Jean-Marie Le Pen dies at 96

The French politician who was sadly one of the most antisemitic creeps of his time has died at age 96:

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the French National Front party, presidential candidate, member of the European Parliament, and patriarch of the Le Pen political family dynasty, has died at the age of 96.

A figure who loomed large over French politics over the past five decades, Mr Le Pen was hailed Tuesday by his supporters as a fearless “patriot” and derided by his detractors as a fascist and an antisemite.

Tragically, he was. And despite any claims to the contrary, he wasn't really opposed to Islam any more than Jean-Luc Melanchon was. As a result, his supposed opposition to mass migration was all a sham, and besides, when somebody like that gets chummy with despots like the late Saddam Hussein, something is terribly wrong.

In a moment of historical coincidence, Le Pen’s death was announced on the day that France marked the tenth anniversary of the Islamist attack on the offices of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, in which two Algerian jihadists shot and killed 12 people and injured 11 more in reprisal for the magazine publishing a caricature of Mohammed.

After reiterating his belief that the Holocaust was a “detail” in 2015, the party he founded voted to expel him, and two years later, his daughter Marine Le Pen renamed the party to the National Rally (Rassemblement National) in a bid to distance herself and the party from her father’s legacy. Their relationship never fully recovered after the split.

While he cast the move as politically suicidal, Marine Le Pen has grown the party to the largest in the French parliament. She currently stands as the frontrunner to replace Emmanuel Macron as president of the republic when his second and final term ends in 2027. [...]

Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon said that “respect for the dignity of the dead and the grief of their loved ones does not erase the right to judge their actions,” accusing Le Pen of spreading “hatred, racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism.”

Also notice how Melenchon repeats the morally equivalent cliche of blurring the difference between "islamophobia" and antisemitism, which he himself has been just as guilty of. There's just no excuse.

Julian Jackson notes how Jean-Marie Le Pen did little more than poison French/European politics, and unfortunately, he did do only so much to damage efforts to oppose the spread of Islamofascism. I seriously doubt he even wanted to defend Charlie Hebdo's own freedom of speech. He won't be missed, and it's to be hoped his departure will help improve the landscape again one day.