreds of thousands of deaths claimed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights or the gas attacks. After the autocrat's exile in Russia, Mariani did not fail to attack those who saw it as good news. “The unconscious and the naive always end up becoming the unconscious allies of Islamists and chaos,” he wrote on X. The president of the RN Jordan Bardella estimated on France 3 that the fall of the Syrian president was a «catastrophe» since he is «possible» that France pays “the consequences of this takeover by Islamist fundamentalists through significant migratory flows”.
“Today we have to be pragmatic. We must obviously hope for a democratic transition for Syria with women’s rights”explains Laurent Jacobelli who would like to point out that “the new leader [du pays] is a former Islamic jihadist from Daesh”. “Let's be careful, not naivehe insists, while HTS, the group which took the lead in the movement to overthrow Assad, claimed to have broken with jihadism. Our Foreign Ministers for some time have had the disease of naivety which means that they generally allow themselves to be bamboozled.”
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