PARIS, 12 April — French President Jacques Chirac has summoned Israeli Ambassador Eli Barnavi to the Elysee Palace, in an effort — says a presidential adviser — to persuade him to better control the activities on French soil of pro-Israeli activists.
Chirac later telephoned Leila Shahid, the Palestinian representative to France who was absent from Paris, to advise her of his conversation with Barnavi.
President Chirac, according to the aide, let it be known to Barnavi “in no uncertain terms” that he was adamantly opposed to all attempts by Israel, to “import onto French soil,” in Chirac’s words, Israel’s war with Palestine.
Although Barnavi has repeatedly distanced himself from the activities in France of pro-Israeli activists as well as Jewish extremists, Chirac, says the aide, “is convinced that the Israeli ambassador has the means of better controlling the extremists,” some of whom are specially trained in combat camps located in Israel as well as in France.
The aide said that Chirac, who has attempted until now to “stay above” the conflict, at least as it applies to France, was quite angered by the pro-Israel marches organized Sunday afternoon by a number of French Jewish organizations, notably the CRIF (Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France), which did not hide its intention of turning the manifestation into a show of support for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Chirac, says the aide, was particularly irked over the participation in the CRIF march of several dozen young Jewish extremists, who reportedly belong to two groups: the Jewish Defense League (JDL), as well as the Betar-Tagar, both of which are described by police sources, charged with keeping watch over them, as being “racist , violent and extremely well-armed.”
Paris police prefect Jean-Paul Proust noted during a Monday afternoon press conference that an important number of arms — guns and knives — had been seized on several of the young men. He said that the extremists had set as their mission “systematically attacking journalists, policemen, and generally anybody who ethnically speaking didn’t meet with their approval.”
A dozen of the extremists indeed attacked a young French man of North African descent as he crossed the street on his motorbike and had nothing to do with the manifestation.
“His only crime,” said an observer, was that he “looked Arab, and that was enough for at least ten of the extremists to assault him and bloody him up.”
When journalists attempted to film the scene, they were attacked in turn by the Jewish extremists who bloodied a film cameraman, and seized his equipment, to the point where the journalists’ rights association Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) said that it would be filing a police complaint against the extremists in the name of all journalists who were present to cover the march.
It is when a policeman attempted to intervene to protect the journalists from the extremists that he in turn was severely attacked, stabbed in the abdomen by one of the knife-wielding extremists. The policeman, who suffered a 14-cm gash in his stomach, was taken to hospital, with what a police source referred to as “an impressive wound.”
Police reported that the second division of the judicial police has been given the task of locating his assailant who was able to escape.
