https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-european-lefts-anti-semitism-crisis-is-the-rights-opportunity-ee81b8b1?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
Wars have a way of scrambling politics near and far, and so it may become with the war Hamas has launched against Israel. One topsy-turvy outcome in Europe is that ostensibly anti-Semitic parties on the further reaches of the political right have embraced Israel—likely because they’ve realized that doing so emphasizes the left’s embarrassing anti-Semitic hypocrisies.
In France, representatives of the two main right-wing political movements—those led by Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour—participated in a pro-Israel rally days after the attack. Ms. Le Pen in the National Assembly last week expressed solidarity with Israel, describing Hamas’s attack as a “pogrom,” and reminding lawmakers of the need to “protect French Jews.”
That’s striking rhetoric from Ms. Le Pen’s party, now known as the National Rally, which has an awful record on anti-Semitism. The party’s founder and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is notorious for Holocaust denial, and Ms. Le Pen eventually expelled him from the party because of it. She herself has waded into debates about France’s culpability for the deportation of its Jews under Nazi occupation and whether kosher animal slaughter should be legal.
In Germany, a parliamentary resolution in support of Israel garnered support from the Alternative for Germany, or AfD. This movement of the populist right, which opinion polls suggest is now the second most popular party after the opposition conservative Christian Democrats, periodically stokes arguments over how Germany interprets the history of the Holocaust. But two AfD members of Parliament visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel in May.
This apparent unity in support of Israel on the further reaches of the right contrasts with the disarray on the left. While Ms. Le Pen was speaking up for Israel, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French version of Bernie Sanders who founded the France Unbowed party, argued Israel and Hamas both were responsible for the violence and then picked a fight with a major Jewish organization.
